CIA CTO Gus Hunt (CONFIRMED) opens the series with a candid survey of what “Big” really means in today's IC, the challenges and opportunities that confront us right now and, the imperative for embracing commercial big-data techniques to tackle those challenges and achieve success as IT moves from “mission support” into “mission proper.”

Thinking Large

Bureaucracy is an inescapable fact of life and exists in many forms. Not always negative, it can work on your behalf if you understand and embrace its positive aspects. In this session, Former Director of NSA and the CIA, General (ret) Michael Hayden (CONFIRMED) discusses the pros and cons of bureaucracy and provides insights from his time at the top levels of the IC.

Thinking about large bureaucracies and the problems and challenges they present requires a great deal more than linear approaches to individual problems. In this session, Dr. Ruth David (CONFIRMED), former CIA/DDST and now CEO of ANSER Corp, discusses “Systems Thinking”, talking to us about the importance of systems analysis and systems engineering in mission understanding and, ensuring the horizontal scalability needs of the IC enterprise.

Mastering the Bureaucracy

Consultant Steve Nixon (CONFIRMED), former ODNI/S&T and also former staff member of the House Appropriations Committee discusses the rapidly exploding complexity of the problems faced by the intelligence community -- wicked problems – and the increasing inadequacy of our approaches to their solutions. He discusses approaches to include dealing with the Executive and Legislative Branches in different and unique ways.

Having been deeply involved in high profile and high media interest cases of national security wiretaps, former FBI National Security Division attorney Michael Woods (CONFIRMED) leads us through the minefields of Data Rights, Intellectual Property Law, Privacy, and Ethics. Failure to consider such important issues can destroy what might well be a well-designed program.

Acxiom's Jennifer Barrett (CONFIRMED) will share her expertise, passion and strategies for success – as well as lessons learned – leading to effective public communications management and preparations, Risk management; Reputation Protection, Red-Team Scenario Planning; and managing expectations.

Approaching Intelligence from a Big Data perspective requires fundamental changes in thinking and approach to analysis, algorithms, assumptions and expectations. The often cited cliché, “paradigm shift”, truly exists in analysis theory and approach when leveraging massive-scale data systems. Guy Filippelli (CONFIRMED) will discuss modern Identity Correlation processing and Dr. James Hendler (CONFIRMED) who will make the case for developing expertise in Interfaces, Approaches, Visualization and data life-cycle management.

Big Data is hard to manage effectively when it’s in a state of continuous acquisition; the standard approaches to ETL just do not work. ETL, Data Management, Real-Time Correlation, Metadata Tagging, and Performance Management are the “heavy-lifting” that is required to buttress Massive Analytics. These functions will easily and ruthlessly consume all resources without a good plan executed – and even when done well, you can expect to spend a full third of your resources engaged forever. In this session, we will spend quality time with the “best in the business” of massive data management Roger Bradford (CONFIRMED)

Discussing Massive Analytics itself, Dr. David Mattox (CONFIRMED), will take us beyond the industry practice of selector-based a priori-question-bound “data mining” approaches that require major pre-indexing and knowing what you’re looking for before you can start looking. What happens when you need to find real actors but have no search terms to begin? This is where Dr. Mattox brings us up to speed on massive data modeling and coding to get to the otherwise impossible answers while there’s still time to do something with the results.

Before any meaningful assertion can be believed, its basis must be understood. When it comes to Massive Analytics, this is nearly as hard as getting the answer in the first place and, must be built-in to the data management and analytic process from the start. Tracking & Understanding Data Quality requires a lot more than following checklists – it requires full-scale data pedigree and lineage to know the “fitness of the data” for any asserted result and, the processing scalability to eliminate the pressure for program-killing data quality “shortcuts”. The “fathers of data quality”, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Acxiom Chair, Dr. John Talburt (CONFIRMED) and Dr. Mike Macedonia (CONFIRMED) join us for an in-depth discussion.

Applied Statistical Analysis at Super Scales seems like magic to most, but this is where Massive Analytics derives all its power. Approaching problems from the non-intuitive, non-deterministic basis requires very large data sets in order to enumerate populations of data in order to reach deterministic-like results asymptotically.

In this session, we dig into the specific approaches, techniques, and pitfalls of leveraging clouds as practically everyone moves “to the cloud” to meet their massive analytics needs.  We are led in this inquiry by Dr. Lewis Shepherd (CONFIRMED).

Next, we discuss the need to manage uncertainty in the Non-Deterministic world of Big Data analysis and Intelligent Agents. Big Data and Massive Analytics can embrace and dominate uncertainty to the level that results from the back-end processing can be fully understood and the basis of that understanding can be ultimately trusted. However, these Intelligent Agents can also run amok if you’re not careful, stealing all your processing cycles as they constantly process the metadata, especially during off-cycles.

We then turn our sights on solving wicked intelligence challenges. Non-technical solutions and classic problem solving techniques can be tweaked at massive scales to do things no human could ever approach unassisted but, the analyst culture requires some new concepts and re-definition of some old terms to approach wicked problems objectively. Dr. Jeff Cooper (CONFIRMED), Vice President for Technology at SAIC, Chief Scientist of SAIC Strategies, and Director, Center for Information Strategy and Policy (CISP), talks to us about new approaches to these problems.

Big Data and Massive Analytics must understand the root forces that drive their thinking, analogies, models and approaches. Only then can they be fully aware of and anticipate fallacies, biases, and irrational conclusions. This means that the analyst must clearly grasp and apply human behavioral and conceptual drivers, both from a technical problem-solving viewpoint and a psychological awareness. Infinity Technology’s VP and CTO, Dr. Philip Sagan, (CONFIRMED) leads the discussion.

Full Speed Into the Future - Embracing and Leading Change in the IC

Keeping up with all new capabilities as the rate of improvement continues to accelerate requires an even handed approach and a wise acquisition technique that is difficult to achieve in a chaotic IT world. The final session will focus on effective approaches for accepting and executing the newest innovations that no one saw coming. Solutions still must be developed, tested and delivered systematically but, with flexibility and adaptability in order to successfully deal with the uncertainty in the data. For this session, we are thrilled to have both new and returning faces to share their successful techniques.

Change is essential to success in asynchronous and asymmetric espionage. Change threatens conventional wisdom, and can be perceived as a threat to formerly successful programs. Achieving change requires true leadership. Former CIA Director George Tenet (INVITED) will share his approach in successfully leading the CIA out of the 90's and into the modern IT-ubiquitous environment it is in today. Joining Director Tenet are Gilman Louie (INVITED), the first CEO of In-Q-Tel Investment Company, Alan Wade (INVITED), former CIA/CIO and, the current Director of S&T, Glenn Gaffney (INVITED) who continues to move technology forward within the IC. IBM's Jeff Jonas (CONFIRMED) will also be on hand to share his experiences.