FROM: NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Restoring lost data
Researchers developing 3-D digital laser microscopy to create visual roadmap
It can be disheartening to learn that something precious, such as a one-of-a-kind family photo, has disappeared from a scratched or broken CD or DVD. It also can become serious, dangerous and potentially costly if it happens to a disc containing criminal forensic evidence, corporate records or scientific data.
But there may be a way in the future to bring the material back.
Optical media, that is, CDs and DVDs, have been in widespread use for the past two decades, and burners are in many homes and elsewhere, making it possible for consumers to create any number of their own personal discs. But the products have not turned out to be as durable as originally believed, a situation that can turn tragic if a disc containing the only available copy of important material has become damaged.
Although still a work-in-progress, researchers have developed a process with the potential to restore much of what was thought to be lost.
"While we haven't solved all of the challenges necessary for efficient data recovery from damaged optical media, we have moved forward in terms of refining what is possible," says Greg Gogolin, a professor of information security and intelligence at Michigan's Ferris State University, stressing that the work of his team at this point was aimed solely at demonstrating "proof of concept."
Equally important, the development of new security techniques to ensure that data is unrecoverable, similar to advances that now prevent the retrieval of information on destroyed paper documents.
"A common way to destroy a paper document used to be to burn it," Gogolin says. "Forensic techniques, however, were developed that allowed for the recovery of information that was on a burned document. Document destruction techniques were then improved."
The National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded researcher, in collaboration with colleagues James Jones, associate professor in the computer forensics program at George Mason University; Charles Bacon, a Ferris professor of physical science; Tracey Boncher, a Ferris associate professor of pharmacy; and Derek Brower, a Ferris graduate student at the time of the research, theorized that using three-dimensional digital laser microscopy to capture 3-D image of the disc could provide a visual roadmap of the data. This and a special computer algorithm capable of recognizing its patterns then could aid in recovering the vast majority of it.
"If a disc is broken in half, you've still got 99 percent of the data still there," Gogolin says. "The media is quite elastic and the data is pretty much intact up to the cut line. There is, of course, a region that is destroyed near where the disc has been cut. But for most part, you didn't destroy the data, you just made it unreadable because you can't spin the disc."
The researchers, funded by a $356,318 grant awarded in 2011 from NSF's Division of Computer and Network Systems, tested their idea by breaking a disc, putting it together and taking a picture of it using the high-powered 3-D digital laser microscope.
"It was like sticking it into a kind of copy machine," Gogolin says. "There are patterns to represent the data, that is, the different letters." After determining the data patterns, "we then read them with a computer program to determine what data was on the disc."
At this early stage of development, the computer program the scientists wrote contains and recognizes only simple alphabetic encoding.
But, "there are many different types of data that could be on there, including letters, numbers and special characters," he says. "There is a huge range of possible data elements, and we don't have recognition set up for all of them, only for a subset, part of the alphabet."
The ultimate goal is "to expand the capabilities of the recovery program to be able to recognize all the different types of data and encoding that could be present on an optical disc," he adds, stressing that big hurdles remain. "It's a huge deal in that there are many different combinations and variations of data that make it a significant challenge to be able to recognize everything that would be on an optical disc. You can have different types of discs and Blu Ray discs. Different manufacturers use different inks. You could have encryption. There are a lot of variables."
Also, the larger the file, the more difficult the recovery, he says.
"If it's a small file, the chances of recovering it are much better than if it's a large file, because the chances of the file running into that ‘destruction zone' are greater," he says. "If you need a complete file to affect the recovery, and it's a large file, it becomes a bigger issue."
The researchers now are trying to decide if they want to test their ideas on other types of memory, such as flash drives "like that in your phone," he says, or solid state drives, rather than hard drives. "That's where everything is going," he says. "Would time be better spent trying to perfect a way to recover material from a flash or finishing what is needed for optical?"
The team is a long way from making the process widely available. Nevertheless, "we wanted to prove the concept that it could be done, so that every time you see a broken disc, you won't necessarily think, 'oh, it's lost forever,"' Gogolin says.
-- Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
Investigators
Greg Gogolin
James Jones
Charles Bacon
Tracey Boncher
Barbara Ciaramitaro
Related Institutions/Organizations
Ferris State University
Showing posts with label IT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IT. Show all posts
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
HIGH-SPEED NETWORKING IN FLINT, MICHIGAN
FROM: NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Igniting change in Vehicle City
Kettering University leads effort to improve city services in Flint, Mich., through high-speed networking
March 24, 2015
Flint, Mich., the former home of General Motors, is on the rebound these days. Leaders there believe they have hit on a winning formula--connecting the city's institutions to high-speed networks that support new, game-changing capabilities.
Through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), Flint is beginning to lay the groundwork for an information technology-driven transformation.
In June 2012, Flint was one of 16 initial cities that were part of US Ignite, a public-private partnership designed to capitalize on the possibilities of ultra-fast broadband networks and "ignite" the development of next-generation Internet applications and services with societal benefits.
Kettering University--formerly General Motors Institute--was designated the lead research institution for the city.
High-speed networking wasn't really on the radar of John Geske, a professor of computer science at Kettering University, before Flint joined US Ignite.
"I was busy running a computer science department and the last thing on my mind was networking applications," Geske said.
But because of the US Ignite award, he started attending application summits and other meetings and realized the possibilities that were available at his doorstep.
"The community that you start to create and the contacts you make are just invaluable," he said.
Connected schools
Phase One of making the city a gigabit hotbed involved taking a step back and uncovering what was already available in the community.
Geske learned that the entire city school system, as well as the schools in 21 schools districts in neighboring Genesee County, had formed the GenNET consortium in 1995 and were already connected by a high-speed, fiber-optic network. Moreover, the schools were connected to the city's four higher education institutions via the Flint Area Network for Educational Telecommunications.
With these capabilities in place, students in the school district experienced unique learning opportunities. For instance, students were able to remotely control an exploratory submarine in real time near the Barrier Reef and communicate with astronauts on the space shuttle. Genesee County students were even able to dissect a sheep's brain via a telemedicine class remotely led by a doctor at Northern Michigan University.
"The GenNET fiber-optic network allows us to reduce the cost of technology services while providing a powerful platform for delivering virtual learning," said Luke Wittum, executive director of Technology and Media Services in the Genesee Intermediate School District.
US Ignite extended this already capable base and provided dedicated 10 gigabit-per-second network connections to the universities and libraries in Flint and to other gigabit cities around the nation, on unique, programmable hardware.
With ultra-high-speed, high-capability Information Technology in place, technology leaders hope to leverage the existing fiber-optic networks to provide immersive virtual reality learning to all students in Flint and Genesee County.
"What if a student could step inside of a human cell, stand at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, or visit a historical place?" Wittum asked. "This opportunity could make learning more engaging and also provide some students who may have never been outside of the county or state to visit another part of the world."
Safer, smarter neighborhoods
Flint areas schools aren't the only target for transformation through high-speed networks. Early meetings with city officials and university representatives determined that public safety could be a focus of the US Ignite networking projects, too.
Together with stakeholders in the Mayor's office and the university, they envisioned a university corridor where improved surveillance, responsive lighting and targeted policing could lower crime and encourage development.
"US Ignite provides the city of Flint with opportunities to make the community safer by automating utilities--turning on all lights in an area where a crime has been reported, for example, or by giving law enforcement access to high-speed, real-time, high-definition video on demand," said Kettering University President Robert K. McMahan.
"We may not be able to have a full smart city yet, but a smart neighborhood is entirely possible," noted Geske.
These forms of "smart policing" rely on networks of sensors, cameras and analytical tools that require fast networking and access to powerful computing. The Kettering project has these in the form of GENI hardware.
GENI is an NSF-funded experimental, ultra-high-speed, programmable networking testbed that allows researchers to test new networking ideas at-scale.
There are more than 180 GENI sites around the world--and Flint is one of a few cities that is already leveraging its GENI connections to advance application concepts and prototypes for public benefit and in support of the US Ignite initiative.
In part because of the strength of the existing resources and the community of stakeholders they had developed, Kettering University was awarded a $1 million grant in 2014 from the U.S. Department of Justice as part of DoJ's Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Program. The grant helps Flint develop and implement sustainable crime prevention strategies in the University Avenue Corridor in order to convert the neighborhood into a vibrant region. One strategy is data-driven policing.
"There are lots of pockets of information and it's hard for a researcher to gather it all together to find out if there are certain patterns," said Geske. "Once you pinpoint that, you can look at the area, figure out what's going on and decide what to do."
In an early collaboration with Flint police, Kettering researchers identified a particular pattern of criminal activity along the corridor. In this case, using data analytics, the university identified a property as a magnet for robberies--and purchased and revamped it to reduce crime in the area.
Geske hopes to enable this kind of smart policing citywide by building a cloud computing platform that enables the city to amass crime statistics and provides public access to the data.
In the future, officials imagine the avenue wired with lighting, air quality sensors, smart lighting and even autonomous vehicles or drones connected to the high-speed network. The GENI equipment will be used as a testbed to explore some of these possibilities.
Networked care
A third focus area for Flint is medicine, where Kettering is spearheading a partnership with the University of Michigan-Flint and Mott Community College, as well as with three major medical centers near the city.
Through this partnership, students, faculty, clinicians and researchers in the Flint area will be able to collaborate with instructors from around the country and have direct access to new tools to provide exceptional patient care. Officials even hope to use high-speed networking technologies to bring specialists together in a virtual office to make diagnoses.
With such technology in place, President McMahan says "individual patients seeking medical care at our partners in Flint will always have access to the latest advancements in healthcare no matter where in our country they originate or reside."
With the city as a testbed for creative technological solutions to civic problems, it will be interesting to see how advanced IT can impact education, policing and health care in the city.
Said Erwin Gianchandani, deputy division director for computer and network systems at NSF, "Pilot projects like those in Flint and other cities across the country are demonstrating the value of ultra-high-speed, programmable networks in our communities and helping the nation envision the possibilities of a faster, safer, smarter future Internet."
-- Aaron Dubrow, NS
Igniting change in Vehicle City
Kettering University leads effort to improve city services in Flint, Mich., through high-speed networking
March 24, 2015
Flint, Mich., the former home of General Motors, is on the rebound these days. Leaders there believe they have hit on a winning formula--connecting the city's institutions to high-speed networks that support new, game-changing capabilities.
Through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), Flint is beginning to lay the groundwork for an information technology-driven transformation.
In June 2012, Flint was one of 16 initial cities that were part of US Ignite, a public-private partnership designed to capitalize on the possibilities of ultra-fast broadband networks and "ignite" the development of next-generation Internet applications and services with societal benefits.
Kettering University--formerly General Motors Institute--was designated the lead research institution for the city.
High-speed networking wasn't really on the radar of John Geske, a professor of computer science at Kettering University, before Flint joined US Ignite.
"I was busy running a computer science department and the last thing on my mind was networking applications," Geske said.
But because of the US Ignite award, he started attending application summits and other meetings and realized the possibilities that were available at his doorstep.
"The community that you start to create and the contacts you make are just invaluable," he said.
Connected schools
Phase One of making the city a gigabit hotbed involved taking a step back and uncovering what was already available in the community.
Geske learned that the entire city school system, as well as the schools in 21 schools districts in neighboring Genesee County, had formed the GenNET consortium in 1995 and were already connected by a high-speed, fiber-optic network. Moreover, the schools were connected to the city's four higher education institutions via the Flint Area Network for Educational Telecommunications.
With these capabilities in place, students in the school district experienced unique learning opportunities. For instance, students were able to remotely control an exploratory submarine in real time near the Barrier Reef and communicate with astronauts on the space shuttle. Genesee County students were even able to dissect a sheep's brain via a telemedicine class remotely led by a doctor at Northern Michigan University.
"The GenNET fiber-optic network allows us to reduce the cost of technology services while providing a powerful platform for delivering virtual learning," said Luke Wittum, executive director of Technology and Media Services in the Genesee Intermediate School District.
US Ignite extended this already capable base and provided dedicated 10 gigabit-per-second network connections to the universities and libraries in Flint and to other gigabit cities around the nation, on unique, programmable hardware.
With ultra-high-speed, high-capability Information Technology in place, technology leaders hope to leverage the existing fiber-optic networks to provide immersive virtual reality learning to all students in Flint and Genesee County.
"What if a student could step inside of a human cell, stand at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, or visit a historical place?" Wittum asked. "This opportunity could make learning more engaging and also provide some students who may have never been outside of the county or state to visit another part of the world."
Safer, smarter neighborhoods
Flint areas schools aren't the only target for transformation through high-speed networks. Early meetings with city officials and university representatives determined that public safety could be a focus of the US Ignite networking projects, too.
Together with stakeholders in the Mayor's office and the university, they envisioned a university corridor where improved surveillance, responsive lighting and targeted policing could lower crime and encourage development.
"US Ignite provides the city of Flint with opportunities to make the community safer by automating utilities--turning on all lights in an area where a crime has been reported, for example, or by giving law enforcement access to high-speed, real-time, high-definition video on demand," said Kettering University President Robert K. McMahan.
"We may not be able to have a full smart city yet, but a smart neighborhood is entirely possible," noted Geske.
These forms of "smart policing" rely on networks of sensors, cameras and analytical tools that require fast networking and access to powerful computing. The Kettering project has these in the form of GENI hardware.
GENI is an NSF-funded experimental, ultra-high-speed, programmable networking testbed that allows researchers to test new networking ideas at-scale.
There are more than 180 GENI sites around the world--and Flint is one of a few cities that is already leveraging its GENI connections to advance application concepts and prototypes for public benefit and in support of the US Ignite initiative.
In part because of the strength of the existing resources and the community of stakeholders they had developed, Kettering University was awarded a $1 million grant in 2014 from the U.S. Department of Justice as part of DoJ's Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Program. The grant helps Flint develop and implement sustainable crime prevention strategies in the University Avenue Corridor in order to convert the neighborhood into a vibrant region. One strategy is data-driven policing.
"There are lots of pockets of information and it's hard for a researcher to gather it all together to find out if there are certain patterns," said Geske. "Once you pinpoint that, you can look at the area, figure out what's going on and decide what to do."
In an early collaboration with Flint police, Kettering researchers identified a particular pattern of criminal activity along the corridor. In this case, using data analytics, the university identified a property as a magnet for robberies--and purchased and revamped it to reduce crime in the area.
Geske hopes to enable this kind of smart policing citywide by building a cloud computing platform that enables the city to amass crime statistics and provides public access to the data.
In the future, officials imagine the avenue wired with lighting, air quality sensors, smart lighting and even autonomous vehicles or drones connected to the high-speed network. The GENI equipment will be used as a testbed to explore some of these possibilities.
Networked care
A third focus area for Flint is medicine, where Kettering is spearheading a partnership with the University of Michigan-Flint and Mott Community College, as well as with three major medical centers near the city.
Through this partnership, students, faculty, clinicians and researchers in the Flint area will be able to collaborate with instructors from around the country and have direct access to new tools to provide exceptional patient care. Officials even hope to use high-speed networking technologies to bring specialists together in a virtual office to make diagnoses.
With such technology in place, President McMahan says "individual patients seeking medical care at our partners in Flint will always have access to the latest advancements in healthcare no matter where in our country they originate or reside."
With the city as a testbed for creative technological solutions to civic problems, it will be interesting to see how advanced IT can impact education, policing and health care in the city.
Said Erwin Gianchandani, deputy division director for computer and network systems at NSF, "Pilot projects like those in Flint and other cities across the country are demonstrating the value of ultra-high-speed, programmable networks in our communities and helping the nation envision the possibilities of a faster, safer, smarter future Internet."
-- Aaron Dubrow, NS
Thursday, March 26, 2015
IS A NEW IT REVOLUTION BEGINNING IN FLINT?
FROM: NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Igniting change in Vehicle City
Kettering University leads effort to improve city services in Flint, Michigan through high-speed networking
Flint, Mich., the former home of General Motors, is on the rebound these days. Leaders there believe they have hit on a winning formula--connecting the city's institutions to high-speed networks that support new, game-changing capabilities.
Through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), Flint is beginning to lay the groundwork for an information technology-driven transformation.
In June 2012, Flint was one of 16 initial cities that were part of US Ignite, a public-private partnership designed to capitalize on the possibilities of ultra-fast broadband networks and "ignite" the development of next-generation Internet applications and services with societal benefits.
Kettering University--formerly General Motors Institute--was designated the lead research institution for the city.
High-speed networking wasn't really on the radar of John Geske, a professor of computer science at Kettering University, before Flint joined US Ignite.
"I was busy running a computer science department and the last thing on my mind was networking applications," Geske said.
But because of the US Ignite award, he started attending application summits and other meetings and realized the possibilities that were available at his doorstep.
"The community that you start to create and the contacts you make are just invaluable," he said.
Connected schools
Phase One of making the city a gigabit hotbed involved taking a step back and uncovering what was already available in the community.
Geske learned that the entire city school system, as well as the schools in 21 schools districts in neighboring Genesee County, had formed the GenNET consortium in 1995 and were already connected by a high-speed, fiber-optic network. Moreover, the schools were connected to the city's four higher education institutions via the Flint Area Network for Educational Telecommunications.
With these capabilities in place, students in the school district experienced unique learning opportunities. For instance, students were able to remotely control an exploratory submarine in real time near the Barrier Reef and communicate with astronauts on the space shuttle. Genesee County students were even able to dissect a sheep's brain via a telemedicine class remotely led by a doctor at Northern Michigan University.
"The GenNET fiber-optic network allows us to reduce the cost of technology services while providing a powerful platform for delivering virtual learning," said Luke Wittum, executive director of Technology and Media Services in the Genesee Intermediate School District.
US Ignite extended this already capable base and provided dedicated 10 gigabit-per-second network connections to the universities and libraries in Flint and to other gigabit cities around the nation, on unique, programmable hardware.
With ultra-high-speed, high-capability Information Technology in place, technology leaders hope to leverage the existing fiber-optic networks to provide immersive virtual reality learning to all students in Flint and Genesee County.
"What if a student could step inside of a human cell, stand at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, or visit a historical place?" Wittum asked. "This opportunity could make learning more engaging and also provide some students who may have never been outside of the county or state to visit another part of the world."
Safer, smarter neighborhoods
Flint areas schools aren't the only target for transformation through high-speed networks. Early meetings with city officials and university representatives determined that public safety could be a focus of the US Ignite networking projects, too.
Together with stakeholders in the Mayor's office and the university, they envisioned a university corridor where improved surveillance, responsive lighting and targeted policing could lower crime and encourage development.
"US Ignite provides the city of Flint with opportunities to make the community safer by automating utilities--turning on all lights in an area where a crime has been reported, for example, or by giving law enforcement access to high-speed, real-time, high-definition video on demand," said Kettering University President Robert K. McMahan.
"We may not be able to have a full smart city yet, but a smart neighborhood is entirely possible," noted Geske.
These forms of "smart policing" rely on networks of sensors, cameras and analytical tools that require fast networking and access to powerful computing. The Kettering project has these in the form of GENI hardware.
GENI is an NSF-funded experimental, ultra-high-speed, programmable networking testbed that allows researchers to test new networking ideas at-scale.
There are more than 180 GENI sites around the world--and Flint is one of a few cities that is already leveraging its GENI connections to advance application concepts and prototypes for public benefit and in support of the US Ignite initiative.
In part because of the strength of the existing resources and the community of stakeholders they had developed, Kettering University was awarded a $1 million grant in 2014 from the U.S. Department of Justice as part of DoJ's Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Program. The grant helps Flint develop and implement sustainable crime prevention strategies in the University Avenue Corridor in order to convert the neighborhood into a vibrant region. One strategy is data-driven policing.
"There are lots of pockets of information and it's hard for a researcher to gather it all together to find out if there are certain patterns," said Geske. "Once you pinpoint that, you can look at the area, figure out what's going on and decide what to do."
In an early collaboration with Flint police, Kettering researchers identified a particular pattern of criminal activity along the corridor. In this case, using data analytics, the university identified a property as a magnet for robberies--and purchased and revamped it to reduce crime in the area.
Geske hopes to enable this kind of smart policing citywide by building a cloud computing platform that enables the city to amass crime statistics and provides public access to the data.
In the future, officials imagine the avenue wired with lighting, air quality sensors, smart lighting and even autonomous vehicles or drones connected to the high-speed network. The GENI equipment will be used as a testbed to explore some of these possibilities.
Networked care
A third focus area for Flint is medicine, where Kettering is spearheading a partnership with the University of Michigan-Flint and Mott Community College, as well as with three major medical centers near the city.
Through this partnership, students, faculty, clinicians and researchers in the Flint area will be able to collaborate with instructors from around the country and have direct access to new tools to provide exceptional patient care. Officials even hope to use high-speed networking technologies to bring specialists together in a virtual office to make diagnoses.
With such technology in place, President McMahan says "individual patients seeking medical care at our partners in Flint will always have access to the latest advancements in healthcare no matter where in our country they originate or reside."
With the city as a testbed for creative technological solutions to civic problems, it will be interesting to see how advanced IT can impact education, policing and health care in the city.
Said Erwin Gianchandani, deputy division director for computer and network systems at NSF, "Pilot projects like those in Flint and other cities across the country are demonstrating the value of ultra-high-speed, programmable networks in our communities and helping the nation envision the possibilities of a faster, safer, smarter future Internet."
-- Aaron Dubrow, NSF (
-- John Geske, Kettering University (
Investigators
John Geske
Yunsheng Wang
Related Institutions/Organizations
Kettering University
Raytheon BBN Technologies Corp.
Igniting change in Vehicle City
Kettering University leads effort to improve city services in Flint, Michigan through high-speed networking
Flint, Mich., the former home of General Motors, is on the rebound these days. Leaders there believe they have hit on a winning formula--connecting the city's institutions to high-speed networks that support new, game-changing capabilities.
Through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), Flint is beginning to lay the groundwork for an information technology-driven transformation.
In June 2012, Flint was one of 16 initial cities that were part of US Ignite, a public-private partnership designed to capitalize on the possibilities of ultra-fast broadband networks and "ignite" the development of next-generation Internet applications and services with societal benefits.
Kettering University--formerly General Motors Institute--was designated the lead research institution for the city.
High-speed networking wasn't really on the radar of John Geske, a professor of computer science at Kettering University, before Flint joined US Ignite.
"I was busy running a computer science department and the last thing on my mind was networking applications," Geske said.
But because of the US Ignite award, he started attending application summits and other meetings and realized the possibilities that were available at his doorstep.
"The community that you start to create and the contacts you make are just invaluable," he said.
Connected schools
Phase One of making the city a gigabit hotbed involved taking a step back and uncovering what was already available in the community.
Geske learned that the entire city school system, as well as the schools in 21 schools districts in neighboring Genesee County, had formed the GenNET consortium in 1995 and were already connected by a high-speed, fiber-optic network. Moreover, the schools were connected to the city's four higher education institutions via the Flint Area Network for Educational Telecommunications.
With these capabilities in place, students in the school district experienced unique learning opportunities. For instance, students were able to remotely control an exploratory submarine in real time near the Barrier Reef and communicate with astronauts on the space shuttle. Genesee County students were even able to dissect a sheep's brain via a telemedicine class remotely led by a doctor at Northern Michigan University.
"The GenNET fiber-optic network allows us to reduce the cost of technology services while providing a powerful platform for delivering virtual learning," said Luke Wittum, executive director of Technology and Media Services in the Genesee Intermediate School District.
US Ignite extended this already capable base and provided dedicated 10 gigabit-per-second network connections to the universities and libraries in Flint and to other gigabit cities around the nation, on unique, programmable hardware.
With ultra-high-speed, high-capability Information Technology in place, technology leaders hope to leverage the existing fiber-optic networks to provide immersive virtual reality learning to all students in Flint and Genesee County.
"What if a student could step inside of a human cell, stand at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, or visit a historical place?" Wittum asked. "This opportunity could make learning more engaging and also provide some students who may have never been outside of the county or state to visit another part of the world."
Safer, smarter neighborhoods
Flint areas schools aren't the only target for transformation through high-speed networks. Early meetings with city officials and university representatives determined that public safety could be a focus of the US Ignite networking projects, too.
Together with stakeholders in the Mayor's office and the university, they envisioned a university corridor where improved surveillance, responsive lighting and targeted policing could lower crime and encourage development.
"US Ignite provides the city of Flint with opportunities to make the community safer by automating utilities--turning on all lights in an area where a crime has been reported, for example, or by giving law enforcement access to high-speed, real-time, high-definition video on demand," said Kettering University President Robert K. McMahan.
"We may not be able to have a full smart city yet, but a smart neighborhood is entirely possible," noted Geske.
These forms of "smart policing" rely on networks of sensors, cameras and analytical tools that require fast networking and access to powerful computing. The Kettering project has these in the form of GENI hardware.
GENI is an NSF-funded experimental, ultra-high-speed, programmable networking testbed that allows researchers to test new networking ideas at-scale.
There are more than 180 GENI sites around the world--and Flint is one of a few cities that is already leveraging its GENI connections to advance application concepts and prototypes for public benefit and in support of the US Ignite initiative.
In part because of the strength of the existing resources and the community of stakeholders they had developed, Kettering University was awarded a $1 million grant in 2014 from the U.S. Department of Justice as part of DoJ's Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Program. The grant helps Flint develop and implement sustainable crime prevention strategies in the University Avenue Corridor in order to convert the neighborhood into a vibrant region. One strategy is data-driven policing.
"There are lots of pockets of information and it's hard for a researcher to gather it all together to find out if there are certain patterns," said Geske. "Once you pinpoint that, you can look at the area, figure out what's going on and decide what to do."
In an early collaboration with Flint police, Kettering researchers identified a particular pattern of criminal activity along the corridor. In this case, using data analytics, the university identified a property as a magnet for robberies--and purchased and revamped it to reduce crime in the area.
Geske hopes to enable this kind of smart policing citywide by building a cloud computing platform that enables the city to amass crime statistics and provides public access to the data.
In the future, officials imagine the avenue wired with lighting, air quality sensors, smart lighting and even autonomous vehicles or drones connected to the high-speed network. The GENI equipment will be used as a testbed to explore some of these possibilities.
Networked care
A third focus area for Flint is medicine, where Kettering is spearheading a partnership with the University of Michigan-Flint and Mott Community College, as well as with three major medical centers near the city.
Through this partnership, students, faculty, clinicians and researchers in the Flint area will be able to collaborate with instructors from around the country and have direct access to new tools to provide exceptional patient care. Officials even hope to use high-speed networking technologies to bring specialists together in a virtual office to make diagnoses.
With such technology in place, President McMahan says "individual patients seeking medical care at our partners in Flint will always have access to the latest advancements in healthcare no matter where in our country they originate or reside."
With the city as a testbed for creative technological solutions to civic problems, it will be interesting to see how advanced IT can impact education, policing and health care in the city.
Said Erwin Gianchandani, deputy division director for computer and network systems at NSF, "Pilot projects like those in Flint and other cities across the country are demonstrating the value of ultra-high-speed, programmable networks in our communities and helping the nation envision the possibilities of a faster, safer, smarter future Internet."
-- Aaron Dubrow, NSF (
-- John Geske, Kettering University (
Investigators
John Geske
Yunsheng Wang
Related Institutions/Organizations
Kettering University
Raytheon BBN Technologies Corp.
Friday, September 13, 2013
COMMUNITY IT ENTERPRISE MILESTONE TO IMPROVE INFORMATION SHARING
FROM: U.S. DEFENSE DEPARTMENT
Intel Officials Announce Community IT Enterprise Milestone
By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Sept. 11, 2013 - Eighteen months after the director of national intelligence announced plans for a new information technology environment that would vastly improve information sharing across the intelligence community, a milestone has set the community on the path to its IT future.
James R. Clapper was talking about the future at that 2011 U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation symposium in Texas, Al Tarasiuk told reporters during a recent briefing, and the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise, or IC ITE -- which nearly everyone at the office of the director of national intelligence pronounces "i cite" -- was part of the discussion.
Tarasiuk, intelligence community chief information officer and assistant director of national intelligence, said that at the time, consolidating IT across the community was driven by budget considerations. But today, he added, it's more than an efficiency play on IT.
"We laid out the vision for IC ITE very much focused on improving intelligence integration across the community," the CIO said. "Basically, the vision statement says [it] enables intelligence integration, information sharing and safeguarding, as well as driving to a more efficient IT model for the community."
Translating those factors into goals produces effectiveness, security and efficiency, Tarasiuk added.
"In the past, these were mutually exclusive, but ... we believe that cloud technologies, the price points that we can obtain today [and] some of the developments that we have invested in ... will allow us to ... address all three at the same time," he said.
Around Aug. 16, Tarasiuk said, the ODNI declared a milestone they call the initial baseline for IC ITE. The first step in deploying IC ITE across the intel community began with giving a few thousand users at the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency a common software desktop.
"We are moving toward a single desktop for the community," Tarasiuk said, "so instead of every agency building their own software desktop, which they do today, we will build one for use by all. They will have common collaboration services, and people will be able to use common email and those kinds of things."
The desktop is being produced by NGA and DIA as partners, he said, part of a new business model for ODNI called a service-provider-based business architecture.
As part of the new IC ITE architecture, Tarasiuk explained, the big five agencies -- NGA, DIA, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office -- alone or as partners, "become the providers of certain ... services that we designated as part of this overall architecture."
The CIO said the IC ITE work leverages investments made by the agencies and much of the work already accomplished by the four combat-support agencies -- NSA, DIA, NGA and NRO.
"They were heading toward consolidation of various pieces of IT infrastructure already prior to us starting down the path of IC ITE," he said, so they had done legwork on a common desktop and had begun planning on network consolidation.
The CIA and NSA are partners on another part of the IC ITE, the IC cloud, which Tarasiuk says consists of the lower layers of IT -- bare-metal hosting, analytics as part of that hosting, and virtual and storage capabilities.
"The IC cloud is not something that's going to be out on the Internet," he said. "It's privately hosted inside the intelligence community according to our security standards and under our security watch."
Tarasiuk said the cloud capabilities are available to the initial DIA and NGA desktop users, but also to legacy users.
"Everyone in the community, everyone who's connected up to the TS/SCI networks within agencies across the community, can access the capabilities on IC ITE right now," he said.
Another service that came online in August, provided and managed by NSA, is an applications mall for the intelligence community, the CIO said.
"The idea here is to begin to rationalize the number of applications across the community that might be redundant or that may be needed," he said, adding that the initial architecture for the mall will be based on a customizable open-source Web application called the Ozone Widget Framework.
The NRO will provide the IC ITE network requirements and engineering service, Tarasiuk said.
"They're not going to provision networks," he added, "but they're going to look at how we connect both our local area networks and our wide area networks and try to find a more efficient model, one that actually improves our effectiveness as well."
In the coming year, Tarasiuk said, the CIO's office will work to ensure the resilience of the first several thousand uses of the common desktops and other infrastructure services "to make sure that we can move more production capabilities into it."
"Then," he added, "we will scale beyond what we have right now -- scale the number of desktops, scale the amount of data that's in the cloud."
New services also will be brought in, he said, including security monitoring, and a central service will be established to monitor end-to-end security of IC ITE.
"The beauty of what we're doing is enforcing an IC standard for all data objects that go in the cloud," Tarasiuk added. "Today, agencies comply with security standards, but they implement them in different ways. This is where we believe we can improve information sharing over time."
Based on the way data was originally implemented, an analyst in one agency may not be able to access certain data sets from another agency, the CIO explained. "What we're trying to do from an infrastructure perspective is remove roadblocks that prevent that kind of sharing," he said. "That's the big benefit of moving the data. It's not all going to be in one place, but from a virtual perspective it will be interconnected to the same standards and formats so the automated engines can determine whether a user can see the data or not."
Tarasiuk also stays in touch with the Defense Department's CIO, Theresa M. Takai, who for the defense secretary, the nation's warfighters and many others ensures the delivery of such IT-based capabilities through the Joint Information Environment to support the range of DOD missions.
The need for more effectiveness, security and efficiency isn't unique to the intelligence community, and DOD is transitioning in a first-phase implementation of the JIE -- a single, secure, reliable and agile command, control, communications, and computing enterprise information environment -- that spans fiscal years 2013 and 2014.
Tarasiuk says the relationship between IC ITE and JIE is still being defined in terms of what services the enterprises can leverage from each other.
"Teri Takai and I are pretty close partners in trying to ensure three important elements that are critical to the IC and the DOD communities -- interoperability of standards and identities, and then the cross-domain capabilities," he said.
"We chair joint committees," he added, "and we have people working on committees to ensure that we can move information back and forth and we can understand who's seeing information, so that's enabled."
The CIO said the piece that's still being defined is where services can be leveraged.
For instance, he said, "we don't plan on a wide scale to produce a secret domain infrastructure. We are very much focused on TS/SCI domain only, and that's where our ... priority is.
DOD has substantial capabilities already in that space, Tarasiuk added, and the ODNI CIO is exploring that and the unclassified level as potential places to leverage services.
"That's what we're currently working on," he said, "trying to figure out where we can point requirements to JIE or JIE point requirements to us when it comes to the TS/SCI space."
Intel Officials Announce Community IT Enterprise Milestone
By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Sept. 11, 2013 - Eighteen months after the director of national intelligence announced plans for a new information technology environment that would vastly improve information sharing across the intelligence community, a milestone has set the community on the path to its IT future.
James R. Clapper was talking about the future at that 2011 U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation symposium in Texas, Al Tarasiuk told reporters during a recent briefing, and the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise, or IC ITE -- which nearly everyone at the office of the director of national intelligence pronounces "i cite" -- was part of the discussion.
Tarasiuk, intelligence community chief information officer and assistant director of national intelligence, said that at the time, consolidating IT across the community was driven by budget considerations. But today, he added, it's more than an efficiency play on IT.
"We laid out the vision for IC ITE very much focused on improving intelligence integration across the community," the CIO said. "Basically, the vision statement says [it] enables intelligence integration, information sharing and safeguarding, as well as driving to a more efficient IT model for the community."
Translating those factors into goals produces effectiveness, security and efficiency, Tarasiuk added.
"In the past, these were mutually exclusive, but ... we believe that cloud technologies, the price points that we can obtain today [and] some of the developments that we have invested in ... will allow us to ... address all three at the same time," he said.
Around Aug. 16, Tarasiuk said, the ODNI declared a milestone they call the initial baseline for IC ITE. The first step in deploying IC ITE across the intel community began with giving a few thousand users at the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency a common software desktop.
"We are moving toward a single desktop for the community," Tarasiuk said, "so instead of every agency building their own software desktop, which they do today, we will build one for use by all. They will have common collaboration services, and people will be able to use common email and those kinds of things."
The desktop is being produced by NGA and DIA as partners, he said, part of a new business model for ODNI called a service-provider-based business architecture.
As part of the new IC ITE architecture, Tarasiuk explained, the big five agencies -- NGA, DIA, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office -- alone or as partners, "become the providers of certain ... services that we designated as part of this overall architecture."
The CIO said the IC ITE work leverages investments made by the agencies and much of the work already accomplished by the four combat-support agencies -- NSA, DIA, NGA and NRO.
"They were heading toward consolidation of various pieces of IT infrastructure already prior to us starting down the path of IC ITE," he said, so they had done legwork on a common desktop and had begun planning on network consolidation.
The CIA and NSA are partners on another part of the IC ITE, the IC cloud, which Tarasiuk says consists of the lower layers of IT -- bare-metal hosting, analytics as part of that hosting, and virtual and storage capabilities.
"The IC cloud is not something that's going to be out on the Internet," he said. "It's privately hosted inside the intelligence community according to our security standards and under our security watch."
Tarasiuk said the cloud capabilities are available to the initial DIA and NGA desktop users, but also to legacy users.
"Everyone in the community, everyone who's connected up to the TS/SCI networks within agencies across the community, can access the capabilities on IC ITE right now," he said.
Another service that came online in August, provided and managed by NSA, is an applications mall for the intelligence community, the CIO said.
"The idea here is to begin to rationalize the number of applications across the community that might be redundant or that may be needed," he said, adding that the initial architecture for the mall will be based on a customizable open-source Web application called the Ozone Widget Framework.
The NRO will provide the IC ITE network requirements and engineering service, Tarasiuk said.
"They're not going to provision networks," he added, "but they're going to look at how we connect both our local area networks and our wide area networks and try to find a more efficient model, one that actually improves our effectiveness as well."
In the coming year, Tarasiuk said, the CIO's office will work to ensure the resilience of the first several thousand uses of the common desktops and other infrastructure services "to make sure that we can move more production capabilities into it."
"Then," he added, "we will scale beyond what we have right now -- scale the number of desktops, scale the amount of data that's in the cloud."
New services also will be brought in, he said, including security monitoring, and a central service will be established to monitor end-to-end security of IC ITE.
"The beauty of what we're doing is enforcing an IC standard for all data objects that go in the cloud," Tarasiuk added. "Today, agencies comply with security standards, but they implement them in different ways. This is where we believe we can improve information sharing over time."
Based on the way data was originally implemented, an analyst in one agency may not be able to access certain data sets from another agency, the CIO explained. "What we're trying to do from an infrastructure perspective is remove roadblocks that prevent that kind of sharing," he said. "That's the big benefit of moving the data. It's not all going to be in one place, but from a virtual perspective it will be interconnected to the same standards and formats so the automated engines can determine whether a user can see the data or not."
Tarasiuk also stays in touch with the Defense Department's CIO, Theresa M. Takai, who for the defense secretary, the nation's warfighters and many others ensures the delivery of such IT-based capabilities through the Joint Information Environment to support the range of DOD missions.
The need for more effectiveness, security and efficiency isn't unique to the intelligence community, and DOD is transitioning in a first-phase implementation of the JIE -- a single, secure, reliable and agile command, control, communications, and computing enterprise information environment -- that spans fiscal years 2013 and 2014.
Tarasiuk says the relationship between IC ITE and JIE is still being defined in terms of what services the enterprises can leverage from each other.
"Teri Takai and I are pretty close partners in trying to ensure three important elements that are critical to the IC and the DOD communities -- interoperability of standards and identities, and then the cross-domain capabilities," he said.
"We chair joint committees," he added, "and we have people working on committees to ensure that we can move information back and forth and we can understand who's seeing information, so that's enabled."
The CIO said the piece that's still being defined is where services can be leveraged.
For instance, he said, "we don't plan on a wide scale to produce a secret domain infrastructure. We are very much focused on TS/SCI domain only, and that's where our ... priority is.
DOD has substantial capabilities already in that space, Tarasiuk added, and the ODNI CIO is exploring that and the unclassified level as potential places to leverage services.
"That's what we're currently working on," he said, "trying to figure out where we can point requirements to JIE or JIE point requirements to us when it comes to the TS/SCI space."
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