DARPA offers $42 million for ‘revolutionary’ research on social media analysis

By

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (slogan: Creating and Preventing Strategic Surprise) is offering $42 million in funding for “revolutionary” research into social media in strategic communication.

The DARPA announcement states:

The conditions under which our Armed Forces conduct operations are rapidly changing with the spread of blogs, social networking sites, and media]sharing technology (such as YouTube), and further accelerated by the proliferation of mobile technology. Changes to the nature of conflict resulting from the use of social media are likely to be as profound as those resulting from previous communications revolutions. The effective use of social media has the potential to help the Armed Forces better understand the environment in which it operates and to allow more agile use of information in support of operations.

The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base. In particular, SMISC will develop automated and semi]automated operator support tools and techniques for the systematic and methodical use of social media at data scale and in a timely fashion to accomplish four specific program goals:
1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.
3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations.

The New York Times comments:
Read more →

Futurist conversations: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on Open vs Closed Systems

By

Continuing our series of conversations between friend and fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard and myself, here are some discursive thoughts on open versus closed systems. Given this issue’s central role in virtually all business strategy today, we find that our clients are consistently asking us about how to think about and build strategies in this context.

Here are a few of the points we make in the video:
Read more →

Governance as opportunity: Governance, risk, and compliance in the cloud

By

One of my key themes is that of governance as enabler. As I proposed in my keynote on the transformation of business at the recent AICD conference, ‘Governance should focus as much on enabling innovation and taking useful risks as about managing and mitigating risk’. Over 93% of the 600 or so company directors present agreed with me. 

Today I’m at the Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium, where I earlier gave the opening keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure. Looking at governance from the perspective of information technologies is very instructive. Governance is a top priority for CIOs and IT departments, not least because there is so much that can go wrong in information management, notably from losing or exposing valuable data.

GRC is the acronym used by industry hands describe Governance, Risk, and Compliance. Compliance is becoming increasingly prominent – arguably even dominant – in technology, because government agencies are legislating on how consumer data should be protected, what information needs to be kept, the audit trails required, and even where physically data can be stored. The US SEC has sufficient expectations of companies’ data storage and retrieval capabilities to mandate hefty fines for every day taken to respond to requests for data.
Read more →

/in /

Steve Duplessie on information infrastructure and shifts in data storage

By

Directly following my opening keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure at Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium was Steve Duplessie, who is recognized as one of the top people in the world on information infrastructure. 

Here are some notes taken from his excellent keynote:
Read more →

/in /

Keynote slides: The Future of Information Infrastructure

By

This morning I am giving the opening keynote at Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium, organized by the Storage Network Industry Association and Computerworld.

Here are the slides to my keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure.

My usual warning applies: these slides are intended as visual support to my keynote, not as stand-alone slides. In this case they are even more than usually epigrammatic. However I share them for attendees and anyone else who might enjoy them. I will try to write more about some of my key points later.

Keynote: The Future of Information Infrastructure

View more presentations from rossdawson

The evidence is in: we believe technology will create a better future but not better environment

By

The Smithsonian Institute and Pew Research Center recently did a survey of Americans on what they thought would happen by the year 2050.

Good created a nice infographic, below, summarizing some of the data. Click on the image for the full size version.


Image source: Good

The Smithsonian magazine has also created a nice animation from the results.

Here are some of what the American people believe will (or is likely to) happen by 2050:
Read more →

Futurist conversation: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on the role of a futurist

By

Continuing our series of conversations with Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency, and myself, here is the one we kicked off with: what is the role of a futurist?

Here are a few of the topics we discuss:
Read more →

How Arthur C. Clarke almost 50 years ago accurately predicted our world of global distributed work

By

Arthur C. Clarke was certainly one of the most prescient people of the last century, anticipating many developments and in fact inventing the geo-stationary satellite on which much of the early media and communication revolution was based.

In this fantastic segment from a BBC broadcast in 1964 he confidently makes two predictions, one absolutely accurate, one completely wrong.

He says (from 1:45 to 3:13):
Read more →

Futurist conversation: Gerd Leonhard and Ross Dawson on the future of music

By

Continuing our series of conversations on the future between Gerd Leonhard and myself, today’s session is on the future of music.

Here are a few of the points we made:
Read more →

How technological and social change are feeding on each other in an accelerating spiral

By

In my recent keynotes I have frequently used variations on my Transformation of Business framework, which looks at how Technology Drivers and Social Drivers lead to a changed Business Landscape, and in turn New Drivers of Success.


Read more →