Outsouring your heart

How about getting your heart surgeries in India and China? Here is an interesting article appearted in Time magazine.

AT&T Statistics Research Center

Yesterday, I attended a seminar by Chris Volinsky who is director at AT&T Statistics Research Center. He presented a nice talk on modelling massive dynamic graphs. He demonstrated that graphs based method is an effective technique to model massive telephone calls in AT&T and the model is used to detect frauds in AT&T.

IBM Statistics Research Center

During IWAP conference I met with Wanli Min who works at Statistics IBM research center. They have some interesting projects. Wanli presented a talk on hidden Markov models with application to software quality maintenance.

Vegas 911

If you have not read an interesting story by David Kushner about Jefferey Jonas in IEEE Spectrum magazine then don't miss it. It is a story of a computer geek who left his high school to do programming, his passion and became the architect of modern computer system to catch the thieves and crooks in Vegas.

In the age of 14, Jeff left the high school and started doing programming. By 18, he was an entrepreneur and taking projects and running his company. He had so many projects but he couldn’t manage them and by his 20 th birthday he filed bankruptcy. After few years, he became nearly quadriplegic after a car accident but came back after 4 months in the rehab. His stars started twinkling when he took a project in Vegas to design a database for a Casino. The database was required to keep out the bad guys from casinos. He used XML and HTML to do real time processing of people entering and exiting from the casino. Beauty of his algorithm was that he considered features of a person such as birth data, address, and birth place, SSN etc. which helps to identify people and also to verify them. All this was done in real time using XML. Jonas work was quite valuable because Casinos were able to crack down the cheaters, thieves.
His work has potential to take disparate data from multiple sources and connect the dots in real time. Jonas founded a company called System Research and Development (SRD) which he later sold to IBM.

Jonas is now chief technical advisor at IBM and looking over a product which will help NSA to track the bad guys in USA. He is developing a system to track terrorists. To consider how the system will work, let us consider an example. Let us say, if a suspicious person buys a ticket of a cruise to bomb it. Using Jonas's system, cruise company can send the encrypted ticket passenger information to Anonymous resolution engine. This encrypted information will be matched against encrypted information from terrorist watch lists and if there is a match then an alert will be issued and sent to a government agency. The government agency can subpoenas record and obtain a court order to get the specific information from cruise line. Jonas's system Anonymous resolution engine (ARE) will help to track bad guys even if they changed their names and defraud their identities.

Actually, we have also designed a system Adaptive Safety Analysis and Monitoring System (ASAM) to track bad guys but our approach is little bit different. We are arguing that instead of just looking at individuals; let us focus on the patterns of bad activities. Using the ASAM system, experts can make a model of suspicious activities and run against a database and if there is a match the system will raise an alarm. We have already developed a Version 2.0 of the ASAM system. It uses synthetic data to detect the threats.