In 2004, the pressure brought upon the Bush Administration brought a screeching halt to brutal and illegal interrogative methods that were administered upon innocent people (purportedly halted, at least so far as upon US soil and at Guantanamo Prison), innocent because their was no process that deemed them guilty of any crime whatsoever.At precisely that time, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created, through networking with esteemed learning institutions, the FODOVA program -Foundations of Data and Visual Analytics. This program was brought to the National Science Foundation (NSF) by the Department of Homeland Security as early as 2004, and the NSF thereupon networked with institutions such as Georgia Tech and Texas A & M, among numerous others, in order to create "fundamental research advances that will be widely applicable across scientific, engineering, commercial, and governmental domains that utilize visualization and analytics to gain insight and derive knowledge from massive, often streaming, dynamic, ambiguous and possibly conflicting, data sets"; the NSF and the DHS invited research proposals whose outcomes would enable "data stakeholders" to detect the expected and discover the unexpected in massive data sets.
Currently $1.72 million dollars a year is allocated to be awarded to institutions that generate adaquate responses to those funding proposals. On September 1st, 2008, Ping Li at Cornell University was awarded $250,000 for the program on Efficient Data Reduction and Summerization. On July 1st, 2008, Leonidas Guibas, heading a program on Global Structure Disovery on Sampled Spaces was awarded $450,000 at Stanford University. On May 15th, 2008, Maurio Maggioni, at Duke University, leading a similar program, was awarded $327,980.
The obvious potentials for varied fields of research, education and community building are obvious. There is no one who would not benefit from breakthrough ideas involved in better being able to connect the dots extracted from particular data sets that are well meaning, but what happens when the data sets have been culled illegally? What if these data sets involve your personal emails, hotel reservations? What if these data sets involved the data retrieval programs initiated by the Bush Administration in the form of over 1000 data fusion centers that invasively, and illegally draw information together on US citizens broadly without distinction? What if these data sets are in fact the information the Bush Adminstration rooted out with programs like MainCore, created initially during Reagan to monitor overseas insurance scams but subsequently altered for data mining on citizens within the US and abroad, or the NSA splitters set up at multiple telecommunication information junctions, funnelling our every last single form of electronic communication (emails, cell phone calls, land line calls, faxes, internet searches, website visits, all credit card transactions, be they relating to hotels, car rentals, perhaps even through various networks of cameras, private and public both, and potentially our own webcams) ? Now this general spying on Americans, at least, goes back to the 1940's when certain telecom industries acquiesced and they've been complicit ever since, generally thought to be in small part, upon isolated cases but the access to private information, illegally, was there. But this is this a new page.
On the steps of Berkely, on December 2nd, 1964, Mario Savio speaking in the heat of the Berkely Free Speech movement, when then Berkely President Kerr was teasing the protesters by indicating he was trying to inject the Board of Regents with a degree of liberalism but would not state so publicly, a revealing comparison was made by a University representative and go-between twixt the movement and the University, compared President Kerr to the Manager of a Firm and the Board of Regents to a Board of Directors, Mario then said to the enormous crowd: "If this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the Manager, and i'll tell you something, the faculty are bunch of employees, and we're the raw material, but we're a bunch of raw material that don't need to have any process upon us, don't need to be made into any product, don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the Government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone. We're human beings! There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears, upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop to indicate to the people who run it and to the people that own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
As sure as President Eisenhower was warning of President Bush Jr., so was Mario Savio alerting us to the degradation of not only the Constitution of the United States, but in his referencing Government, Industry and Universities reducing the people, the citizenry of the United States to a product to be bought and sold, mined and processed. Mario Savio is speaking to the heart of our present circumstance. FODAVA is the Foundation that violates our constitutional rights by Government, Industry and Universities, and naturally it goes without saying, we're footing the bill, and therein lies our power to throw our "bodies upon the gears, wheels and levers" with our voices and bodies in protest, backed by our hearts, minds and convictions.
We, in the recorded details of our private experiences being data mined by Local, State and Federal employees, and that vast information basically being traded to be processed by otherwise prestigious Universities by their post-doctoral graduate students or any other students, by their professors and related peers, is potentially criminal. Our Universities have, in part, thanks to huge monetary rewards for tacit and efficient complicity, been corrupted into an illegal operation of feeding our Government with the statistical analysis of US citizens based on their illegaly obtained private information in order to prevent terrorist attacks. We, as a people, must ask ourselves not if this is the best way to catch a terrorist, but that is this what we do? Do Americans pay taxes to encourage illegal spying on it's citizens, to wave that money under Universities' noses to process that illegal data more effectively? The answer is Yes, and whether we agree with any defense made by and/or for the offenders defying our constitutional rights being so violated or not, it's what in fact is happening. We have the right to protect the protection of our rights, it is a core blessing and responsibility of Democracy, the foundation beneath America of which cannot be afforded to be taken advantage of and abused, for it weakens the soil beneath to the point where true Democracy would be incapable of being supported.
At the heart of FODAVA is the speech by speaker Joseph Kielman, who serves as Science Advisor in Science and Technology Directorate at the Dept of Homeland Security, where he is the Chief Scientist and Lead for Basic Future Research in the Command, Control and Interoperability Division, also managing two University programs, the Centers of Excellence and established and manages the National Visualization and Analytics Center Program, and the University based Regional Visualization and Analytic Centers, one of the key people who established the joint program with the National Science Foundation, the FODAVA program. He had a 20 year career in the FBI, where he assumed various leadership roles, where he worked on Advanced Information Collection and Surveillence Systems, Advanced Computer Architecture, Information Processing and Analysis Technologies among others. In 2006, he was awarded the Presidential Rank of Meritorious Senior Professional. He is based in Washington D.C.
His speech is "Visual Analytics, Past, Present and Future" you can download the pdf's but they will automatically appear as the lecture proceeds in your browser. You would need to click the name of the speech by his name, on the next page down scroll for the link to click again, in red font with the 'play' button, which takes you to the last page to hit 'play', and your browser will shrink and the speech will start, with the pdf automatically appearing in your browser in sync with the speech.
Speech: http://presentations.dlpe.gatech.edu/coc/coc_022709/f.htm
His presentation in PDF format can be downloaded here, where the list of other lecturers are, his is the third down, i have posted most of them below:
http://fodava.gatech.edu/node/23
There are other distinguished speaker lectures, mostly dealing in statistical and probability mathematical algorithms, needed to arrive at presumptive conclusions in processing private US citizen data to understand from what directions potential threats can be calculated to arrive.
Alan Turner is apparently an employee of the the DHS, this is his presentation as a distinguished lecturer at Georgia Tech, within which are veiled references to his employer, DHS and their intentions with the FODOVA program as inititated within University settings. These broadcasts were streamed to many locations, as indicated by Haesun Park while introducing another distinguished lecturer. The red font link at the bottom links to the next page, where you can initiate the speech, or you can access his speech from the link just above, where all the lecturers are listed.
http://presentations.dlpe.gatech.edu/stream/support/coc_042409/
At 3:31 by Haesun Park, from Georgia Tech
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mu1FFQ4qGI&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bing.com%2Fvideos%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dbuckminster%2Bfuller%26docid%3D748845400522%26mid%3D58C7C0CF473EC85A835658C7C0CF473EC85A8356%26FORM%3DVIVR&feature=player_embedded
Georgia Tech http://fodava.gatech.edu/
Funding:
http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=501081
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/progSearch.do?SearchType=progSearch&page=2&QueryText=&ProgOrganization=&ProgOfficer=&ProgEleCode=7703&BooleanElement=true&ProgRefCode=&BooleanRef=true&ProgProgram=&ProgFoaCode=&RestrictActive=on&Search=Search#results
A post-script: My father and myself, along with many of her friends, not to mention her family of course, lost a friend on flight 77 into the Pentagon. Dora Menchaka was a beautiful, vibrant woman who was a leading research scientist into prostate cancer. I cannot claim to speak for her, but i know she would be proud of my speaking for myself. ~harama goti
