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Dayton Technology Landscape Conference

Technology First is a local IT Trade Group, and their second annual “Technology Landscape Conference” was yesterday, so I dutifully (duty = I’m dating their intern) attended.

Ok, so there was some more duty… one of the companies presenting was ExpeData, a Dayton, Ohio (which is “local” for us folk) company who has a digital writing capture technology. We’ve been working with them for a few months to find some suitable applications and to discuss some security issues and requirements. It’s a fairly interesting technology, although I have some trouble finding its killer-app.

Another interesting company whose presentation I attended was Persistent Surveillance Systems — these guys have a 190+ MegaPixel camera array that they fly over the Cincinnati area (among others), taking pictures about once per second. When they hear about a crime, typically a murder, after the fact, they can go back and assign analysts to review the captured images to track people in the vicinity. Their software allows analysts to assign colored tracks and markers to people, vehicles, and anything else of interest — they initially track suspects, then go back and track anyone they interacted with, anyone nearby (possible witnesses/accomplices), and whatnot. The large pixel view of the city and long video times allow them to watch people drive all the way to their destination — a home, hideout, friends’ house, or whatever — where they can then work with police to get a warrant and follow up as appropriate. Their metadata is even good enough that they can apparently cross reference locations to find that, for example, the getaway driver from murder A may have lived next door to the suspect from murder B, which may help detectives tie together previously unrelated crimes.
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Heritage Health Prize: On Algorithms, Rights, Patents and Patients

So my goal for the weekend was to submit an entry to the Heritage Health Prize. It took me until Monday night (have to work off-hours, this isn’t a work-sponsored event), but our team (the Data Monkeys) (with Jeremi and Chris at this point) are now entered and somewhat amazingly NOT in last place! Yay!

But I’m ahead of myself… the Heritage Health Prize is a data competition run through Kaggle, who runs these sorts of things. It’s a $3-Million prize competition for a method of predicting what hospital patients will spend time in a hospital given their prior years’ medical history.

I’ve been wanting to enter something like this for a while. I don’t house any real hopes of winning (I have some fake hopes, of course); this sort of money attracts teams with far more depth of experience in data mining algorithms than I have — our team leans more towards data management, but not analytics. Still, this is an opportunity to head in that direction, so I’m going to take it.
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Data Ethics, Privacy, and Responsibility

We’ve seen a lot of high profile data privacy and data leak issues in the news lately.

• Facebook is constantly under fire, for apparent lapses in securing private data.
• Just today, classified documents from Guantanamo Bay were leaked to the public. In fact, these were leaked by WikiLeakes, who was in the news frequently in the last few years for similar leaks.
• Millions of passwords were stolen from gawker media
• News that credit card data is targeted and stolen appears almost routinely these days.
• Dropbox’s privacy policy has been under attack due to apparently misleading comments about data encryption and security
• Some smartphones are keeping track of where you’ve been either by design or by error, but raising privacy concerns either way

And I’m sure the list could go on and on and on…
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