Is The Games For Change Festival Important To Intelligence Professionals? (Gamesforchange.org)

I hope to answer this question over the next day or two.  I made the decision to go to the Games For Change Festival primarily to see what it was all about.  This idea of "serious games" is gaining lots of traction in a variety of different fields -- almost none of which have anything to do with intelligence.

When people think about serious games, they usually think about improving education or health care or changing the world in other positive ways.  There is nothing wrong with that, of course, and nothing wholly inconsistent with this view and the discipline of intelligence, but I recently witnessed a pretty heated debate over whether games that explain the basics of macroeconomics "belong".  Not sure how anyone will react to the idea of serious games for intelligence professionals...

That said, the intelligence community has been exploring the educational value of games for quite some time (with mixed results, I hear).  The recent Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) Sirius request for proposals is clear evidence that the US national security intelligence community intends to continue to explore how games can meet the IC's needs.

Of course, my own (personal and research) interests lie along these lines so going to this summit makes sense.  I just wish it didn't conflict with another excellent conference, the Game Education Summit, which, this year, is on the west coast.  GES is an excellent small conference with a unique opportunity to mingle with academics, designers, artists, developers -- all aspects of the game design and game education fields. 

I will probably be posting at least some updates to my twitter account (@kwheaton) during the conference and will post a wrap-up article when I get back later this week.

Evil Geniuses Teach How (NOT) To Use PowerPoint (YouTube via Danger Room)

Wired magazine's excellent blog, Danger Room takes another look at the use of PowerPoint in the US military. While the entire article is worth reading (Danger Room has covered the relationship between PPT and the military extensively), the video embedded below is priceless...

Intelligence Analyst "Words To Live By" -- #3 (SurveyMonkey.com)

This is the third of 10 surveys I intend to conduct to determine which are the "best" quotes, sayings and words of wisdom for intelligence analysts.

If you want more detail on why I am doing this, see the previous post.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Voting on the first two lists is still open:
List 1
List 2

The current frontrunners from the second list include (with the percentage representing the percent of respondents who said move it up the list):

"Describing a past event is not intelligence analysis; it is history. True intelligence analysis is always predictive." Robert Clark (68%)
"If you don't make any mistakes in life, you don't accomplish anything." -- Aikido Master Ken Ota (65%)
"Always bring something to write with and on." -- Numerous (54%)

All other entries are currently below 50%.

Reviewers Needed For Visual Analytics Science And Technology (VAST) 2011 Challenge (PNNL)

The National Visualization and Analytics Center at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in coordination with the IEEE sponsors a visual analytics challenge each year at the IEEE conference for students and researchers.  

 

In order to judge the output from the participants, the challenge organizers asks for analysts to participate as reviewers of the submissions.  Kris Cook, who is on the contest committee, has asked me to put the word out that the contest needs reviewers for this year’s challenge.  

 

This is an unpaid, all volunteer effort to assist a non-profit sponsored contest.  Kris’ note to me is reproduced below with additional links.  If you are interested in participating or have any additional questions, please contact her directly.  

 

For what it is worth, taking a look at the VAST entries is a very interesting and rewarding way to learn what is happening in the world of visual analytics.

Begin Text of Note: 

Once again, we are in need of analysts to help us review submissions to the Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge.  The goal of the VAST Challenge is for teams to design intuitive new visualizations that support analysis of complex data sets.

We are soliciting reviewers for three mini-challenges and a Grand Challenge.
•    Mini-Challenge 1 challenges participants to develop tools to characterize the spread of an epidemic using the geospatial and micro-blogging data provided
•    Mini-Challenge 2 challenges participants to create cyber security situational awareness visualizations to identify events of interest in a collection of computer network logs
•    Mini-Challenge 3 challenges participants to create visual analytics tools to support investigation into criminal activity.
•    The Grand Challenge asks participants to look across all Mini-Challenge data to provide visual insights into an over-arching scenario.
More specific information about the tasks may be found at http://hcil.cs.umd.edu/localphp/hcil/vast11/index.php/.

As a reviewer you would be responsible for viewing 3-4 submissions. Each submission consists of:
•    Documents of several pages in length describing the software and how it was used in solving the mini challenge.
•    Screen shots of the software in use on the data
•    Video showing an example of the analytic process used by the team.  
Submissions will be available for review by July 2nd and reviews must be returned no later than COB July 15th.  All review materials will be accessible over the internet. Reviews will be conducted using the Precision Conference web-based reviewing system. Reviewers will be registered in the Precision Conference system and will submit their reviews using Precision Conference web pages.

If you are interested in reviewing please send e-mail to kris.cook at pnnl.gov no later than June 22nd.  Please indicate which mini challenge you would be most interested in reviewing.

Thank you for your time and consideration!

Intelligence Analyst "Words To Live By" -- #2 (SurveyMonkey.com)

This is the second of 10 surveys I intend to conduct to determine which are the "best" quotes, sayings and words of wisdom for intelligence analysts.

If you want more detail on why I am doing this, see the previous post.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

If you haven't had a chance to vote on the first list you can find it here (voting is still open).

The current frontrunners from the first list include (with the percentage representing the percent of respondents who said move it up the list):

"Always be aware that what you know and believe can taint your perception of what really is." -- Bill Russell (84%)
"What is your source?" -- Numerous (67%)
"Chance favors the prepared mind." -- Louis Pasteur (61%)
"Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain." -- Carl von Clausewitz (58%)
"If you always do what you aways did, you'll always get what you always got." -- Steve Gottlieb (58%)

All other entries are currently below 50%.