NASA IT conference

I hope you guys are not missing out on this

www.nasa.gov/offices/ocio/itsummit/index.html

Sose,

Great post - I had no idea Nasa organised such summits. I'm actually attending it right now

Thanks for the update!

NASA provides alot of info on computer security, for some time now I have been subscribed to their mailing list on computer security. Plus the array of speakers on this conference is marvelous- enjoy the conference

The conference so far has been very educative, and we got some important statistics.


Misti Burmeister presented on effective leadership and mission-centric leadership. she used phrases like
Looking forward, not thinking backward.
Knowledging forward, not looking backward,

Effective leadership is essential to creating a sustainable culture.


Vint Cerf
vice-president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google also presented.

here are some extracts from his presentation

The number of people on the network is getting close to 1.8 billion. I might add the number of mobiles in the world is up into the 4 and a half billion range. The reason that's relevant to Internet, many are Internet enabled, those at Google, we have to make sure the services work on laptops, desktop and mobiles. This an important part of our world. Smart phones with Internet capability.


Here's where the users are, another surprising statistic. I watched this system grow over the last 35 or 40 years. The Asian population is now the largest in absolute numbers. Half of thations on the Internet are in China, about
400 million, that's only a 20% penetration. You can imagine over the course of the next decade the people who will be added in China, and the content of the Internet for the term to come. I stopped making predictions about Europe,
they keep adding countries to the definition of Europe, keeps changing. I don't know what to say about that. This is not the stock market, at least I hope not.



Security is increasingly important issue, because of scope, the things we depend on it for. The digital signing of domain names is now a reality, a number are already digitally signing zone file and root zone, finally, in July of this year.
In addition to that, the routing system has vulnerabilities. You can announce routing space you don't own, hasn't been assigned, causing people to route to the wrong place in the net. There's an effort to digitally sign the allocation whenborder updates occur you can see if the announcer is authorized to announce routing to that particular IP address,putting in digital signatures, in other in order to improve security.


We are starting to see capability in computing that allows us to put machines in the same environment you and I are living
in. The best example, at MIT, the TED conference, this guy had a projection unit strapped to his exist, small one, and television camera, headset, microphone. This put his computer into the same environment he
was in. Instead of carrying a laptop around or mobile, he projected imagines he needed to see on the wall, piece of paper.Wanted to make a phone call, held out his hand and projected the keypad on his hand, touched the numbers to dial.The television camera was looking to see what he was doing, make a phone call, it made the call for him using voice over IP.The point I want to make is as you begin to bring computer power into the same sensing environment human beings are in we start to create partners for ourselves. The software and hardware becomes embedded in our space, part of our communications environment as opposed to our having to adapt with keyboards and mice. I see that as a very interesting evolution. Google
is participating in that, we have a big investment in speech understanding, recent development called Google Goggle, taking an image, saying what is it? We are good with wine labels, book covers, famous landmarks, and so on, as time of goes on it will get better.

I don't have time to tell me about my wife's cochlear implants, just because I only have a short amount of time, but the short story is that a person with a cochlear implant has electronics embedded in their head into the auditory
nerve and has a speech processor, external computing system listening, turning sound into electronic pulses directly stimulating the cochlea. I have an idea that I could reprogram her speech processor to put TCP/IP in it. She has
a microphone picking up sound, can hear, can ask a question, we can turn that into digital packets, send to a speech understanding machine like the ones at Google. The answer could come back by way of voice over IP and go straight into her auditory nerve. I could put my wife on the Internet. We haven't done that, but I think it's a great idea.

There are other things that look like telephones but are IP phones from Cisco. Refrigerators, what would you do with -- nice touch-sensitive displays, augments the family communication system, which was paper and magnets on the front of the refrigerator, now we can blog. We might be able to figure out what's inside the refrigerator if there are the appropriate
tags. While you are working its surfing the net for recipes. You get an e-mail from your refrigerator saying I don't know how much milk is left but you put it in there three weeks ago, it's going to crawl out on its own.

All the presentations are now out
www.nasa.gov/offices/ocio/itsummit/presentations.html

we have a lot to read