Great Interest in IHLS Big Data for Homeland Security Conference

Great Interest in IHLS Big Data for Homeland Security Conference

big data for homeland security

This post is also available in: heעברית (Hebrew)

iHLS fifth annual conference on Big Data for Homeland Security attracted many technology experts, investors, entrepreneurs and representatives of the high-tech industries, defense industries, the IDF, Israeli police and more.

The conference was chaired by Col. (Res.) Arik Davidi. Lectureres included Maj. Sefi Cohen, Head of Research Operational Knowledge at the IDF, David Tyuri, Active Director, Cyber Intelligence Programs at IAI, Laurent Fratty from SAP, Benny Malka from DELL-EMC, Aviram Zrahia from Uniper Networks, Tzur Hazan from IBM, Asaf Shefer and Javier Valladares from Aman and MicroStrategy, as well as Ester Kashtanov from Agriyos, Tel Meiron from We Ankor and Ohad Flinker from Webhose.io.

A vast variety of advanced big data technologies were showcased at the exhibition, including the latest developments of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, DELL-EMC, IBM, SAP, Octopus, Agriyos, Aman, We Ankor, Webhose.io.

The basic assumption of the speakers was that everything we do leaves a digital trail – this makes us exposed to cyber attacks but also enables us to store and analyze new sources of data which was previously too difficult, expensive, or time consuming to exploit. Industries’ shift to digital has created unique opportunities to measure, analyze, experiment and tune experiences in real-time. Big data enabled Improved response to disasters such as earthquakes by tracking population movements with mobile phone network data, but also supplies insights on customers behavior.

Various applications of big data technologies were presented by the lecturers, including:

The IDF representative’s lecture focused on deep learning applications, a concept aimed at imitating the human brain by computerized tools, using neuron networks.

The challenge of cyber security – the IAI representative elaborated on the risk of IoT-based cyber-attacks and recommended that consumers would demand more secure appliances, vendors would use open source and open security using a software signed by a trusted entity, and called for wider international regulation.

Command and control – While traditional command and control systems manage events from a command center, the cognitive command and control analyzes the raw text and video streaming and supplies more insights. IBM’s platfrom has applications for first responders but also for other sectors.

Machine learning can scale the knowledge of skilled human analysts to large data sizes and handle the complexity beyond human capabilities. One of the applications of big data and machine learning is detecting malware and cyber attacks, as offered by Juniper’s cloud-based service.

Big data analytics enable the creation of proactive security alerts, based on anomaly detection in comparison to streaming and historical data, behavior analysis and the detection of dangerous behaviour, as well as biometric face recognition. Agriyos presented its solutions with special emphasis on attacks carried by insiders.

Data lakes – The representative of DELL-EMC elaborated on the data lake concept, which converges disparate sources of data into one single, unified shared pool that can be used by traditional or emerging applications. The result is efficient storage, more protection to the corporate data etc.

All the above aspects and many more were the focus of the Big Data Conference organized by iHLS.

Thanks to all the participants!