Intriguing Insights from Big Data Conference

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All the speakers agreed that big data technologies are at the midst acceleration and form a growth engine in any organization. Big data field raises special interest when we talk about security, intelligence and data fusion. The intriguing conference and exhibition Big Data for Security, moderated by Col. (res.) Arik Davidi, was held today, for the seventh year in a row. As always, the unique event, organized by iHLS, was a meeting point for all the members of the big data ecosystem – from the military, security forces and law enforcement, defense industries, academy, startup and innovation sector, etc.

During the day, a new and pioneering conference was launched – Quantum Tech – which will be held for the first time on November 18, 2019. Over the backdrop of the acceleration of quantum applicable development in industry and research in Israel and abroad, the conference will focus on quantum applications in the defense and security realms.

The Big Data Conference Chairperson, Chen Vakrat-Ben-Mordechai, Sales Manager, TA9, opened the event. Her presentation defined the integration of a wide variety of sources and systems as a tiebreaker and a major challenge. There is a need for an automatic learning process regarding all data, for the benefit of analysts’ work and the production of insights.

The IDF experience in the field was presented by Lt. Col. Mark Mendelman, Head of C4I and Data Branch – the IDF software house. The journey to cloud-based big data technologies should take into account the accelerated change rate and uncertainty conditions, requiring that decisions would be taken on the basis of an intelligent guess. He said the major global technological development relates to the public cloud, over which we want to build the private data cloud, while the organization data and the organization cloud must constitute one environment, using the most advanced tools and technologies. The IDF has initiated a widespread move that includes instruction and profession formation in the data field – data engineers, researchers, analysts, etc. A special track for big data studies was opened by the academic reserve (Atuda), and new data roles will be established in the IDF in response to the growing need.   

GIS solutions for geographic big data by ESRI were the focus of the presentation by Mor Yaffe, CTO, GIS Division, Systematics. He emphasized the importance of distributed analytics for big data.

BG (ret.) Baruch Matzliach, a doctoral student at the Department of Industrial Engineering, Tel-Aviv University, was the chief engineer of the Merkava tank project, and won the Israel Security Prize for the development of the Armoured Shield Protection – Active (Trophy). His presentation dealt with innovation in targets detection by mobile autonomous robots equipped with a variety of sensors.

Dr. Nathan Weiss, Senior Scientist, Cyber Division, IAI/ELTA, spoke about the game changer for the cyber defender and attacker, in the context of big data and AI.

Associate Prof. Oren Kurland, Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Management, the Technion, Haifa, an information retrieval expert, spoke about Game Theory meeting information retrieval and the fight against terrorism.