Presenters

Abstract

Interfaces site, modulate and govern economies of exchange between distinct bodies: mammalian, geographic, geopolitical. They transfer material from one body to another and/or prevent the same transference. Such partitions and pathways cohere such flows into stable forms. Interfaces incorporate what they mediate. The transition from Foucault’s disciplinary society to Deleuze’s society of control, is also a shift in the quality of interfaces, from relatively stable fortifications and hierarchical observation to mobile recombinant membranes and the spectacle of transparency. Any boundary is always reversible: inside becoming outside, outside becoming inside. Contemporary security interfaces amplify that ambiguity by their reliance on the work of active conceptualization interpretation and formalized, distributed cognition. In the face of such ambiguity over the siting and effect of security interfaces (in the delamination of sovereignty from territory) we see the reappearance of political theology, especially fundamentalist genres, as providing an alternative master geography to which the reversibility of interfacial membranes may be refixed. This talk will explore these dynamics of reversibility, interfaciality, biopolitical ambiguities, etc. through a discussion of several recent projects that employ nanosensitive inks, mechanically-augmented perception of the ambient world, and more blunt materials.

Biography

Benjamin H. Bratton is a theorist whose work spans Philosophy, Art and Design. He is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts and the Director of D:GP, The Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. His research is situated at the intersections of contemporary social and political theory, computational media & infrastructure, architectural & urban design problems, and the politics of synthetic ecologies and biologies. Current work focuses on the political geography of cloud computing, massively-granular universal addressing systems, and alternate models of ecological governance. His next book, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, is forthcoming from MIT Press.

Abstract

Hacktivism is on the rise….that being said it might not always a bad thing. There have been instances where Hacktavists have jumped into the fray with seemingly good intentions but due to a lack of coordination with proper authorities are viewed as part of the problem instead of part of the solution. Mr. Cleary would like walk you through that “Art of the Possible” for how this untapped resource could be leveraged for good and what a “Cyber Force” of the future could look like.

Biography

Christopher Cleary is the President of Vir-Sec Government Services LLC, a private security company specializing in providing unique technical security solutions and consulting services to the US Government. Prior to joining Vir-Sec, Mr. Cleary was a Chief Operational Planner at US CYBER COMMAND and deployed as Officer in Charge of the Expeditionary Cyber Support Element (ExCSE) charged with planning and executing full spectrum cyber operations in support of combat operations in the CENTCOM AOR. Mr. Cleary holds a B.S. in History from the United States Naval Academy and a M.A. in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College.

Abstract

For 25 years, conventional wisdom has been that the network perimeter is the place to implement information security. Firewalls, intrusion detection, data loss prevention, and a host of other products exist to “harden” the perimeter and guard against the disclosure or loss of sensitive information. Recent trends in “IT Consumerization” and “Bring Your Own Device,” however, have reduced the effectiveness of the network perimeter model, in some cases to the point of irrelevance, in protecting the sensitive information belonging to an organization. This is especially true in academic settings, where the network perimeter is already more “porous” than in other settings and adoption of these new technologies is taking place at a rate that far exceeds the security industry’s ability to keep pace. This talk will examine the problems introduced by IT Consumerization and BYOD, especially in academic settings, and speculate about some possible solutions.

Biography

David A. Curry, CISSP is the Director of Information Security for The New School. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional with over 25 years of cross-industry experience in diverse security, privacy, and systems roles including security and privacy governance, risk management and analysis, legal and regulatory compliance, security incident response, professional services, software design, and systems programming and administration. He is the author of UNIX System Security: A Guide for Users and System Administrators (Addison-Wesley) as well as two books on UNIX systems programming. He is also one of the principal authors of RFC 4765, The Intrusion Detection Message Exchange Format (IDMEF).

Abstract

For more than two years, we have been building a threat intelligence engine where samples and content are cross-indexed and related. This allows for tremendous amounts of derived analysis, building relationships based on timing, behavioral, structural, and communications characteristics. We are able to determine origin, aims, and targets of specific samples via second and third order relationships. We track all artifacts and behaviors, both host and network, and correlate between any of them.

Content is generated through dynamic and static malware analysis. We don’t perform de-duplication of samples that are collected in the wild and submitted through various sources. Even though a piece of malware can be identified as belonging to a particular family of rootkit or dropper, their characteristics change and evolve over time. These ephemeral behavioral characteristics are vital to identifying relationships between malware, and this is content that we don't want to miss. We've been submitting and analyzing a specific sample for about a year now, tracking how its functionality, content and relationships have changed over time. This approach of not deduping submissions leads to some interesting issues related to scaling, storage and infrastructure design.

This talk covers the infrastructure requirements and architectural decisions made to facilitate being able to analyze the entire worldwide output of malware samples multiple times; we have built our own in-house supercomputing cluster, with petabyte scalable storage, and a 40gbps interconnect. We will also show the value of such correlation, and why everyone should be building these relationships between content.

Biography

Dean is co-founder and CTO of ThreatGRID, a malware analysis and threat intelligence platform. When not looking at improving methods to analyze malware, he leads incident response and targeted threat analysis for a wide variety of client organizations in the financial, federal and energy sectors.

Dean is a well sought after educator, leveraging his technical experience and his ability to communicate complex concepts and ideas to teach incident response and malware analysis. Previously he served as an instructor for NYU Polytechnic's Network Security and Penetration Testing track. Dean is also a regular public speaker and has been invited to speak at organizations such as SC Congress, AT&T, ASIS, Netwitness, Gartner, IANS, the ISSA and the NYPD’s Computer Crime Division. He is regularly quoted on malware and targeted attacks in publications such as the Register, Dark Reading, The New York Times, Reuters and SC Magazine.

Abstract

A number of geo-social applications that integrate location and social networking can now leverage wireless devices and use them as sensors to create aggregated information. According to provisions, the number of geo-referenced contributions and the smartphone diffusion are increasing dramatically and will reach a consistent part of the world population in the near future. These applications, and the datasets they produce, are therefore becoming an increasingly interesting source of information to reveal individual and collective patterns of perception and experience in space.

This presentation will introduce ongoing research that focuses on the relationship between where people live or temporarily inhabit and the social media data they generate on twitter, foursquare, instagram, and flickr.

Millions of people walk the world’s city streets taking and sharing photographs, sending messages, and virtually showing-off by checking-in at locations. Due to the public nature, these activities can be stamped with precise geo-positioning data, processed, stored and used. This leads to a possible re-defining of public places as "novel spaces for publishing" welcoming ephemeral, individual and fragmented stories that, if properly analyzed, could contribute to the creation of novel urban knowledge.

This research aims to investigate the various factors that shape places, perception, and identity through people’s social media data. Using new field experiments and integrating them with former findings from “conventional” geographical studies, this presentation will identify which sets of data are the most suitable to analyze, how to read such contributions, how to extract urban qualitative indicators, and how to validate the insights we gather with actual people. A side, but equally important, consequence of this research will be to inform and educate the general public on what they make available.

Biography

Giorgia Lupi is a designer and researcher. After graduating with an architecture degree from Ferrara University in 2006, she became involved in multidisciplinary projects exploring urban phenomena, information and technology. She is conducting research as a PhD candidate at Politecnico di Milano at the Design Faculty, within Density Design Lab, which focuses on the visual representation of complex social, organizational and urban phenomena. Her research aims at designing new methodologies for interpreting urban phenomena through digital traces with a specific focus on patterns of perception of places. Currently, she is a visiting researcher at PIIM, the Parsons Institute for Information Mapping in NY. Professionally, she is a partner and co-founder of Accurat, an information design company based in Milan.

Abstract

Although some attempts at collaborative production—like Wikipedia and Linux—build large volunteer communities, the vast majority never attract even a second contributor. Although there have been thousands of papers published about these “peer production” projects, nearly all of this research has focused on the atypical collaborative successes.

I will present a series of analyses that take advantage of the fact that online communities provide detailed data on failed attempts at collective action—and that they usually fail. Applying “big data” research methods from software engineering to consider large populations of attempts, I will show how the design of communication and information technologies shape fundamental social outcomes with broad theoretical and practical implications.

Biography

Benjamin Mako Hill is a social scientist, activist, and consultant working on issues of peer production and society. He is a PhD Candidate in a joint program between the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. His research focuses on sociological analyses of social structure in peer production communities. He has been an leader, developer, and contributor to the Free and Open Source Software community for more than a decade as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects. He is the author of several best-selling technical books, a member of the Free Software Foundation board of directors and an advisor to the Wikimedia Foundation. Hill has a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab.

Abstract

During most of its history, software design has basically tackled the problem of creating tools that enable single users to perform a set of tasks in order to achieve a specific, predetermined goal. Though potentially large numbers of users could be using the same system, the process of getting to a result is reached through tasks performed by individual users. The advent of crowdsourcing (using the broad definition of the word), has so far mostly split large tasks in smaller pieces that can be then distributed among a big number of people, something also known as micro-tasking. Successful examples like Amazon Mechanical Turk abound, but in almost all of the cases, the nature of the goal is directly decomposed into the tasks, meaning that the whole will never be greater than the sum of the parts. I suggest that by taking an interdisciplinary approach and learning from game design, system thinking, genetic programming, market economy and behavioural sciences a new breed of systems could emerge that would tap in the power of the crowd in interesting new ways. By designing systems built on rule-based models and allowing for emergent behaviours, the exploration of much more complex and less deterministic problems could be possible, including many of the world most pressing challenges. I propose to analyze a few preliminary examples and suggest ideas for further exploration.

Biography

Nicolás di Tada spends most of his time designing and managing software projects. Before starting his company, Manas Technology Solutions, Nicolás spent 10 years as a software architect and project leader for many organizations, including startups and large corporations, acquiring a background in information retrieval, machine learning, information visualization and web development.

During the last 7 years, he founded two other companies in the fields of e-Learning and consumer end social applications and guided several development teams through a wide variety of projects ranging from digital photogrammetry and biomedical signal processing to enterprise applications. Both for small startups and Fortune 500 companies, his teams have always proudly delivered usable and effective software on time.

Passionate about building a better world through the convergence of technology, science and art, Nicolas currently leads the creation of InSTEDD's software tools and it's Innovation Laboratory in Latin America, designing and building technology to improve the health, safety and development of underserved communities.

Abstract

Big Data is all the rage but behind the buzz it's hard to pin down a common definition or understanding. Independent of how you define it—size, complexity, processing time, structure, number of items or transactions—big data is always full of the unknown. Dark data is the biggest part of Big Data - it's the vast majority of information that we don't have the tools to capture, process, store and manage. We know where it comes from and where it's going yet we don't use it in analysis, trend spotting and big data applications. In our attempts to do big data we create bigger dark data. When we aggregate, collate and make data accessible we can lose the very components we need to make connections and breakthroughs in business analytics or insight.

But in this big data-intensive era, we can turn dead ends into information pathways and products. Location, the geography in 80 percent of all data, is increasingly being recognized as the way to join the dots and relate seemingly disparate sets and sources together revealing unforeseen patterns and shedding light on the unknowns. Location is elusive yet pervasive; it can add structure to the unstructured and reveal the missing link.

This session will discuss how location analytics is bringing dark data into the light. It describes many different applications from social media to disease surveillance, fraud analysis to e-discovery and beyond.

Biography

As Director of Commercial Solutions at Esri, Simon is responsible for a wide-ranging business sector that includes insurance, banking, real estate, retail, manufacturing and media. He has over 20 years of experience in applying geographic data analysis to solve business, industry and social issues. Simon’s knowledge and experience in creating new insights and immediately applicable intelligence out of complex data has been applied to many different business problems from understanding risk, improving business and community resilience to supply chain innovation.

Simon began his career in the private sector as a systems architect and management consultant before holding senior positions in enterprise GIS and IT companies in Europe and Asia Pacific. He is a member of a number of commercial trade associations, has held senior positions in industry and governmental advisory panels and provides advocacy for spatial technology to a range of national research councils, special interest groups and educational committees.

Biography

David E. Van Zandt is the eighth president of The New School, a legendary, progressive higher education institution inspiring undergraduates, graduate students, and others to catalyze change in an inconstant world. Since arriving at The New School in January 2011, he has worked to bring the different divisions of The New School together in order to take advantage of their complementary strengths.

President Van Zandt is a sociologist, attorney, and visionary in higher education with a record of distinguished academic leadership spanning three decades. Prior to leading The New School, he served as dean of the Northwestern University School of Law from 1995 until 2010. Under his leadership, Northwestern Law transformed its approach to admissions, education, and social engagement. Through continual analysis of the legal profession, he led major efforts to change the school’s admissions and academic programs to prepare students for the new demands of the global marketplace. This included the creation of the country’s only fully integrated three-year JD/MBA program and the nation’s most distinguished two-year accelerated JD program. The faculty grew by nearly 40 percent during his time as dean, and it currently includes a number of widely recognized clinical and practitioner faculty. More than half of Northwestern Law's research-intensive faculty holds PhDs in related fields, the highest percentage of any U.S. law school.

President Van Zandt, who received his PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics, continues to lecture and contribute to professional and scholarly journals. He is a past president of the American Law Deans Association and has published articles and written and presented papers on the regulation of financial markets, the sociology of religion and deviance, social theory (in particular the microsociological aspects of law), and the economics of common sense. His more recent publications have been on legal education. An expert in corporate law, international finance, and legal education, President Van Zandt has taught courses in International Financial Markets, Business Associations, Property, Practical Issues in Business Law, and Legal Realism.

Prior to joining the Northwestern faculty, David E. Van Zandt was an associate with Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York, specializing in international banking and finance. He graduated with an AB from Princeton University in 1975, received his JD from Yale Law School in 1981, and clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval, United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (now on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit), and Justice Harry A. Blackmun, United States Supreme Court.

He is married to Professor Lisa Huestis, Associate Professor of Legal Studies at The New School, and has two children, Caroline and Nicholas.

Abstract

In an era of big data and surveillance, sensemakers can create new means of ambient or integrative civic engagement. This form of engagement is not new, but can be amplified and made more pervasive.

A college in Boston recently added a new campus extension. The planners sought a student-centered approach to the design of walkways across the courtyard. They could have begun with a community survey, followed by design feedback, iteration, and a vote for approval. Instead, they started a new semester without pathways, allowing students to form natural connections between buildings, carved through use and experience. The results were later paved, not based on surveys and other representations of the public's thought and opinion, but rather on ambient student input in the form of experience and action.

Are there other examples of ambient or integrative civic engagement? What are the attributes of this form? How can we observe and foster this as a medium for communication between people, community and their government? How could this framework be applied to complex issues such as rent control, public health, and urban transportation?

“Calm technology” offers some insight on the attributes of ambient engagement. Nest, one example, is a sensor driven, learning thermostat. Rather than setting timers to control your temperature and energy use, Nest observes when people are home and learns when they are likely to leave and return. Nest demonstrates how complex observations and feedback loops can seamlessly integrate with our routines.

Currently in the US, civic engagement falls toward two poles. Individuals vote, tweet, “like” and petition, making a minor commitment of low-fidelity engagement. Large groups protest, march, and revolt, deeply investing time, identity, and their bodies in larger commitments of high-friction engagement. Toward both poles, people aim to facilitate communication between individuals and society, but fall short due to fidelity or friction.

In between these two poles, integrative civic participation offers an opportunity for more dynamic, pervasive and persistent engagement and communication. This presentation will explore this idea and its potential implementation in complex systems for the public good.

Biography

Matthew Willse, designer and technologist, dreams of ambient and pervasive civic engagement. By day, he consults with public interest organizations and initiatives. At night, Matthew pursues tools for organizing and advocacy that leverage network tech, but also integrate with the routines of our offline life. In all his work, he aims to reduce the divide between the moments of need/opportunity and our response through coordinated action.