Defence Works with New Tech Programme to Enhance Capability

Defence Works with New Tech Programme Devised by NZer to Enhance Its Capabilities

Wellington – The NZ Defence Force is seeking to enhance its understanding of new technologies in its daily work with the help of a programme devised by a New Zealander living in the United States.

At a recent New Zealand Defence Industry Association forum held in Wellington, the audience was told that technologies that are likely to impact on the science and technology landscape will also affect defence issues.

Defence needs to understand and get on top of the emerging and disruptive technologies (EDTs) and their potential to transform the way things are done, Dr Ralph Marrett, of the Defence Technology Agency, said.

He said Defence should learn and understand the technology landscape, anticipate areas of threat and opportunities, and to prevent strategic surprise.

“Disruptive technologies can impact the significance of other technologies, and we have to learn the ramifications of this technology landscape.”

In anticipating threats and opportunities, Defence would need to ensure that when equipment is brought into service it is still relevant and useful, he said.

A better way is urgently needed to visualise the available data by way of discovering trends and novel relationships, separating hype from reality, and identifying emergence of new clusters and outliers, Dr Marrett said.

“The key point here is about Google searching, which in general terms is the current approach we all use to understand various issues.

“The vast amount of information returned in a single search is the problem. Much of it is duplicated many times.

“But among all the information are search returns that are different and significant, and there are groups of returns more closely related than others. Visualising these groups is key to understanding the mass of data.”

Various tools are needed to characterise large sets of data and the tools depend on some serious computing power to analyse the connectivity between the search items returned.

Dr Marrett said that in his analysis of data on the web, he came across Quid - a company engaged in analysing large sets of data and provides a software-based service over the internet.

The founder and CEO of Quid, a New Zealander Sean Gourley, is based in San Francisco where he splits his time between mathematical research and Quid. Dr Gourley has a PhD in physics from Oxford where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship and has acted as a political advisor to the Iraqi Government, briefed USCENTCOM at the Pentagon, and addressed the United Nations in Vienna.

On his website, Dr Gourley says there is no short soundbite answer to explain the collection of data, structuring of information and visualisation of multi-dimensional space in 30 seconds

Over time, he got better at telling the Quid story, and the rest of the world has started to understand more and more of the technical elements of the Big Data space.

“We are living in an increasingly complex world, with millions of interacting components and feedback loops, a world that may be beyond our raw human ability to understand it.

“With this in mind we set out to build a new set of tools to enhance the human ability to understand this complexity. Think of Quid as the new AI — not Artificial Intelligence, but instead Augmented Intelligence.

“In the past, when people had a problem they invented technology to help solve it which worked for a while and then new problems and new ideas emerged. So they invented even more technology.

“Well, the problem now is that with all this technology the world is moving more and more quickly and is becoming more and more complex,” Dr Gourley says.

Sometimes it is hard to know what to do next and the old ways of thinking just cannot keep up. We have got no good way to understand this complexity and the huge amount of data generated draws much less conclusion from it.

But are there any other options?

What if there were new tools that harness this data explosion and organise it to reveal a new pattern so that people can make better decisions, he says.

“The team over at Quid decided to build new tools that do just that. Quid is building software that allows people and companies to see patterns and extract meaning from this data and use it to understand the world better, transforming information into intelligence into insight.

“So instead of being confusing and overwhelming, this massive electronic footprint can be applied to solving real world problems and to making better business decisions faster based on the most comprehensive global real-time information ever.”

Dr Marrett said the main issue is how Quid could enable the NZDF, with relatively small resources, to monitor and assess emerging technologies.

“The same technology could assist groups like Callaghan Innovation to monitor industry groups, watch for gaps that NZ industries could exploit etc.

“We got into this because we are studying emerging and disruptive technologies for NZDF. Our goal originally was about understanding specific technologies and where they could impact us and we realised this was of great help in understanding the whole area of technology and understanding what the various trends are.”

Generally, a range of industries could benefit from a clearer and more up-to-date analysis of their position within their industry groups, like who is doing similar Research and Development, who can be relied on for relevant infrastructure, and other related issues, Dr Marrett said.

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