In attempts to balance communication, transparency, and operational security, the military has encountered both practical obstacles and general criticism. In a recent podcast, Carey said, "Most social networking tools come with no rules of the road. As the Internet moves towards user-generated content, we thought there was a void we could fill... to mitigate some of the security risks associated with social media."

Generally, military organizations have the options to reach out directly to large IT companies to configure customized security profiles and inherent OPSEC protection for personnel; traditionally, however, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have not been particularly receptive to working within that type of culture or framework. From the sharing-and-access social media pole to the security/military pole, both sides are resistant to different approaches to shared and social information. Still, Carey is an advocate for the usefulness of these tools, even behind a military firewall.

"We must remain a learning organization. As the Internet evolves, so must our workforce and its associated skills. To that end, we must be able to embrace change," Carey wrote in his blog post. "Many of our processes are rooted in the Industrial Age and will need to move toward the Information Age to remain relevant in the coming years."

With specific regard to social media and the American military, Carey stated, "Social media is an inherent part of the toolbox for members of the millennial workforce, while baby boomers are just adopting it. Social media tools should become the standard by which we can share and collaborate on information inside and outside the network boundaries."

He also highlighted green initiatives, mobile working, and the use of modern technological tools in recruitment efforts.

To see Carey's office's Policy and Guidelines for Secure Use of Social Media by Federal Departments and Agencies, click here for a full PDF.

While Carey's optimism is to be applauded, one wonders what our military-minded friends will have to say about OPSEC vis-a-vis social media. The battlefield isn't really Foursquare-compatible, and the military might actually have the last plausible use case for censorship. Every servicemember is probably aware of existing regulations for Internet and social media use; how do you think Carey's goals and statements will affect the state of affairs on the ground, and do you feel such a shift is needed or welcomed? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

He notes that the service-level agreements (SLAs) for all the hosted applications are the same as those offered in the operation's traditional on-site computing environment - that is, 99.999% uptime. Google only offers 99.9% as does Amazon S3...and yes, those extra digits make a world of difference.

In addition, DISA also uses the same information assurance process (the process of managing information-related risks) for the RACE applications as it does for any apps running on the traditional, on-site computing platform. They've even cut the security accreditation process from 80 days to 40 thanks to built-in information insurance controls in RACE. 

One of the most obvious benefits of a cloud computing infrastructure, though, is the speed of deployment. The cloud platform has cut the acquisition time for a new server from 6 months to 24 hours - a change that means DISA will now be able to rapidly deploy new applications to the military in record time. "That's a must for worldwide missions with ever-changing computing requirements," says Sienkiewicz.

RACE runs using VMware on HP blade servers. Defense Department customers can choose either Microsoft Windows or Red Hat Linux and are able to configure their server with up to 4 CPUs, 8 GBs of memory and up to a terabyte of storage. Test servers are $500 per month and production servers are $1200 per month. Next year, RACE will be deployed on the DoD's classified network (SIPRNet) as well. 

Free Publicity Ahead of a Full Launch?

As Jared Newman points out in a post on his PCWorld blog, Google will obviously get a lot of free press out of this - and not just from the tech press, but also from mainstream news outlets.  Google Voice already got a lot of press in the last week after Apple rejected Google's own Google Voice app from the iPhone App Store and ousted all third-party apps that made use of Google Voice. We don't want to be too cynical here (after all, this is a great cause), but we can't help but think that this announcement was timed to keep the public's attention on Google Voice.

Chances are that Google is getting closer to a full-blown launch of Google Voice or at least getting ready to allow users to send out invites to their friends.

With this new project, BBN hopes to "develop techniques that can generalize across the linguistic structure and content of diverse documents to extract relations and axioms directly from text rather than relying on a knowledge engineer to encode such information." Here's how it will work:

Although it is not immediately clear when (or if) this new machine reader will be available to civilians, we are certainly looking forward to trying something like this out. Some paranoid types will believe this is nothing more than "the man" trying to spy on us, but those people need to realize everything we do online is being watched by someone. If you are really concerned about your online privacy you should secure important data on your computer, call your government leaders and try to change privacy laws, or stay off the Web altogether.

Researchers, medical professionals, consumers, students and others are all likely to benefit from such an application. Not having to spend unnecessary time searching through mountains of information on the Web for something relevant makes life easier and allows us to be more productive.

Like most military operations, the transition is very well-planned and strategic. "Classroom computers, dayroom and kiosk computers, new computers (such as life cycle replacement computers) and computers with minimal impact to mission readiness will be part of the initial implementation". Marcus D. Good, Chief of the Army's Information Technology Systems Support Division says, "The Army's mandate is to have 50 percent of all Windows-based systems migrated to Vista by July 31st and 100 percent by the end of the year".

As is the case with any technology changes, there is a certain learning curve that users must overcome. The Army is providing several resources to help its employees and customers through the transition including in-house training sessions, quick-tip handouts and free online training. Since many of the Army's employees already use Vista and Office 2007 in their homes it has shortened the learning curve overall, but for those unfamiliar with the new operating system and software, it has provided two sites, usarmy.skillport.com and train.gordon.army.mil for its employees to preview Vista.

The iLink technology was developed as a part of the SRI-led CALO (Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes) program and was funded and managed under DARPA's PAL (Personalized Assistant that Learns) program. That project was designed to create cognitive software systems that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise: in other words, A.I.

iLink specifically was the part of the overall CALO project that focused on social search and message routing within social networks. It was also used to develop a system for FAQ generation within a network - they call this technology "FAQtory". With this technology implemented on a social network, FAQs are continuously generated and revised by the community using a Wikipedia-like model, as opposed to being static creations made by the site's authors. But it's not basic as a simple user-generated FAQ system - instead, iLink's FAQtory technology allows for incremental bits of information - even those that don't qualify as answers to the question. As the members contribute these bits of information, the learning system in iLink monitors how users are attempt to resolve queries and is then capable of drafting off of the social network's learning. Essentially, the technology actually enables the social network to discover and amplify its own capabilities

Other aspects of the overall iLink system involve not just incremental learning capabilities, but also the use of prior knowledge to solve problems, message-matching technologies for finding related information, algorithms for gathering data from multiple sources and compiling it together, and the ability to differentiate private information from that which is safe to share.

The Research Behind iLink's Creation

For those that helped create the iLink technology, such as the researchers at SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center, they see social networking as a much more valuable tool than, arguably, even some members of our own tech community do today. In a research paper on iLink (filled with details math nerds will eat up), they state:

"The social web provides much more than an opportunity for people to interact and exchange general information. It is a new medium for powerful models of organizing purposeful social activities. This is compellingly illustrated in the growth of open source efforts (e.g., LAMP,2 Wikipedia), which some authors [8, 14, 20, 27, 29] argue represent an alternate mode of social and economic production."

The authors of the paper state that much of the research in social networks has not formally modeled how these networks accomplish tasks. Most of the current work focuses on other areas like structural representation, analysis, and interpretation of social network data. Their work instead introduces a general approach to modeling how real-time, dynamic social networks communicate and cooperate to solve problems because an understanding of this could enhance the development of potential future applications...applications like expertise identification, FAQ generation, and smart RSS filtering.

iLink Model

iLink in the Military

Today, iLink is being used in the military communities to help recognize "who knows what" within a community, connect members to each other, and point members to valuable content, discussions, and others who share their same interests. Those connections between members and resources are made with iLink's machine-based learning to model the users and the content in order to facilitate the information sharing.

Currently, three military sites are using the technology: Platoon Leader, Company Command, and the Family Readiness Group. In Platoon Leader, current and former U.S. Army Lieutenants worldwide discuss and exchange information with each other. Company Command does the same for Army Captains while also allowing them to pose questions in order to solve problems together (crowdsourcing the military!). The Family Readiness Group helps coordinators nationwide share information and best practices with each other in order to point military families to resources they can use.

Platoon Leader

Where The Military Goes...Civilian Businesses May Follow

It was only a year ago that the military shut down access to several social networking web sites, including MySpace and YouTube, to users of the military networks. However, that shutdown was not so much a criticism of the social networking technology itself - only the public nature of those "civilian" networks. Concerned that users would share secure information like schedules or locations (for example: "Hi Mom! We're sailing into Dubai tomorrow!"), the military opted for a "better safe than sorry" policy. They also cited bandwidth concerns - sharing videos and photos can use a lot of bandwidth and not all areas of the world have much to spare.

Yet, social networking itself can be a valuable tool for businesses, and the military has realized that. In an organization, even one the size of the U.S. armed forces, connecting people to information and resources has been a challenge that I.T. has struggled for some time to achieve, and never mastered quite as well as the social networks do. In the past, businesses used impersonal, intranet-based web sites to provide files and documentation, but they miss out on one of the most critical sources of information - the knowledge that is stored in users' own minds. That knowledge that comes from both experience as well as information surrounding the undocumented processes that exist in any organization.

Now that the military is implementing more social networking technologies into their online networks - in addition to the three communities today, it's being evaluated for inclusion in several others - we'll likely see big business soon following suit. For those enterprise organizations that have been slower to pick up on Web 2.0 trends, seeing how the military uses a particular technology will be a big influence that may change their course of thinking. Social networks may just be fun for us as personal activities, but in workplace, they can be valuable tools for getting the job done...or even helping craft military strategy.

iLink's technology has been made commercially available. More information can be found at SRI International's web site.

military photo by: Randy Son of Robert; building by bourget_82