I signed up for the Wishvast project, a cell-phone based social network that is currently in stealth because of intellectual property issues. The two other projects are:

Ecovillage

• Building infrastructure, education, agricultural, and microenterprise systems for the Children and Youth Empowerment Center (CYEC) in Nyeri, Kenya

Mashavu

• A self-sustainable medical station that will enable the remote evaluation of Kenyan patients.

The Ecovillage project team will be primarily be working within the CYEC compound, but Mashavu and Wishvast will develop products that will be beta tested in the area and eventually distributed across the country (maybe even the continent).

Wishvast was the project that sparked my interest in enrolling in the Kenyan classes. The technology and social-media aspect immediately caught my eye, and I could easily relate to the goals that its founder, Khanjan Mehta, had envisioned. Wishvast was also an opportunity for me to pursue my interests in social entrepreneurship. Over the last semester I have been reading up on ideas like the “double bottom line” and “social return on investment.” My close friends and I have had many discussions about starting up businesses and pursuing ideas to realization. Wishvast is a service that could potentially change the way millions of entrepreneurs interact in Kenya. I enrolled in this class because I found that I was very passionate about the Wishvast mission.

I want to bring my knowledge of social media, information technology, operational security, and intelligence analysis to the table and give a valuable contribution to Wishvast. I am championing Wishvast’s network management infrastructure . This component is crucial to the reliability and usability of the Wishvast network.  Ultimately, I will help create a service that will be valued by its end-users in Kenya. I want our users to be enabled by the value of the relationships that they build on the Wishvast network.

The skills that I hope to develop during the course of this project will reinforce many of the key concepts that my IST and Security and Risk Analysis degrees emphasis. I want to bring back my experiences that I gain from the Wishvast project and apply them to my future career(s). A technology or security start-up has been a recent interest of mine, and I think the Wishvast project will be a good starting point in developing entrepreneurial skills.

The first Kenyan seminar, which meets every Tuesday evening, covered the organizational breakdown of the Ecovillage, Mashavu, and Wishvast teams.  Later on we had a speaker give us information on the Children and Youth Empowerment Center in Nyeri, Kenya.

Nyeri, Kenya  - Googles Maps

The only minor setback I have with our seminar class is the usage of the distance learning classrooms. There are about 100 students enrolled in the seminar and space issues have forced us to be separated into two separate classrooms equipped with video conferencing systems. This is something that I believe might pose a challenge to the seminar’s learning objectives.

The first Wishvast project meeting was at 8pm on Thursday night. As Khanjan put it, we are lean and mean. Our small group consists of information technology specialists, one electrical engineer, one computer science major, and two post-graduate education students.

During our first official meeting, we got a chance to know one another, championed various components of the project, and assigned a couple of issues to research before our next meeting. We changed the time of our weekly gathering to 8pm on Monday nights. Looks like I’m going to miss this season of House unless I get my TV tuner working.

I will be posting weekly updates on the progress of the Wishvast project.

The ideal environment for our Leonidas solution would have 30-40 virtual machines running on a single mainframe. System resources would be dynamically adjusted depending on the processing power that a particular virtual machine would require for its tasks.

For a proof of concept, we used Virtual Box, a virtualization software, and created cloned copies of a master Ubuntu machine loaded with:

Kudos to Albert Chen, Brian Reitz, Renee Stepler, and Anastassia Ioujanina for a great semester project.

I saw the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, over the weekend. Although I thought that the movie lacked the normal amount of gadgets commonly associated with a James Bond movie, there was a particular scene that made me think of the technology and visualization software that I use in my coursework at Penn State.

Analysts show Bond and M a new lead at MI6 HQ with an interface that displays geographical data integrated with suspect profiles. It’s no surprise that the interface resemables Microsoft Surface (product placement?). I wish my i2 Analyst Notebook graphs could look this snazzy.

The current visualization analysis industry standard in the U.S. Intelligence Communitys’ A-Space and much of law enforcement in the UK and Canada is i2 Analyst Notebook (the same software that Security and Risk Analysis majors are using in SRA 231: Decision Theory and Analysis). My own experience with this program has been somewhat of an annoyance. Much of the problem lies in the inability to quickly assemilate and categorize the data for analysis in these visualization tools. I’ve heard from some professionals that Analyst Notebook is more often used as an investigative or forensic tool after a crime or event has occurred.

James Bond may make it look easy, but it takes a lot of hard work and critical analysis to create a valuable intelligence product. The interface for presentation to a decision maker is only the icing on the cake.

The 2nd annual Security Analysis and Risk Management Association conference last May gave me insight into the intelligence community and national security industry. My internship with Exelon Corporation gave me some perspective on the challenges of operational security in the enterprise and also provided an opportunity to participate on an innovation project within the company. The trip out to Google and San Francisco for the Google Online Marketing Challenge fired up my interests in entrepreneurship and the Valley. More recently, I signed up to work on a Kenyan social entrepreneurship project that will hopefully implement a prototype cell-phone based social network by next summer. All of these interests, whether at an intelligence agency, enterprise, or a start-up, share a common theme of innovation, responsibility, and technology.

Enter Intelent.

Intelent is a mashup of the words intelligence and enterprise. I based this idea on the theory that a decision advantage can be achieved by the fusion social media technology, operational security, and intelligence analysis. Maybe one day I’ll take this to next level and create a startup. For now, the Intelent blog will focus on issues in technology, entrepreneurship, security, and intelligence.