FEEDBACK : SEMINAR ON BIG DATA - APPLICABILITY IN THE DEFENCE

FORCES
Inaugural Session
1.
Lt Gen BS Nagal, PVSM,AVSM,SM(Retd), Dir CLAWS gave out the welcome
remarks. He brought out the meaning of Big Data(BD) and its complexity, diversity
and architecture. He elaborated that there are a number of users in the commercial
world. He then covered the constraints in storage, computational power, algorithm
designs and scalability of BD. It was mentioned that a multi-disciplinary approach
needs to be undertaken for its contextual development.
2.
The Dir explained that there was immense applicability in defence forces viz.
ops, lgs, integrated management system. There were in various stages of
development in the Services. The nature of future war being intense, multidimensional and fused was then covered. He also accepted that making a single
point of inference or deduction from BD was difficult. In the end he admitted that
there was a need to learn on applicability of BD in the defence forces from the
various speakers during the seminar.
3.
Lt Gen KJ Singh, AVSM**,GOC-in-C, Western Comd then proceeded to give the
keynote address. He intimated that BD as global trend made its debut in 2012. He
then went on to say that BD will remain an important technology for the next 10
years at the least. Thus, the next decade would belong to BD and Big Data
Analytics(BDA). He felt that it is a byproduct of networked society. Velocity of BD
was one of the most aspects of BD for the uniformed fraternity. Veracity of BD was
the next most important feature of BD. The Army Cdr then elaborated that US is
working on a number of BD projects and the world is also on 'Watch mode' for this
phenomenon. He quoted from his personal experience of the BD status in the Army
and admitted that we have a long way to go.
4.
Lt Gen Philip Campose, PVSM,AVSM**,VSM,ADC, VCOAS then gave out the
inaugural address. He commenced by stating that we are still in the traditional
mode. He accepted that BD and BDA phenomena are topical and futuristic. He then
gave out the geostrategic environment in which we operate. He then covered the
traditional threats we face in addition to insurgency and LIC environment. In the end
he said that this seminar was important as it would expose mil leadership and midpiece officers to how world is changing and technology is evolving.
Session 1 : Big Data Awareness and Big Data Analytics Exploitatiotation
5.
Lt Gen Nitin Kohli, AVSM,VSM, SO-in-C commenced the session by intimating
that BD was always there and it is a dynamic process. The basic challenge is to
capture, process and analyse the data. BD comes in a variety of ways and rate of
generation of data is phenomenal. He gave out examples in the retail world of
Amazon, ebay etc. BD is used in a major way in nuclear research. He also alluded to

its use in human genome. He next talked about its use in Def Forces, especially in
HR, medical, cyber security and Intellegence. He then gave examples of US
PROJECTS FINDER, ALLADIN and CRYSTAL.
6.
Mr M Inamdar from Microsoft gave out his presentation on Introduction to BD
Science and BD vision for Defence and Security Forces. He started with the fact that
analysists spend 80 percent of time . and velocity as how BD is of very large volume,
has a wide variety of unstructured data and has rapid velocity of complexity. The
BD has now graduated from terrabytes to petabytes. He then went on to eloborate
on the Defence and National Security Data scenarios , namely, Maintenance Report
and overhaul, Force Mobilisation and mission readiness, maritime surveillance and
resource management and analysis.
7.
Mr RK Kattar from CISCO then proceeded with his talk on BDA : Current and
future perspective. He added four more Vs to BD by naming Veracity, variability,
visualisation and value. He estimated that about 50 billion interconnected devices
would be existing in year 2020 for 7.6 billion people in the world. The systems of
today are not equipped to handle all this data and unstructured data will grow much
more in the future. He concluded by touching upon the major trends in BDA,namely,
Rich media analytics,Cloud based BDA, End user self service, machine learning,
consumer service delivery and BDA ethics.
8
Lt Col Haridas M from CLAWS gave out his presentation on BD Applications for
Defence and Security - Requirement Analysis. He started with mention of the
Gartner Hype cycle 2012. He then touched upon the schema of automation of
Indian Army IT roadmap and the relationship of data, information and intelligence.
He then covered the use of BDA for terrain analytical layers an