InfoSphere Streams for Smarter Governments

As the world around us gets more instrumented and interconnected, it also continues to become a flatter, smarter and a more dangerous place than ever before. Governments are constantly challenged by the forces of rapid urbanization, increasing strain on natural resources, citizen security as well as evolving threats related to global terrorism. The key to effectively address these challenges lies in effectively managing the huge volumes of structured and unstructured data being created in real time to gain instantaneous insights and contextual awareness necessary for effective governance.

Governments worldwide are increasingly focused on key imperatives such as:

Security and Law Enforcement
Energy & Environment Leadership
Traffic and Transportation Management

InfoSphere Streams with its revolutionary set of capabilities can be a central pivotal component to help governments successfully execute their ambitious security, environment and traffic management agendas.

Security and Law Enforcement

Smarter Surveillance: InfoSphere Streams can enable powerful predictive analytics on multiple concurrent streams of structured and unstructured surveillance data from sources such as manned and unmanned vehicles, security cameras in real time to alert law enforcement agencies of potential security issues

Real Time Global Name Recognition: InfoSphere Streams can help run Global Name Recognition analytics on cross-border and intra-border transactions happening in realtime to alert agencies of potential fraud and terrorist activity in a truly real time fashion before the transaction is committed

Real Time Identity Insight Analytics: InfoSphere Streams can execute powerful Identity Insight or Entity analytic insights on cross-border and intra-border transactions happening in a truly real time to highlight any fraudulent activity in real time

Real Time Covert Intrusion Detection: TerraEchos Inc., a leading provider of covert intelligence and surveillance sensor systems, has signed a technology agreement with IBM to imbed InfoSphere Streams in their Adelos™ solution. The solution helps organizations protect and monitor critical infrastructure and secure borders. Based on advanced fiber-optic acoustic sensor technology licensed from the US Navy, TerraEchos’ Adelos solution helps meet growing security demands for government, energy, public safety and transportation sectors

Real Time Botnet detection and Cyber Attack Prediction: Real Time Streams based analytics help analyze real time events across multiple layers of the network (IDS, Firewalls etc) in conjunction with each other to predict the possibility of a cyber attack. Streams based analytics help discover new threats as early as possible and detect known complex threats in real-time

Predict and prevent Street Crimes: Real Time data mining analytics on the location parameters of street gangs as obtained through the geo spatial location detectors such as GPS enabled cell phones etc can help predict if any criminal activities could happen and help the authorities to proactively prevent them

Energy and Environment Leadership

Manage Wildfire Risk: Governments worldwide can use IBM InfoSphere Streams technology to analyze smoke patterns in a real time fashion obtained via live video and pictorial feeds from satellite and unmanned surveillance vehicles during wildfires. Governments can then provide fire and public safety officials with a real-time assessment of the fire, allowing them to make more informed decisions on public evacuations and health warnings. This is a huge step ahead of current practices where current analysis of smoke patterns is simply based on weather forecast data (normally that is updated every six hours).

Example: UMBC Researchers Use IBM Technology to Fight Rising Threats of Forest Fires

Predict Water Quality and Flow Patterns: Providing safe and bountiful supply of water is one of the key objectives of governments worldwide. A critical step to ensure this is the effective management of fragile and diverse river and estuary ecosystem. Streams analytics based applications can help officials within government agencies visualize the movement of chemical constituents, monitor water quality and protect as well as analyze behavior of fish and marine mammal species as they migrate – All of which are key to provide a better scientific understanding of river and estuary ecosystems.

Security for Electric Grid: With utilities worldwide moving towards smart meter technology and use of sensors along the transmission lines, there is a wrap around of communication network infrastructure over the physical electric transmission infrastructure. This makes the entire infrastructure prone to cyber attacks. Streams based analytics help analyze real time events across multiple layers of the network (IDS, Firewalls etc) in conjunction with each other to predict the possibility of a cyber attack and also help discover new threats as early as possible.

Protect Energy Grid from Solar Storms: Solar storms happen when an eruption or explosion on the surface of the sun sends radiation or electrically charged particles toward Earth. A massive solar storm could leave millions of people around the world without electricity, running water, or phone service. As a result predicting Solar Storms well in advance is a key to ensure citizen safety and business continuity. InfoSphere Streams based analytics can help analyze data from sensors that track high frequency radio waves. Endless amounts of data can be captured and analyzed on the fly. Over the next year, some of the ongoing projects are expected to perform analytics on at least 6 gigabytes per second or 21,600 gigabytes per hour – the equivalent of all the Web pages on the Internet.

Traffic Management

Better Commuting Options for Citizens: IBM InfoSphere Streams based analytics technology can be used to gather real-time information from the Global Positioning System (GPS) devices on taxi cabs and other vehicles in the city in conjunction with data from delivery trucks, traffic sensors, transit systems, pollution monitors and weather information to provide the city and its residents real-time information on traffic flow, travel times and the best commuting options. For example, a resident could send a text message listing their location and desired destination. The technology would instantly process the real-time traffic, rail and weather information and provide anticipated travel times via car and public transportation thereby giving people an accurate and instant view of the fastest or the shortest way to get to their destination.

Example: IBM Helps City of Stockholm Predict Better Commuting Options

Other Miscellaneous Services

Real Time Disease Outbreak Detection: InfoSphere Streams can help perform real time scoring on information coming across to the central health monitoring agencies to alert the authorities on any outbreak of dangerous diseases or conditions in truly real time. Currently this kind of analysis is done as an overnight batch process and lost time in this case could mean many deaths or severe loss of life.

Smarter Healthcare in Intensive Care Units: InfoSphere Streams can help predict the potential onset of harmful conditions in ICU patients by running continuous analytics on physiological streams of sensor data from patients in real time to alert the medical staff to take necessary measures to prevent the undesirable outcomes. This is a huge step over current medical practices where a nurse takes readings from the 10-20 sensors attached to the patient and uses her judgment to determine any harmful conditions developing.

Example: First-of-a-Kind Technology to Help Doctors Care for Premature Babies