More about the IBM Chicken

A few days ago I posted IBM's chicken ad without comment. In retrospect I should really explain why I thought it was significant, as well as funny. Everyone, except the German government, knows that we are in a severe recession probably by a breakdown in consumer confidence rather corporate problems, and some people are talking about depression. While, I think this has been 10 to 15 years in the making, it's a waste of time playing the blame game at the moment.
The point is that every crisis needs to be looked at as an opportunity. The Great Depression and the ensuing World War II left the US with a lot of very good things. We got Social Security, the basis for Medicare, the FDIC and other programs. World War II brought us the GI bill and allowed many people to study (like my father) who probably wouldn't have done so otherwise. This gave us a well educated population (and the US was already a leader in education back then, believe it or not) that felt well secured compared with previous generations. This, in turn, led to immense prosperity. Of course, it helped that World War II didn't destroy any US infrastructure, unlike in Europe, giving the US a head start.
So, how should this crisis be used to our long term benefit? The IBM Think marketing campaign is a good starting point for thinking about this. What IBM is trying to sell us (and yes, they want to profit it from it, of course) is the idea that technology in the hands of clever folks (IBMers, presumably, although other folks will do I guess) we can streamline our supply chains and operations. This is not only good for our balance sheets, but can be good for the environment, culture and well being. We have got in the habit of importing produce from California to New York, but a friend in California mentioned recently that they don't get to consume the produce grown on the farms next door. The supermarkets get their produce shipped in from central depots (although I hope they just getting stuff from other parts of California.)
I'd like to see people cutting the waste in the system and making these cuts permanent so that we are left with a sort of virtual infrastructure superimposed on a (hopefully) improved physical infrastructure allowing produce to reach us in an energy efficient manner. I'd also like the produce to be created in a way that makes sense. The example in the Chicken video was that it takes 10 calories to produce 1 calorie of food. Obviously, this is plain stupidity and so a cost/effect balance has to be achieved.

Surprised and Confused

So, some friends have expressed surprise and confusion at my recent career changes, and all that is good as surprises and confusing events are good for the creative juices. But given that the times we live in are interesting and getting even more interesting each day, it is time to reign in the confusion a bit.
Long, long time ago, after dorking around at university, a few smaller jobs and my own company for a while, I joined IBM Research in Hawthorne, New York. Specifically, I joined the IBM AntiVirus team led by Steve R. White (get him confused with any of the other Steve Whites, and you're dead). That was fun, and lasted until Symantec bought us (or something like that) in 1998. So, I thought I'd transfer to IBM Research in Zürich (actually Rüschlikon), Switzerland to work on intrusion detection stuff (for instance Exorist) under Marc Dacier (and later Andreas Wespi) and to finish my PhD on Malware and Intrusion Detection.
By the time I finished said PhD, IBM had decided they weren't that interested in IDS after all. Of course, they up and bought ISS a year later, but who said a company has to be consistent? Anyway, I got more and more involved with compliance and security models. Interesting stuff. Yawn. No actually, it wasn't that bad and it all culminated with the design of the Data Centric Security Model, in which I was instrumental. Everyone was so impressed with the idea that they did the only thing logical: canceled the funding of the project after 1.5 years. Just in case you think I am being sarcastic, I'm not. This is a tried and proven method of finding out how important an idea is: cut the funding and see how much the researchers fight to get it done anyway. So, I left, but not because I didn't believe in the DCS model. BTW, I should point out that I can only encourage people to join IBM Research if they can (and if they are actually hiring). It was initially the most humiliating experience of my life to be around all these great minds, matched only by my attempt to improve my martial arts by joining a Chinese Opera company in Xi'an. Without any knowledge of the Chinese language. Just like with the martial arts, I thought I was pretty good before I joined IBM Research. Enough said.
I left IBM Research for a variety of personal reasons. One, though not the main one, was that I was beginning to think SOA was a good idea after all, at which point I knew I'd been there too long. So, I joined John Jay College of Criminal Justice at CUNY as an associate professor. I'm now convinced that teaching actually is my vocation, but it became clear to me last Spring that I just couldn't afford it. It was also clear (at least to me) that the US was headed into a bad recession and that there would be no easy way of compensating for the subsistence-level pay that I was getting. Landing consultancy work was going to be difficult and I found out that (quite logically really) antivirus and other security companies like to do their research in-house. So that didn't work out very well.
Meanwhile, the really big reason for leaving Switzerland disappeared. Poof. So, I contacted a headhunter in Zürich and nearly landed an very interesting sounding job as research lead. Nearly. Which means not. I had already been talking to Trend Micro and decided to fall back on their offer to join their Advanced Threat Research team. So far, I am very happy with that decision. It is a very interesting and competent team under Erik Wu's leadership. There is a lot to like about Trend. They are fiscally conservative, which normally would be an irritation, but now seems like a good thing. The CEO, Eva Chen, is very technical, so you don't have to water things down to an meaningless elevator pitch. The work I am doing is bringing together a lot of thinking I've been doing recently about semantic technologies applied to security as well as massive computational architectures. They have one of the largest Hadoop/Hbase installations while I had been dabbling with Erlang/Mnesia for very similar things.
Unfortunately, the latest career move didn't result in a physical move towards Switzerland (or even Germany). The group is actually in Cupertino, California, which would be a nice place to go to as a geek, but I'm not sure if it is the right thing for my family. However, I'm not the only team member working remotely, so perhaps this will work out well. That would be nice. I've had the luck of always doing something I enjoy, but any given job change could land me with something I would not be so keen on, so I'd rather stick with what I've got, at least for now.

I'll keep you posted. Or confused. Whichever seems best at the moment.

You are a chicken

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XPost: Announcing Local New York Chapter of the Heart project

For those who don't read my other blog:
http://malwareandsecurity.blogspot.com/2008/11/announcing-local-new-york-chapter-of.html

Shearwater

Shearwater is my latest music obsession AND they are coming to New York on Oct 20. I might have to cough up some dough for tickets.

(At least it isn't as crazy as Final Fantasy, Owen Pallett's band/brand/whatever. )

Twitter gives you the option to decline or decline

Well, that was special! Luckily a refresh fixed the problem.

capitalism and socialism

In 1991, socialism died.

In 2008, capitalism died.