Editor’s insight interview: Big Data and analytics expert
R
avi Hubbly works in complex data environments. His expertise is in enabling an enterprise to transform data sets to generate greatly enhanced risk evaluation and decision making. Ravi and his team works with a range of business stakeholders and across industries including space missions and security. With 20+ years of information technology experience, Ravi leads the Leidos thought leadership group and advises customers on big data project implementations, as well as, influencing industry leading tool vendors, and internal research data analytics initiatives. In 2016, global science and technology solutions company Leidos announced the successful completion of the merger with Lockheed Martin’s Information Systems & Global Solutions (IS&GS) business. Globally this created a US$10 billion company dedicated to “complex systems integration and service provision with an innovative, smart technology-culture.” Amongst Ravi’s accomplishments, he has successfully delivered data environments for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid in analytics environment modernisation, NASA’s Human Research Program and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s HIV outbreak. One of the major customers of Leidos is a large US government agency where modern data analytics is applied for consumer protection and monitoring against bad business behaviour. Speaking with the Australian Security Magazine, Ravi explained, “typically what we have seen with these organisations in general is that most of them are interested in link analysis and how strong those connections are – based on those connections they can learn to predict behaviour and that kind of analysis is a very strong area of capability that law agencies are utilising. They are also constrained by the tools they currently have available.” “Our solutions make it feasible to apply a big data solution that handles all kinds of data, video, audio, structured data sets, semi structured sets and
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logs. Capturing huge sets of data from various data sources we can then process them to identify profiles and data sets.” “We can access an agency’s databases, criminal investigation reports, match them to social media and data from across other government agencies databases, and should we include additional data sets, such as geospatial information, we can create a diverse and highly valuable data set. These solutions are applicable to defence, law enforcement, government and civil agencies.” “Our solutions to customers includes using open solutions. With technology constantly changing and organisations getting caught in propriety systems, which often excludes other technology opportunities, our platform is an open platform with various interfaces and designed for a plug and play application. It’s like a Lego box and you choose pieces to plug in and it remains an open architecture, end to end solution. The analytics platform is called CAADS – Collaborative Advanced Analytics Data Sharing – which allows customers to integrate the platform into their data environment and framework and providing the support for a working solution in solving their business needs. Our business model is not around selling tools and technologies. It is around solving problems. It is referenced to the solution and based on the number of users and based on data sizes. We have applied CAADS broadly, from healthcare insurance companies and healthcare providers through to space agencies where it was applied for focusing on human safety in space. At its core, it can be applied to treasury, regulations, manufacturing and for money markets, or supporting research work, new drug developments and new healthcare models. CAADS is based on technologies similar to Google, where Google stores and accesses the data via links and we’re running an integrated set of tools on top of a Cloudera Hadoop cluster. Leidos partners with Cloudera and Intel, taking a differentiating approach that is providing no coding requirements, so does not need an ‘IT’ dependant approach to generating and accessing the data. That means the business does not need to know coding, it can simply ‘click, drag and drop’. This is designed to empower business users to be self-reliant. This makes it easy to use and apply for end users and they’re not relying on IT Teams to provide solutions. The Data Science can apply self-learning and artificial intelligence and the system self learns how users are using the data and what kind of operations are running. It will then become prescriptive and suggestive to approaches to data analytics. Leidos has launched its Australian business and employs over 900 Australians in Canberra and Melbourne. Christine Zeitz, Managing Director of Leidos Australia confirmed, “We are building on our existing customer base which includes the Department of Defence Centralised Processing program valued at nearly $1 billion and the Service Management and End User Computing contract with the Australian Taxation Office worth roughly $470 million. Whilst we have a strong heritage in the defence business, we are also committed to working in cyber security, big data, airport, and air traffic management systems.” Leidos also recently announced it has been awarded the Joint Project 2030 Joint Command Support Environment Phase 8 Sustainment contract to the value of AUD$55M. CAADS demo is available at https://www.leidos.com/healthcare/ advanced-analytics