#built some data analysis programs with “real code” to put all this together... my education is paying off

[silicon-tmblr]

DRV3 trial camera test tool I made the other day. It's kinda garbage and has a bunch of unimplemented/buggy features, but it works! Probably won't work on this again for a while though...

[bountyofbeads]

100 Million Hit in Data Breach at Capital One https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/business/capital-one-data-breach-hacked.html

Capital One Data Breach Hits 100 Million; Ex-Amazon Worker Is Charged as Hacker

By Emily Flitter and Karen Weise | Published July 29, 2019 | New York Times | Posted July 30, 2019 10:29 AM ET |

A software engineer in Seattle hacked into a server holding customer information for Capital One and obtained the personal data of over 100 million people, federal prosecutors said on Monday, in one of the largest thefts of data from a bank.

The suspect, Paige Thompson, 33, left a trail online for investigators to follow as she boasted about the hacking, according to court documents in Seattle, where she was arrested and charged with one count of computer fraud and abuse.

Ms. Thompson, who formerly worked for Amazon Web Services, which hosted the Capital One database that was breached, was not shy about her work as a hacker. She is listed as the organizer of a group on Meetup, a social network, called Seattle Warez Kiddies, described as a gathering for “anybody with an appreciation for distributed systems, programming, hacking, cracking.”

The F.B.I. noticed her activity on Meetup and used it to trace her other online activities, eventually linking her to posts describing the data theft on Twitter and the Slack messaging service.

“I’ve basically strapped myself with a bomb vest,” Ms. Thompson wrote in a Slack post, according to prosecutors, “dropping capital ones dox and admitting it.”

Online, she used the name “erratic,” investigators said, adding that they verified her identity after she posted a photograph of an invoice she had received from a veterinarian caring for one of her pets.

According to court papers and Capital One, Ms. Thompson stole 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers in the breach.

In addition to the tens of millions of credit card applications stolen, the company said on Monday, the breach compromised one million Canadian social insurance numbers — the equivalent of Social Security numbers for Americans.

The information came from credit card applications that consumers and small businesses had submitted as early as 2005 and as recently as 2019, according to Capital One, which is the nation’s third-largest credit card issuer, according to its website.

“Based on our analysis to date,” the bank said in a statement, “we believe it is unlikely that the information was used for fraud or disseminated by this individual.”

The bank also said it expected that the breach would cost it up to $150 million, including paying for credit monitoring for affected customers. Last week, the credit bureau Equifax settled claims from a 2017 data breach that exposed sensitive information on over 147 million consumers, costing it about $650 million.

Amazon Web Services hosts the remote data servers that companies use to store their information, but large enterprises like Capital One build their own web applications on top of Amazon’s cloud data so they can use the information in ways specific to their needs.

The F.B.I. agent who investigated the breach said in court papers that Ms. Thompson had gained access to the sensitive data through a “misconfiguration” of a firewall on a web application. That allowed the hacker to communicate with the server where Capital One was storing its information and, eventually, obtain customer files.

Amazon said its customers fully controlled the applications they built, and Capitol One said in a news release that it had “immediately fixed the configuration vulnerability” once it discovered the problem. Amazon said it had found no evidence that its underlying cloud services were compromised.

On July 17, a tipster wrote to a Capital One security hotline, warning that some of the bank’s data appeared to have been “leaked,” the criminal complaint said.

Once alerted to the breach, the authorities found what they said were Ms. Thompson’s online boasts that she wanted to “distribute” the materials. On June 27, she also listed “several companies, government entities and educational institutions,” according to court papers, which investigators interpreted to be other hacks she “may have committed.”

Other users in that channel, on Slack, expressed alarm. One said “don’t go to jail plz,” according to the complaint.

On Monday, F.B.I. agents executed a search warrant on Ms. Thompson’s house. They seized “numerous digital devices,” prosecutors said, and found on them “items that referenced Capital One” and Amazon, which they referred to in the complaint only as the “cloud computing company.”

“I am deeply sorry for what has happened,” the bank’s chief executive, Richard D. Fairbank, said in a statement. “I sincerely apologize for the understandable worry this incident must be causing those affected, and I am committed to making it right.”

Capital One said the bank account numbers were linked to customers with “secured” credit cards. Secured cards require customers to put forth a sum of money — $200 or $250 — in exchange for a card.

“It’s a way for banks to minimize the risk associated with lending to folks who don’t have perfect credit or who are just getting started,” said Matt Schulz, an analyst for Compare Cards. These customers are vulnerable, he said, and “often have very little financial margin for error.”

While the breach was possible because of a security lapse by Capital One, it was aided by Ms. Thompson’s expertise. Information posted on social media shows she worked at one time for Amazon, as an engineer for the same server business that court papers said Capital One was using.

Capital One is a longstanding and prominent client of Amazon’s. In a 2015 keynote at Amazon Web Services’ main annual conference, a Capital One executive gave a presentation on the company’s efforts to move critical parts of its technology to Amazon’s cloud infrastructure so it could focus on building consumer applications and other needs.

Ms. Thompson will remain in federal custody until a hearing on Thursday, prosecutors said. Her lawyer did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Capital One has faced security breaches before, and they are a constant, and costly, threat for the financial industry. The chief of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, has said his bank spends almost $600 million a year on security. Bank of America’s chief has said in the past that the bank has a “blank check” for cybersecurity.

In a breach in 2017, Capital One notified customers that a former employee may have had access for nearly four months to their personal data, including account numbers, telephone numbers, transaction history and Social Security numbers. The company reported a similar breach involving an employee in 2014.

On Meetup, Ms. Thompson posted enthusiastically about hacking. “I’ve been meaning to put together something like a hack night or somethng soon,” she wrote on May 13.

“It’s been a crazy past two weeks, and my cat had to go to the vet everyday last week but she’s finally starting to recover maybe this wednesday in capitol hill? I’ll do an all day thing at starbucks until they close, I’e got nothing better to do.”

[Reporting was contributed by Tiffany Hsu, Stacy Cowley, Adam Goldman and Ben Protess.]

Paige Thompson, Capital One Hacking Suspect, Left a Trail Online

Ms. Thompson, a 33-year-old software developer, made a habit of oversharing online. Those posts led the authorities to her door.

By Daniel Victor | Published July 30, 2019 | New York Times | Posted July 30, 2019 10:32 AM ET |

Before she was arrested and accused of illegally obtaining the personal data of over 100 million people from Capital One, Paige Thompson, 33, had a public Twitter persona typical of a software engineer in Seattle.

She commented often on programming chatter, fretted about her dating life and mourned the euthanasia of her cat, Millie. Millie’s death, she wrote, was “one of the most painful and emotionally overwhelming experiences I’ve had in my life.”

But Ms. Thompson also spoke darkly about her mental health, writing on July 5 that she intended to check herself into a facility for treatment.

“I have a whole list of things that will ensure my involuntary confinement from the world,” she wrote. “The kind that they can’t ignore or brush off onto the crisis clinic. I’m never coming back.”

The tweets, initially seen by a small number of followers, offered a public but limited glimpse into Ms. Thompson’s mind-set at the time the authorities arrived at her door on Monday and seized her digital devices. Federal prosecutors say the data breach included 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers, culled from tens of millions of credit card applications.

Her propensity for oversharing online created a trail of digital bread crumbs that the F.B.I. used to track her down. At times, Ms. Thompson boasted about the sensitive data she was accused of taking.

The data was posted on GitHub, a website for sharing and collaborating on software code, that was linked to her full name, email address and other pages belonging to her, according to court documents.

She ran a group on Meetup, a site geared toward organizing real-life gatherings, called Seattle Warez Kiddies, a small collective of programmers and hackers. Using the online alias “erratic,” she invited members to a channel on Slack, a messaging application, in which she shared files, some of which, the authorities say, contained the Capital One data.

And a tipster provided the government with private messages on Twitter in which Ms. Thompson said she had “basically strapped myself with a bomb vest,” while mentioning Capital One, indicating she intended to distribute the data and knew the consequences.

Since dropping out of Bellevue Community College in Washington State in 2006, Ms. Thompson has had a series of software engineering jobs, including at Amazon Web Services in 2015 and 2016, according to her résumé. She listed herself as the current owner of Netcrave Communications, a hosting company.

Ms. Thompson will remain in federal custody until a hearing on Thursday, prosecutors said.

Daniel Victor is a Hong Kong-based reporter, covering a wide variety of stories with a focus on breaking news. He joined The Times in 2012 from ProPublica.

[zipgrowth]

How Machine Learning and the Cloud Can Rescue IT From the Plumbing Business

Many educational institutions maintain their own data centers. But to Jeff Olson, chief data officer and senior VP of technology strategy at the College Board, all those humming racks of servers are just plumbing—and he doesn't want to be in the plumbing business. He would rather focus on how the College Board, which administers the PSAT, SAT, and Advanced Placement Tests, can help students reach their educational goals. "We need to minimize the amount of work we do to keep systems up and running, and spend more energy innovating on things that matter to people," he says.

We need to minimize the amount of work we do to keep systems up and running, and spend more energy innovating on things that matter to people.

That's why the College Board has pulled the plug on much of its IT plumbing in favor of the advanced capabilities offered by the cloud. These capabilities go far beyond simple cloud storage to encompass machine learning and new computing environments that allow the not-for-profit organization to identify opportunities and accelerate program development.

EdSurge spoke recently with Olson about how machine learning and these new advances in cloud computing are helping the College Board support students on their path to college.

EdSurge: First off, what's the difference between machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI)?

Jeff Olson: That's actually the setup for a joke going around the data science community. The punchline? If it's written in Python or R, it's machine learning. If it's written in PowerPoint, it's AI.

As I see it, machine learning is in practical use in a lot of places, whereas AI conjures up all these fantastic thoughts in people.

So what are some of the practical uses for machine learning at the College Board?

Some years ago, we were trying to figure out when to offer the SAT. The College Board had always offered the SAT at the same times of the year, but we wondered if it might be time to make a change. So we used Amazon Web Services (AWS) machine learning services including Amazon SageMaker to generate and then analyze many millions of calendars—every permutation you could think of. It recommended that we create a new test date in August, which seemed inconvenient for students because school is out then. We created an August date anyway, and it proved so popular that there weren't enough seats the first year. In our nearly 100 years of doing the SAT, we had never considered August.

Another example is something I call error forgiveness. I'm not talking about errors in the test questions themselves, but errors in responses to administrative questions. For instance, it's very common for people to accidentally put the current year as their birth year. Or, at the beginning of the year, they will write the date using the previous year. Instead of having these errors cause problems for students when they show up for the test, we can catch them earlier by using AWS to notice the pattern and fix the problem.

. . . the College Board has pulled the plug on much of its IT plumbing in favor of the advanced capabilities offered by the cloud.

These are unsexy examples, but it's important to talk about grounded applications if only to get away from the perception that machine learning is going to produce this "everything" machine. One area where we are doing something a bit radical, though, is in serverless architecture.

What is serverless architecture, and why are you excited about it?

Instead of having a machine running all the time, you just run the code necessary to do what you want—there is no persisting server or container. There is only this fleeting moment when the code is being executed. It's called Function as a Service, and AWS pioneered it with a service called AWS Lambda. It allows an organization to scale up without planning ahead.

But there's actually something more radical than serverless architecture, which some people are calling radically cloud native. It refers to the ability to put together applications using the managed services provided by AWS.

At the risk of getting lost in the tech weeds here, what kind of managed services are we talking about?

Everyone needs the same basic services to build software: database, authentication, networking and load balancing, login and log analysis. AWS saw that it could make these services available and connect them together via API (Application Programming Interface). The whole premise of using managed services—as opposed to servers or containers—is that you don't recapitulate work that isn't important to your customer.

At the College Board, for instance, our cloud-native architecture is a homegrown combination of API-connected AWS services. We call it Catapult, but it makes heavy use of Amazon Cognito, which is a device-agnostic service for login and authentication; Amazon S3, which is a simple storage solution; and Amazon DynamoDB, its NoSQL database service. Together, they make building a new application incredibly simple. They allow us to focus on the value of the software that we're delivering to users.

Do you have an example of how the College Board used this radically cloud-native approach?

More From Amazon SageMaker

Overview: Machine Learning for Every Developer and Data Scientist

Video: Build, Train, and Deploy Machine Learning Models on AWS with Amazon SageMaker

Resources: Amazon SageMaker Developer Guide

We recently used Catapult to develop a new program called the College Board Opportunity Scholarship, which will award $25 million to students over five years. The idea is to give students an incentive to complete the various tasks needed to navigate the transition from high school to college, like taking the SAT, making and refining a college list, filling out the FAFSA aid form and actually applying to college. For each step they complete, students earn a chance to win a scholarship, and students who complete all six steps qualify to win $40,000.

We knew that we were going to announce the program in the fall and launch it on December 11, which posed two problems. First was the tight development timeline, but we were able to build something really robust in just six months. Without Catapult, it would have taken much longer and we would have lost a year. The Class of 2020 would have missed out on the benefits of the scholarships entirely.

The product was also timed to launch on the same day we release PSAT scores to roughly five million students. So we knew that the program was going to see an enormous amount of usage on debut, which is another reason why we decided to build the program in this radically cloud-native way. It needed to be able to scale in the same way Netflix can scale. If every one of those five million students had come at the same time, we still would have been able to withstand it. This architecture has a real scale advantage.

I know you hit your launch deadline, but was your team's hair on fire the whole way?

Whenever you launch something new, there's always a rush to the deadline—you expect people to be pulling late nights at the end. But nobody had to work on the weekend before launch, which is unheard of in software development. The team took a lot of pride in that. We were also able to include a lot more features than would have been possible otherwise and to test it heavily on a wide variety of mobile devices. To our knowledge, we launched with no bugs. Those are all great benefits.

How do you think machine learning and Function as a Service will impact higher education in general?

We recently used Catapult to develop a new program called the College Board Opportunity Scholarship, which will award $25 million to students over five years.

The radical nature of this innovation will make a lot of systems that were built five or 10 years ago obsolete. Once an organization comes to grips with Function as a Service (FaaS) as a concept, it's a pretty simple step for that institution to stop doing its own plumbing. FaaS will help accelerate innovation in education because of the API economy.

If the campus IT department will no longer be taking care of the plumbing, what will its role be?

I think IT will be curating the inter-operation of services, some developed locally but most purchased from the API economy. It's happening already. You don't build your own payment processing, you use Stripe or Braintree. You don't build your own messaging service, you use Twilio. You don't build your own identity and authentication service, you use Cognito.

As a result, you write far less code and have fewer security risks, so you can innovate faster. A succinct machine-learning algorithm with fewer than 500 lines of code can now replace an application that might have required millions of lines of code. Second, it scales. If you happen to have a gigantic spike in traffic, it deals with it effortlessly. If you have very little traffic, you incur a negligible cost.

Jeff Olson on Insomnia Reading and His Podcast Diet

"I read for two to three hours every day in the early morning, starting around 4 am,” says Jeff Olson. “In my family, we call this Insomnia Reading.” He reads up on software architecture, data science, and other interests and keeps a few curated Twitter lists to stay current. “I also love to save articles to the magnificent Voice Dream Reader iOS application and then have it read them aloud to me while I'm walking or exercising.”

Olson says he’s also “a podcast omnivore” and shares the highlights of his tech diet:

a16z, which covers technology, cultural trends and news, with an emphasis on “software that eats the world”

AWS Podcast, featuring AWS news and tech tips, as well as interviews with AWS partners and startups

Data & Society, which explores some of the social and cultural ramifications of our increasingly data-centric world

Data Journeys, which is aimed at aspiring data scientists looking to make an impact in the world

Data Skeptic, a weekly podcast explaining complex data science concepts

DataFramed, which examines data science through the prism of the problems it can help solve

Linear Digressions, covering machine learning and data science

Not So Standard Deviations, which discusses the latest happenings in data science in academia and industry

Software Engineering Radio, a podcast for professional software developers

How Machine Learning and the Cloud Can Rescue IT From the Plumbing Business published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

[heatherehouser-blog]

Final Instructional Design and Technology Project: Reflection

How well were you able to utilize the concepts and techniques you learned from the program (theories, systems design, interface styling, and the creation of multimedia content) as you designed, developed, and implemented your Final Project?

For my final project, I found the Training Needs Analysis document to be very helpful to plan each asset and ensure each met at least one learning objective. It was this document that allowed the theories, design and styling used throughout the project to be developed and detailed. I developed a style guide of colors, graphics, and fonts that would be appropriate for the subject matter and audience to ensure all of the learning objects would maintain continuity. I was also certain to have each piece be minimalistic, ensuring that each graphical element had purpose to prevent any distractions from the content or learning. 

To see my final project and other project created during my time at Full Sail University, please visit https://heatherdelagardelle.myportfolio.com/

How has each course contributed to your personal and professional development as an instructional designer? Describe your most outstanding personal triumph in each course.

Mastery: Personal Development and Leadership This course set my expectations for the hard work and dedication it takes to master a craft. It also helped me to envision the year ahead at Full Sail, by allowing me to write down my goals for each upcoming course and my ideas for how I would achieve those goals and excel in the Instructional Design and Technology Master’s Degree. My most outstanding personal triumph was finishing the entire book, Mastery. I was happy that there was audio available for the book to be able to listen on my long commute to and from work.

Strategies for Learner Engagement This course provided a basis of knowledge for several models of instructional design, such as the ADDIE, SAM, Gradual Release and Rapid Prototyping. My most outstanding personal triumph was being able to use my previous graphic design experience to make posters that showcased my newly learned concepts in a way that was both educational and appealing. 

Visual and Verbal Communication in Instructional Design This course taught me about how Adobe Illustrator could be used to display information in a more visual way, transitioning data into graphs and charts. I’d had loads of experience with Illustrator prior to this, but rarely have had opportunities to try out the program’s graphing capabilities, so I enjoyed learning something new about a program I’ve used for years.  My most outstanding personal triumph was not just learning about Adobe Illustrator’s data visualization capabilities, but also learning to use Keynote to make the renewable energy presentation.

Corporate Training and Motivational Development This course taught me about creating professional videos, script writing and storyboarding. This was really the first video I’d created in over a few years, so it was challenging to get back into the swing of things, using proper lighting, a green screen and editing. My most outstanding personal triumph was putting together the video to my full satisfaction. This course allowed ample time to plan, produce, and revise. Looking back at my video, I know it’s not perfect, but it really laid the groundwork to me getting back into video production and learning lessons that I applied for the videos I would continue to make during my time at Full Sail.

Instructional Design and Evaluation This course gave me some of the information that I was lacking, creating media for education. It provided a basis for several learning theories such as the Schema Theory and Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction. It also included some best practices for designing learning environments that motivate and compel learners to explore the material. My most outstanding personal triumph was being able to use my love for psychology and previous graphic design experience together to make posters that showcased my newly learned concepts. 

Digital Media and Learning Applications This course gave me an opportunity to utilize my experience with coding and how coding can be used to enhance the user experience. My most outstanding personal triumph was creating interesting questions from the NASA video and successfully troubleshooting some of the issues that came with coding the interactive quiz

Music and Audio for Instructional Design This course gave me a deeper understanding of the purpose and use of a audio equalizer. My previous audio knowledge only reached as far as adjusting levels and cutting audio together, so this course pushed me deeper into the audio world. My most outstanding personal triumph was my adaptation of the Brothers Grimm story, “The Straw, The Coal and The Bean”. I altered most of the story so it would be more suitable for children. While it seemed like a really challenging project initially, it was so fun to be able to rewrite the story for children, narrate it and use voices for added interest.

Filmmaking Principles for Instructional Design This course reminded me that good videos can still be created in a DIY environment. With the help of my husband, some can lights and my computer and cell phone as cameras, I was able to create a video that was both professional and educational. My most outstanding personal triumph was allowing this video to really be the foundation for future projects in the program. It was also my first real attempt at a storyboard and that helped me tremendously when I was ready to produce the video. 

Game Strategies and Motivation This course taught me more terminology and theory behind the creation of gamified learning experiences. While this course was nothing like I expected, it allowed me to think outside of the box and create a game that could actually benefit the work done at my full time job. My most outstanding triumph was sticking with this course and not getting discouraged when things got tough. While this wasn’t my favorite course, overall, the terminology was what kept me going and I enjoyed learning about the benefits of adding games to a learning experience. 

Learning Management Systems and Organization This course showed me that I had a lot of experience with Full Sail’s LMS, but that there were several other LMS environments available. It allowed me to become aware of other features and possibilities that are available in other LMS’s. This was also the first time I personally built a course in an LMS and I’m glad to have that experience. My most outstanding personal triumph was utilizing the video I created in Filmmaking Principles for Instructional Design to be the inspiration for my LMS. It was fun to dig into my love for plants as well and really allow my passion to drive the overall success of my project. 

Media Asset Creation This course allowed me to take my interest in health and apply it to an instructional design project. Overall, I learned so much about how planning is imperative to a large project and how each asset must work together to ensure that the project’s learning objectives are being met. My most outstanding personal triumph was researching and compiling all of the data about my chosen topic. My project relied on a lot of data, so ensuring that my resources were reputable and reliable really set the foundation overall. I also enjoyed utilizing a minimal aesthetic style throughout that was complimented on several times. 

Instructional Design and Technology Final Project This course helped me to become more familiar with Behance and introduced me to a new Adobe product, Portfolio. I’m also more aware of communities and networks out there where I can learn and connect with other instructional design professionals. My most outstanding personal triumph was seeing all of my hard work from the past year assembled into one place and reflecting on how my dedication has paid off. 

[taskfarm]

Only fail digital! - Digital Twins help to prevent real world mistakes

Digital Twins are the exact replica of a product or system in the virtual world.The pairing of the two allows data analysis and monitoring of systems to prevent downtimes but also to predict and simulate outcomes.The virtual world becomes the playground for trial and error and opens new approaches to cost optimising, efficiency and security. Failures in reality can be prevented as they can be identified and resolved in the digital twin. The idea of a Digital Twin is now being developed in the IoT space, and it is rapidly becoming the technology of choice for digitalizing the physical world. It acts as bridge between the physical and the digital world and has been named one of Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017. Donna Rhodes, Director MIT Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiative (SEAri), talks about business opportunities, changes in company structures and ethical aspects for the development of a digital parallel universe where failures are made without damages and digital goods will be traded like items in computer games. Interview by Julia Weinzettl (special thanks to Ursula della Schiava- Winkler, Kürşad Özdemir, Christoph F. Strnadl and Harald Katzenschläger for providing insightful questions on the topic)

Dr. Donna Rhodes talks at the MIT Europe Conference in Vienna, March 29th/30th, 2017.

A GE wind turbine and its digital twin. Image credit: GE Power & Water

Is the concept of Digital Twins already used in many companies?

Donna Rhodes: It is a reality for some products and systems, such as jet aircraft, wind turbines, and commercial ships. However it is still largely a vision for many companies. But in the future every product or system will have a digital equivalent. We envision that these digital assets will become even more valuable than the physical product because the models themselves consist  of the history and of all of the encoded knowledge that is in the product itself and will be forming the foundation for connected products and services. Right now most companies would treat their digital model as opposed to their product, not as part of what they consider their portfolio of assets, this will change within the near future.

For which sector do you think the concept of Digital Twins would be most beneficial as you have mentioned aircrafts and big systems?

Donna Rhodes: It absolutely makes sense in all types of domains and we see evidence already of that. The initial places where we have seen this approach being used is in the defence industry, in aerospace and in manufacturing of products. But it already extended out into transportation systems, into healthcare and energy systems. There are actual manufacturing operations where the factory itself has a Digital Twin and you can simulate how products float through their production floor. Experiments on reconfiguring the manufacturing floor and what impact that would have on getting the product completed can be made. Once improvement is verified by the digital system, it can be implemented into the real system which is very cost effective.

Do you have an example for a company that is already using digital twins?

Donna Rhodes: GE is one of the companiest hat is leading the charge on this topic. One of their successful examples is their wind farms. They have replicated their wind farms digitally, every wind turbine asset has its own Digital Twin. They are using the digital systems not only to maintain the ongoing process but to predict potential failures. With the computational power that we have right now, the whole field of data science and visual analytics we are starting to be able to envision how the future will look like in a very specific sense.
Another example is Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Working together with GE Healthcare Partners their aim was to redesign the hospital’s approach to patient flow. The technology incorporates predictive analytics based on a hospital’s current systems and its historical data- the Digital Twin - to forecast when the hospital may approach or exceed its capacity. Using this approach the hospital has reported a 30% reduction in ER patients who have to wait for an inpatient bed and a roughly 70% reduction in patients who must be held in the OR because there’s no recovery or inpatient bed for them.

How do you think the technical development of programming or writing actual code would be accomplished in the future? Will there be a meta programming paradigm?

Donna Rhodes: Meta level approaches will be used to create a Digital Twin as it doesn´t only involve software development but also graphical programs and items to plug and play from visual perspective to actually built up a digital twin. To my knowledge companies like GE and Siemens are already selling graphical or object oriented software environments to be able to create Digital Twins. The interaction of humans with this systems implies some additional areas of consideration.

Donna Rhodes: One topic we are looking into in my research group is what kind of leader would be responsible for the Digital Twins within an organisation. We also need to know more about how humans interact with these very complex digital models. As part of that we have been studying how people develop trust in these models. Because if you don´t trust your digital twin that´s going to cause issues. How can we raise the confidence that is necessary so that the persons who are the users or the beneficiaries of these systems, trust that the Digital Twins are first of all accurate, have valid information and truly represent the system.
With the importance of the Digital Twins and the reliance on their information we are additionally facing another issue concerning compromise through cyber security questions.

With the rise of the Digital Twin a big world with new applications evolves, what new services can emanate from this concept?

Donna Rhodes: As you have just mentioned this is a vast field. Many more specialists that have a background in data science model based engineering will be needed. As this development is moving very rapidly I would suspect that many companies wouldn’t have a sufficient number of people with the right skills to keep up with what is needed in this field. So I think that companies who would specialise into the interrogation and analysis of Digital Twins would be needed very soon. In the automotive industry for example suppliers who are delivering parts to the whole product would not only have to deliver the physical item but also the Digital Twin of the component. This Digital Twin component is going to have to plug into the whole part of the Digital Twin of the automobile. Those companies may not have the resources to develop these models so there could be niche industries of modelers that grow and act as suppliers to the component suppliers. Services around creating, maintaining, constructing aggregates, updating the Digital Twin or how to put the parts of the Digital Twins together will be needed.

Donna Rhodes, Principal Research Scientist, MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, and Director, MIT Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiative

If we spanned the concept of the Digital Twin further - wouldn´t that mean we would enter the simulation age - where anything, before experienced in the real world, would be simulated in our digital parallel universe and thus provide a flawless reality as mistakes have been made already? We would that lead us?

Donna Rhodes: That is an interesting question. What would be the ethical consequences of such a virtual world? Wearables may allow you to interact with your system so that you can reach in and pull out information. It will be a truly new way of working. But the question will be: Does this replace the inventor who is sitting at the workbench doing things? I like to think that there is still a place for that in the future. Because someone has to experiment with the physical products in a different kind of way. I don´t think our brains are totally wired to do everything in the virtual world versus the ability to be equally able to work in the physical world. So what´s the coupling of digital and physical then in the future? It´s an open question that we face. What are the limits of this?
I almost think that you need to be able to grow up in this environment. Getting away from being anchored in a physical system is probably going to take a generation to change.

https://idss.mit.edu/

About:

Dr. Donna H. Rhodes is a principal research scientist in the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC)within IDSS. She is the director of the MIT Systems Engineering Advancement Initiative (SEAri). Prior to joining MIT in 2003, Dr. Rhodes held senior management positions in systems engineering and enterprise practices at IBM Federal Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Lucent Technologies.

Dr. Rhodes conducts research on human-model interaction, decision-making in model-centric environments, innovative approaches and methods for architecting and design of complex systems and enterprises, including predictive indicators of performance, empirical studies of engineering systems thinking and practice, and designing for uncertain futures. Her research is driven by the desire to more predictively architect socio-technical systems to address significant societal needs in a dynamic world. She is involved in research across multiple sectors including defense, aerospace, transportation, energy and commercial products.

Dr. Rhodes received her Ph.D. in Systems Science from the T.J. Watson School of Engineering at Binghamton University. She serves on industry and government advisory boards focused on advancement of systems practice and education, as well as on study panels for issues of national and international importance. She engages with government and industry leaders through collaborative research, consulting engagements and executive courses. She has been very involved in the evolution of the systems engineering field, including development of several university graduate programs. Dr. Rhodes is a past president and fellow of the International Council on Systems Engineering, and a recipient of INCOSE's Founders Award and several distinguished service awards. She serves on the INCOSE Systems Engineering journal editorial board.