Mission Aware Data Analysis

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The objective of this research program is to develop techniques and tools for analyzing the flow of data in a heterogeneous information technology (IT) environment for mission assurance. The challenge is to detect / identify interesting phenomenon so that the mission / operation of an organization continues even under fault or attack conditions. That is to say, IT in itself only represents a collection of entities, which when deployed, may or may not act to support mission assurance goals. Only through suitable engineering practices can supporting systems and techniques be deployed to ensure that IT collectively functions in support of mission assurance. In such a case the IT infrastructure is said to be mission aware. Given the current landscape of IT infrastructures, IT computing is hinting at a future in which cloud computing and client computing (computing that is not on the cloud) coexist and evolve hand in hand with the increase of data-intensive applications. As the scale and complexity increases, it becomes more and more difficult for administrators and managers to analyze the state of a system because of the continuously evolving nature of these systems. Hence, if we want mission aware systems, the management systems and techniques underpinning today's IT systems need to monitor, analyze and adapt dynamically and predictably to rapid changes in system workload, or environment while remaining true to their objectives. Thus, the purpose of this research program is to automatically monitor and analyze the flow of data on an organization's IT system as it moves from one layer to another. In doing so, we aim to discover interesting phenomenon that might assist us to predict faults, performance changes or simply unknown/new behaviour to manage heterogeneous systems. In order to study these issues, we will employ a data-driven approach where machine-learning techniques will be used, given that they have the potential to generalize solutions to a wider context. In the long term, this new vision provides autonomous and mission aware systems for commercial, governmental and military needs.