Guide to Australia’s national security capability

This paper provides a single consolidated picture of the capabilities that enable Australia to achieve national security outcomes in a range of environments, including domestically, at the border, offshore and in cyberspace. Introduction The period since 2001 has been transformative for Australia’s national security and our national security challenges continue to evolve. To meet these challenges, we need new ways to coordinate and develop our capability and to shape the national security environment. Significant advances have been made in recent years to build greater collaboration and interoperability across the national security community. However, the increasing complexity of national security threats requires an even more consistent and connected approach to capability planning that complements existing individual agency arrangements. To that end, the Government has developed a security classified National Security Capability Plan to provide a single consolidated picture of the capabilities that enable Australia to achieve national security outcomes. This Guide offers an overview of Australia’s national security capability planning. It identifies the functions performed by the national security community and how these achieve the objectives outlined in the National Security Strategy (2013). Capability planning is one of the tools that support Government to better consider how capabilities can be directed to meet national security objectives. This ensures that capability investment is focussed and that Government can give appropriate consideration to redirecting existing capabilities to meet new or emerging risks and opportunities. It also highlights areas where agencies’ capabilities are interdependent, identifying focus areas for collaboration and interoperability. Having a better understanding of our capabilities will help us to make more informed decisions about what we need. Australia’s national security arrangements are underpinned by a number of agencies working across areas such as diplomacy, defence, development, border protection, law enforcement and intelligence. Australia’s national security agencies include: Attorney-General’s Department (AGD) Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) Australian Crime Commission (ACC) Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (ACBPS) Australian Federal Police (AFP) Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation (AGO) Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) Department of Defence (Defence) Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) Department of Health and Ageing (DoHA) Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) Department of Infrastructure and Transport (DIT) Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) Office of National Assessments (ONA). The Capability Plan brings together, for the first time, a single view of the capabilities maintained by these agencies with the exception of Defence capabilities. Defence has a separate established capability planning process that includes the Defence White Paper (2013) and Defence Capability Plan (2012). Defence is a key contributor to Australia’s national security arrangements including leading the coordination and delivery of national security science and technology and works in close cooperation with other national security agencies. Defence capabilities will continue to be managed through existing mechanisms, principally the Defence Capability Plan. For the first time, the Capability Plan, and the accompanying Guide to Australia’s National Security Capability, presents a unified picture of the capabilities that exist across non-Defence national security agencies. Together with other strategic planning tools, this work informs the broader national security planning cycle and supports the objectives and implementation of overarching policy documents such as the National Security Strategy and the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper. The Capability Plan complements the Defence Capability Plan and does not seek to duplicate it. It should also be noted that the Guide has not been designed to signal specific initiatives or tender opportunities. Such processes will continue to be managed by individual agencies

Developing the Quantitative Histopathology Image Ontology : A case study using the hot spot detection problem

Interoperability across data sets is a key challenge for quantitative histopathological imaging. There is a need for an ontology that can support effective merging of pathological image data with associated clinical and demographic data. To foster organized, cross-disciplinary, information-driven collaborations in the pathological imaging field, we propose to develop an ontology to represent imaging data and methods used in pathological imaging and analysis, and call it Quantitative Histopathological Imaging Ontology – QHIO. We apply QHIO to breast cancer hot-spot detection with the goal of enhancing reliability of detection by promoting the sharing of data between image analysts

Personal Identification in the Information Age: The Case of the National Identity Card in the UK

The informatics infrastructure supporting the Information Society requires the aggregation of data about individuals in electronic records. Such data structures demand that individuals be uniquely identified and this is critical to the necessary processes of authentication, identification and enrolment associated with the use of e-Business, e-Government and potentially e-Democracy systems. It is also necessary to the representation of human interactions as data transactions supporting various forms of governance structure: hierarchies, markets and networks. In this paper we use the agenda surrounding the proposed introduction of a national identity card in the UK as an empirical backbone for considering the issue of identity management. Currently, the UK government is attempting to relate the rights and entitlements of citizenship in the UK with a standard electronic identifier for British citizens and its instantiation in an ‘entitlements card’. This attempt to define legitimising identity seems to us a potentially fruitful empirical source for examining the conceptual and pragmatic issues associated with identity management in the information age. Such a card offers numerous potential benefits for individuals and organisations but its introduction raises major challenges to data protection, data privacy and public trust in the information governance of the UK

Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes

RoboChain: A Secure Data-Sharing Framework for Human-Robot Interaction

Robots have potential to revolutionize the way we interact with the world around us. One of their largest potentials is in the domain of mobile health where they can be used to facilitate clinical interventions. However, to accomplish this, robots need to have access to our private data in order to learn from these data and improve their interaction capabilities. Furthermore, to enhance this learning process, the knowledge sharing among multiple robot units is the natural step forward. However, to date, there is no well-established framework which allows for such data sharing while preserving the privacy of the users (e.g., the hospital patients). To this end, we introduce RoboChain - the first learning framework for secure, decentralized and computationally efficient data and model sharing among multiple robot units installed at multiple sites (e.g., hospitals). RoboChain builds upon and combines the latest advances in open data access and blockchain technologies, as well as machine learning. We illustrate this framework using the example of a clinical intervention conducted in a private network of hospitals. Specifically, we lay down the system architecture that allows multiple robot units, conducting the interventions at different hospitals, to perform efficient learning without compromising the data privacy.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

An Integrated Framework to Achieve Interoperability in Person-Centric Health Management

The need for high-quality out-of-hospital healthcare is a known socioeconomic problem. Exploiting ICT's evolution, ad-hoc telemedicine solutions have been proposed in the past. Integrating such ad-hoc solutions in order to cost-effectively support the entire healthcare cycle is still a research challenge. In order to handle the heterogeneity of relevant information and to overcome the fragmentation of out-of-hospital instrumentation in person-centric healthcare systems, a shared and open source interoperability component can be adopted, which is ontology driven and based on the semantic web data model. The feasibility and the advantages of the proposed approach are demonstrated by presenting the use case of real-time monitoring of patients' health and their environmental context

Monitoring and Evaluation of the Emergency Plan Progress (MEEPP): End-of-project evaluation

This report evaluates the scope of the Monitoring and Evaluation of the Emergency Plan Progress (MEEPP) and the lessons learned from the project in Uganda, which aims to improve availability and quality of PEPFAR data

The role of information systems in the prevention and detection of transnational and international crime

© Cambridge University Press 2014. All around the world criminal activity remains at the forefront of governmental concerns, not only as a problem that distorts the very fabric of society within the confines of national jurisdictions, but also as a problem that cuts across national borders to exhibit a global dimension. The international dimension of criminal activity remains critical and is generally characterized by a complexity that is unique and requires action on many different levels. Criminals set out to mask their illegal activities and deliberately generate complexity as a means of concealment. In doing so, they exploit new developments in technology that assist them in achieving their ends. This criminality exhibits forms of innovation that stretch far beyond traditional criminal activity (e.g., drug and human trafficking) and manages to attach itself within the broader fabric of society by exploiting the very latest developments. This evolution is necessary as criminals seek not only to escape arrest, prosecution and conviction, but also to enjoy the fruits of their criminality (mostly financial gains). Thus, they seek to develop ways of exploiting the various diffuse norms of social interaction (e.g., trust), financial modes of conduct (e.g., cash-based economies), technological and communication developments (e.g., Internet), and thereby minimize the possibility for detection. By limiting the resources that can be made available for prevention (or making them obsolete when developing new criminal behaviour), they participate in this co-evolution actively; and this they achieve by generating complexity

Concurrent engineering research center

The projects undertaken by The Concurrent Engineering Research Center (CERC) at West Virginia University are reported and summarized. CERC's participation in the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Project relating to technology needed to improve the product development process is described, particularly in the area of advanced weapon systems. The efforts committed to improving collaboration among the diverse and distributed health care providers are reported, along with the research activities for NASA in Independent Software Verification and Validation. CERC also takes part in the electronic respirator certification initiated by The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, as well as in the efforts to find a solution to the problem of producing environment-friendly end-products for product developers worldwide. The 3M Fiber Metal Matrix Composite Model Factory Program is discussed. CERC technologies, facilities,and personnel-related issues are described, along with its library and technical services and recent publications