in this issue
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VA Tech, IBM & Arlington Partner |
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Center for Community Security and Resilience to be Created in Ballston |
Virginia Tech, IBM and Arlington have created a partnership surrounding the school’s research center being built in Ballston at 800/900 N. Glebe. The facility, called the Center for Community Security and Resilience, will focus on advanced research and systems for routine and crisis event management. The Center will conduct policy, social and systems research to address issues related to developing an infrastructure that can boost security in communities, locally and nationally.
Virginia Tech already has a research institute in Ballston which will start housing research work for the center before the new 145,000 square-foot building delivers around the end of 2010. The site recently broke ground and is expected to be built by January 2011. It is being developed by JBG.
Terry Holzheimer, Director of Arlington Economic Development, emphasized the strengths each partner would bring to the relationship. “Each partner has a role. IBM brings a certain technological and private sector view of the world to it and Virginia Tech brings computational capabilities,” said Terry Holzheimer, director of Arlington Economic Development. “After 9/11 we were the ideal community to look at and Arlington is the ideal test bed for the tools the researchers will develop.”
Arlington will serve as a living laboratory enabling researchers to develop policy and systems research to address issues related to developing an infrastructure that can boost security in communities, locally and nationally. Real-world data analytics and informatics will be used to improve intelligence gathering and analysis in routine and crisis community management scenarios.
Jim Bohland, Vice President for Virginia Tech’s National Capital Region stated, “communities are like complex organisms: they need resiliency to resist, adapt, and recover. Our goal is to help a community develop predictive abilities to understand their resistance to natural or man-made impacts, their ability to adapt and their ability to recover community infrastructure and IT systems.”
Technologies used will include data integration, cloud computing, virtualization.
“By being able to analyze massive amounts of data in real time you can develop the capability to develop tools to make communities more secure and resilient,” said Holzheimer.
IBM was pleased with the potential of the partnership. “As you might expect, technology - particularly information and communications - is central to our work. By utilizing high performance computing and cloud computing, virtualization, data and systems integration, we'll help community decision makers analyze and predict scenarios, and assist during real-time crisis management.”
Holzheimer added, “When we couple our urban complexity with Virginia Tech’s leadership in informatics, engineering, and security policy to IBM’s world class reputation in supercomputing, image analysis, and information analytics, we think we have a critical mass of intellectual firepower that will help metro regions around the nation develop community resiliency.”
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