Conference Highlights – Day Three at I/ITSEC 2015 with RePubIT
Ian Gibson – Tuesday, December 2nd, 2015
Day 3 at I/ITSEC in sunny Orlando, Florida – and yes summer is back “unseasonably warm for December.”
As we write, crowds of happy attendees are dispersing and making their way to their evening engagements. Many will be happily recounting war stories, battles fought and ordnance destroyed in all sorts of spectacular ways. Yes, there has been a lot of simulated warfare in the exhibition halls. You would expect to fly a Chinook helicopter or multi-role combat jet fighter into action – but a micro light kite?
Micro-light kite? – MicroLight Simulator
Jeff Segal of Inflow Interactive is with us again and smilingly reports he “blew up a whole ***** of stuff this afternoon” – and didn’t take particular note of what platforms or weapon systems were used. Mission goals accomplished, that’s all that matters – right?
Back at the Future Leaders pavilion, we finally got to talk Spencer Compton and Benjamin Valente of Bishop Moore School about their excellent epidemiology mathematical modeling project – and of course their proud teacher Sharon Dearmon. So – if there were a very infectious disease here at I/ITSEC, they can show you graphically (the math not the disease symptoms) how it would spread from booth to booth around the exhibition floor, and how best to use limited medical testing resources to detect the patients needing treatment. This is truly excellent work by these school students, we wish them well in all their next endeavors and gave them a thought about modeling a disease theory of information sharing – when they have THAT perfected we’ll ruthlessly exploit it in our Actionable Data Book architecture, of course.
Since we had these guys cornered John quizzed them about their school electronic textbook experiences…
John B. Costa with Spencer Compton and Ben Valente – Findiing Patient Zero w/Graph Theory & Probability
After an impressive presentation by Bishop Moore AP computer science students, we had the chance to chat about their experience with eTextbooks. Bishop Moore Catholic High School in Orlando, FL are true innovators. Now in their third year since transitioning away from printed textbooks to all digital iPad based versions, they have beta tested and experienced the gamut. From PDF files passing as eBooks to web page books with secure login to finally this year interactive “Books as an app” and a few interactive iBooks which are the favorite. They shared some appealing features and a few golden nuggets as a wish list.
They agreed to have a look at the ADBook demo and to our pleasant surprise, their first question was “are these available now?” Both Benjamin and Spencer agreed that the communication capability would be fantastic. The highlighting capture led them to suggest some new use cases – sharing highlights and annotations with their colleagues, and the potential for the teacher to push highlights and annotation down to the students book.
Nick Washburn of Riptide Software Elements (here in the North Eastern area of Greater Orlando), and creator of Riptide is an xAPI powerhouse of entrepreneurial (actually, he told us corporate intrapreneurial) excellence. Nick generously shared a huge amount of the wealth of experience and he has gathered in the field of military training analytics – just take a look at the REAPER project information to see what he does.
The day is far from over — More news tomorrow!
Article contributors @ I/ITSEC 2015 – John Costa & Ian Gibson
