Dr. Maymir-Ducharme is an Executive Consulting Architect at the IBM Federal CTO Office – covering the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and Justice & Law Enforcement accounts. Prior to IBM, Fred spent several years as a systems engineer at AT&T Bell Labs, and later as Chief Architect and Program Manager on several large DoD programs (with Grumman, Unisys, Loral and Lockheed Martin.) Fred has a BS in Computer Science (CS) from the University of Southern California (USC) and a PhD in CS from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Fred has over 70 publications in a variety of engineering disciplines, and has chaired numerous conferences and workshops world-wide. Fred has served on various government advisory boards, as a subject matter expert. Fred periodically teaches graduate computer science classes – as an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, University College.

IBM’s “Smarter Planet Initiative” is an excellent example of applied Informatics and Cybernetics. The initiative originated from “Autonomic Computing,” which integrated the traditionally silo’ed management of computer servers, storage, networks, and other systems elements into a more holistic view of the enterprise – enabling more intelligent decisions and automation. As the world becomes more and more instrumented, the ability to access and process vast amounts of inter-related data has enabled novel capabilities: managing large complex buildings, state-wide infrastructure, city-wide services, and so on.  This presentation will focus on the Informatics and Cybernetics behind the evolving Smarter Planet wave.