New U.K. center's mission: Use science to make world safer
institute will come in. Imperial is the largest science and engineering university in Britain, academic home to thousands of experts whose work just might have security spin-offs, such as those from gamma-ray astronomy. Sir Keith’s challenge is to join the dots, so that research that could have security applications isn’t missed. “The trick is actually spotting where that great piece of progress that has been made in nuclear physics may connect to sniffing a gas or an explosive, welding those two things together. In a normal academic world you’ve got nuclear physics over here and biology is over there. How do you create an environment where more than happenstance brings those people together, so they say, ‘My God, I’ve got something that could help with that’?”
He is particularly excited about potential gains from the world’s biggest scientific experiment — the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator at the European Cern lab near Geneva that will fire up next month. The £2.6 billion atom-smasher’s main goal is to prove — or to disprove — the existence of the Higgs boson, the elusive “God particle” which is supposed to give matter its mass, but which has yet to be detected. But it could also provide clues to processing mountains of surveillance data that arefiendishly difficult to interpret. “This is no more than an intelligent guess, but the thing about the Large Hadron Collider is that it pushes several things to new limits in technology,” Sir Keith said.
One is the detectors themselves; the sensitivity has moved to a new level. The other is the capacity to handle huge amounts of data. Effectively, they’re looking for the odd event that says, ‘Ah yes, we’ve got one of those,’ against a background of events that may be a billion or ten billion. It’s looking for the event that actually tells us that the Higgs boson exists, against a lot of information that’s not actually very useful. “Now that’s great. They may find the Higgs boson and understand gravity, or they may not. Then you think well, what else can you think of in the world of security where finding the real event among billions of background events may be important? Well, it’s all a bit of a no-brainer. If you think of the amount of remote observation that’s made, of looking for rare events within that, you can start to see that it would not be surprising if some of these mathematical and computational techniques found their way into security, where you’ve got very large amounts of data and you’re looking for that rare event.”
Cern’s software might be adapted for crowd surveillance, in tools that analyse body language for clues to a criminal purpose. “One of the questions is what more can be done to make crowded places secure, whether it’s the Tube, the football, the Olympics. What you’d really like to know is the intent of every soul that is in the place. What you’re looking for is the odd person who is carrying something, who has some malign intent.”
The institute will also be looking at wider security issues, such as better protection of personal data and financial transactions. Sir Keith is well placed to run an interdisciplinary programme. As well as defense experience, he was until recently director-general of Science and Innovation — the senior civil servant running the science budget. One of the main themes of his Whitehall tenure was an effort to persuade medical researchers to do more “translational” work, aimed at moving their discoveries more quickly from bench to bedside.
Sir Keith sees parallels between this and his latest challenge. “What we’re talking about is translating basic research, in the physical, biological, engineering and mathematical sciences, into solutions for the benefit of society and the population and its security,” he said. “So in that sense it’s similar. It’s quite useful to think of this as a translation exercise and nick the term from the medics.”
