Planning for FOSE 2011? Here's a primer.

FOSE, which runs Tuesday through Thursday, July 19-21, at the Washington Convention Center, is government’s annual smorgasbord of everything IT.

The show floor at FOSE 2011 will be awash with eye-catching displays of new technologies, from high-profile entries such as IBM’s “Jeopardy!” camp Watson and Research In Motion’s Mobile Tour Vehicle, to an array of rugged devices, security software and other network essentials.

And off the floor, a lineup of speakers and panels will tackle the key issues facing IT administrators and managers in a series of keynotes and sessions that will span the conference.

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Marine Corps Gen. James E. “Hoss” Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a longtime champion of IT in the military, kicks off the keynotes at 9 a.m. Tuesday. Cartwright’s talk — which will address IT on the battlefield, the future on DOD IT and the barriers to innovation — is free, but seating is limited to the first 1,000 attendees.

At 12:30 Tuesday, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple and well-known for his philanthropic work, will talk about the mobile computing revolution, the “Internet of things,” artificial intelligence and fostering creativity in large enterprises.

At 9 a.m. Wednesday, Watson gets its own keynote to talk about the implications of its advances in natural language processing. OK, the keynote actually will be delivered by David McQueeney, IBM vice president of software, who will discuss Watson’s role in applying the underlying data management and analytics technology in government and business.

A keynote typically features a single speaker, but the FOSE conference has two panels worthy of keynote status.

The keynote luncheon at 12:30 Wednesday will address the federal IT agenda for 2012 and beyond. The talk will feature David McClure of the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, Ron Ross of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and moderator Karen Evans of the U.S. Cyber Challenge.
 
At 3:30 Wednesday, James Craig and Michael Eubanks of the FBI and Gary Warner of the University of Alabama at Birmingham will discuss Operation Trident Beach, an international, multiyear cybercrime investigation conducted with teams from the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Ukraine.

The panel will talk about the lessons learned from more than 100 arrests made so far and will demonstrate ZEUS, a malware kit available in the Russian-speaking underground.

GSA Administrator Martha Johnson will deliver the closing keynote at 9 a.m. Thursday, discussing technology’s role in the government of the future.

Aside from keynotes, the conference is chock full of sessions running on four main tracks:

1. Enabling the Mobile Government Workforce, which will cover subjects ranging from supporting a mobile workforce to using roaming data centers to support troops inn the field.
2. Cybersecurity, Network Defense and Information Assurance, with sessions on the Agriculture Department's innovative approach, continuous monitoring and how to mitigate the next Stuxnet, among other topics.
3. Next-Generation Infrastructure Strategies, featuring sessions on desktop virtualization, getting to reality with cloud computing and the lessons of data center consolidation.
4. Information Management & Collaboration, with sessions on open-source collaboration, social network analysis and using geographic information system data as a decision-support tool.

In addition to all the products on the floor and sessions in the conference, FOSE also hosts dozens of free educational sessions and workshops, from vendor demonstrations on how to make the best use of their products to sessions on getting the most from fiber optic cabling and new technology for battlefield health IT.

It’s impossible to get to every session, of course, or even most of them, so check the schedule and see what looks the most enticing to you. And you can check with GCN, Federal Computer Week, Washington Technology and Defense Systems for coverage, and follow the expo and conference on our Twitter feed, @govcomputernews and check some video from the GCN Lab guys on Facebook.