In this installment of the MITRE Knowledge Driven Podcast, Data Analytics Engineer Steffani Silva, gives us an inside look at the inner workings of Generation AI Nexus, a collaboration among MITRE, universities, and government that educates students, as well as professors, on the power of artificial intelligence and accessible data.
Have you ever wondered how Google Maps works? How does the application calculate the fastest route for you, and how does it do this so quickly? The answer might surprise you – at the backbone of these navigational applications and software is graph theory.
According to the independent website Government Technology, “Many government agencies have an unstructured data nightmare, with bits and bytes scattered across servers, clouds and hypervisors.” Vernor Vinge calls this so-called nightmare “data glut.” In an era of Internet of Things (IoT), the data glut may not get better, and, in fact, is likely to get worse.
When you buy your groceries, the best and brightest fruits and veggies have usually traveled across the country and sometimes across the world to get to you. This supply chain bypasses the perfectly fresh produce local to your community. Our traditional market practices have enormously high transportation and carbon costs, create massive amounts of wasted food, and may leave our local farmers with unsustainable businesses.
So what can we do to address these problems?
“Weatherizing my home? What does that mean?” “I’m only renting. Why should I care?” “That sounds complicated and expensive.”
These are common responses Kathy Huynh would hear from renters living in the lower-income apartment complexes where she spent time volunteering as an Energy Master. Energy Masters is a program focused on providing information and services for under-invested communities in Arlington and Alexandria. The objective is to help residents decrease their energy and water usage and utility bills, while, ideally, increasing comfort levels in units.
The pace of change accelerated across organizations over the past year, perhaps even more so across the government, given the previously limited telework capacity and available resources for robust virtual collaboration. This post focuses on lessons learned while taking a high-engagement, in-person, transformational change method into the virtual world to support the Census Bureau’s effort to design a 21st-century organization.
When Charles Clancy helped launch Virginia’s Smart City Innovation Competition in January, he mentioned that, despite being MITRE’s Chief Futurist, his job didn’t come with a crystal ball.
Instead, he told the hundred or so innovators participating in the month-long hackathon—the first of its kind in Virginia—that his job is to think beyond the challenges facing the government today, focus on likely challenges in the future, and ensure that MITRE has talent with the schooling and smarts to prepare for those problems.
Once upon a time, when it was uncommon to wear a medical mask in public, I was a mechanical engineering student at the University of Oklahoma. As anyone who’s been to the Southeast will know, Oklahoma is oil country. Therefore, when I went to the career fair in the Spring semester of my junior year, I had filtered out all of the companies that had anything to do with the petroleum industry. I was left with only a few companies that piqued my interest. One of these companies was MITRE.
Researchers have been vocal about the rise of quantum computers and how they may come to fundamentally undermine our assurance in cryptography (AKA the backbone of protecting all our digital interactions). Enter Perry Loveridge, the MITRE engineer paving a path towards a future where all of our digital interactions can be protected, even from quantum computers.
Air travel has become so common place to the point where many of us never even think about the wonder of flying on an aircraft or being able to send things around the world over night. And yet every day, countless agencies and individuals around the world move in a coordinated ballet even in the face of a global pandemic. In this session of the tri-annual Aviation Industry Update podcast, Michael Wells and Bob Brents focus on the complex logistics involved with distributing COVID vaccines across the country as well as the various applications that can help ease travel restrictions for a public eager to get back to normal.
Approximately 2 billion people lack regular access to sufficient quality food. The issue of global food insecurity is one that is constantly being looked at and, fortunately, MITRE is stepping up to help mitigate this problem. Dr. David E. Willmes discusses his team’s project and how it uses significant crop and consumption data to better understand the factors at play in this global problem.
One of the key metrics for measuring how fast a computer performs is through floating-point operations (i.e., any mathematical operation on two decimal numbers, such as +, -, *, /) per second. You would be amazed if you were to compare the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer with today’s iPhone 12’s 16-core Apple Neural Engine.
When you launch a project team, what are your go-to methods for kicking off, building cohesion, establishing goals, and delivering value together? If you’ve been thinking about refreshing your toolkit, would you consider a customizable process—with or without steamed milk—to ensure that everyone knows why they are on the project and why it is going to be the best one ever?
Many countries in the Global South are not fortunate enough to have the infrastructure or tools that we take for granted. Things as simple as knowing where a community is can mean life or death when battling disease. Join us as Dr. Victoria M. Gammino walks us through her work turning geospatial data into the tools and technology needed to keep the world healthy and disease free.
Every day, billions of people connect to the internet. When you log on to your favorite website, mitre.org for example, you can be quite safe in assuming that what you get is the real MITRE website and not a random server pretending to be mitre.org to steal information. You can also safely assume that you are the only one who can log on to your bank account and access all the information contained in it.
Like life, our projects move fast, and it is hard to find the time to stop and look around, causing us to miss insights that could be valuable to future projects. That’s where the Knowledge Harvesting (KH) Framework comes in.
Considered the first Internet of Things (IoT) device, the toaster John Romkey created could be turned on and off over the Internet during the October ’89 INTEROP conference! Since then, more people have begun to use IoT devices. Simply put, IoT connects devices with the Internet, from things as simple as smart light bulbs and coffee makers to things as complicated as robots and drones.
Charles Schmidt worked with his leadership in the Cyber Security Technical Center to figure out ways to incentivize better use of Tech Stature to record outreach activities. The Collaboration & Information Management department in Corporate Operations created the initial ROAR website to record awardees, and the Digital Content and Creative department designed the ROAR ribbons with their roaring lion icon. Thanks to these collective efforts, the Ribbons for Outreach Activity Recognition, or ROAR, was born.
Cars field more than 100 sesors. All these sensors turn our automobiles into mobile Internet of Things (IoT) devices. With on-board computers providing a vast number of functions, including mobile communication and entertainment systems, most cars today can also perform limited auto-piloting, communicate with nearby cars, and transmit sensor data over the internet. All of these activities are made possible because of increasing deployment of 5G.
Quantum technologies frequently appear in popular science articles and can also be a popular speculative conversation topic among interested professionals. This is for good reason: Quantum technologies have the potential to be game changing in many ways, but that fact can be misleading as to how soon, and how direct, those impacts will be to our everyday lives. As a trusted advisor to many government sponsors, MITRE explains these technologies and aims to temper expectations when necessary.