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News With predictions about an upcoming shortage in qualified STEM applicants to meet the high demand for jobs, MITRE is partnering with local communities to help nurture future generations of talent. A typical workday for Brandon Keith, electronics engineer at MITRE,...

A Chat with Tammy Freeman
by Niall White

I had the opportunity to visit with Tammy Freeman, the latest in our ongoing “SME Interviews” for MITRE’s Bridging Innovation. We talked about Social Innovation, sustainable tourism, graduate school, and of course, Bridging Innovation. Tammy is creative, courageous, and very friendly. I hope you enjoy the read!!

The manufacturing industry is looking towards artificial intelligence (AI) for the next disruption in the marketplace. Manufacturing is an industry that is based on speed, heavily dependent on volume, and always monitoring safety. Where does MITRE fit in all of this?

What do startups, computational linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, and MITRE have in common? Meet Dr. Qian Hu, a scientist, collaborator, and mentor that has contributed greatly to these areas during her 20 years at MITRE.

Accessibility means making every reasonable effort to ensure people with disabilities can work effectively and productively in the workplace. That includes both facilities and all electronic materials. Web accessibility, for example, ensures people with disabilities can equally perceive, understand, navigate, contribute to, and interact with web sites and tools. Unfortunately, we have a long way to go in this area. In addition, many of today’s Human Resource practices, processes and tools put some people with disabilities at a disadvantage when applying and competing for a job. On May 18th, MITRE joined Capital Factory in their Accessibility in Tech Summit 2021 to start knocking down some of these barriers.

News One of the most quoted equations in the world is E=mc2. Even for those that do not really understand the subtleties of this equation, or what each of the letters represents, most could provide “Who is Albert Einstein?” if the equation appeared on Jeopardy. E is...

MITRE is forging a new and exciting partnership with the Naval Post Graduate School, leveraging its Labs test infrastructure and NPS’s Sea, Land, Air Military Research Initiative (SLAMR) and Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JFIX) program. Using an existing cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA), MITRE and Naval Post Graduate School (NPS) are working towards development of a cross-country and multi-organizational live, virtual, constructive (LVC) demonstration, experimentation, and eventual test and evaluation capability. The objective is to one day have a variety of manned, unmanned, and autonomous platforms at various facilities, including NPS’s SLAMR; MITRE’s McLean and Bedford labs; MITRE Bedford’s state of the art Advanced Maritime Systems Experimentation Lab (AMSEL); Camp Roberts Army National Guard Base (ANG); MITRE’s unmanned systems (UxS) experimentation area in Purcellville, VA; and others, combined with emulated or virtual platforms in a common environment which allows sharing of information and command and control across any and all users, at these facilities or any other location.

Finding a good mentor is like getting a personalized self-help book, one that is full of insightful questions and practical guidance tailored to you. A traditional mentor focuses on guiding your personal growth. However, you can receive a wide array of guidance from a variety of perspectives when you work together with someone, so let’s expand our vocabulary a bit and use the word Collaborators as a more general term.

The Department of Defense is looking to startups, small businesses, and nontraditional vendors to improve agility and innovation. MITRE has created a resource to help these newcomers navigate the complex defense acquisition process.

The term “military contractor” calls to mind sprawling and powerful corporations with legacies of ship building, bomber design, and weapons system development. Small companies with big ideas often face a daunting task getting their foot in the door.

Liv Blackmon has a new appreciation for water as a key to community health. Learning that access to clean water opens educational opportunities to girls and helps infants thrive inspired Blackmon to take action—virtually. She moved others to join her.

NewsLast month, we shared news about our partnership with Stadia Ventures to tap into their rich ecosystem for sports and e-sports innovations. Through MITRE’s Bridging Innovation program, technical and domain experts from across MITRE are mentoring six SportsTech...

Cathy Petrozzino is a long-time contributor to the Cybersecurity and Privacy communities both inside and outside of MITRE. A subject matter expert in privacy and Artificial Intelligence ethics, she navigates complex discussions surrounding policy and best practices; coaches startups, particularly those in healthcare, who are trying to enter an extremely regulated market. She strives to be a Privacy and Security catalyst, breaking down barriers to entry. Originally from Maryland, Cathy continues to bring her independent perspectives and positive energy to the Boston Community and beyond.

Can a diverse group of seven engineers and designers write a book? Can they write a book about innovation, teamwork, and problem solving, in a collaborative fashion, while working in a virtual environment?

The answer is yes.

A potent combination of high-end systems thinking, passion, and persistence—along with a focus on solving big problems—transforms one engineer’s vision for advanced antenna technology into reality.

From technology in satellites, ships, and planes, to 5G, MITRE’s Frequency-scaled Ultra-wide Spectrum Element (FUSE™) antenna design offers potential reach across the global communications infrastructure. FUSE’s unprecedented capacity eliminates the need for multiple apertures for different technologies—saving time, effort, and money.

What do sports and government have in common?  A first glance, not much.  But, as you look closer, growing investments in innovative uses of technologies are driving dynamic changes across the global sports market.  From data analytics, video exploitation, secure transactions and payment systems to customer experience, human performance, and safety devices, innovations applied to sports might introduce some unique diverse solutions for related government needs.   

More than twenty startups were recently awarded Small Business Innovation Research Phase II contracts by the Army during their xTech SBIR pilot competition.  The purpose of the pilot is to accelerate technology prototypes for crucial Army capability gaps into military platforms.

The quest to build Artificial Intelligence (AI), at least narrowly defined as computer programs that can mimic human cognitive capabilities sufficiently well as to solve practical problems for us, has again captured the business world’s attention. Government and private investment dollars are flowing into this sector, motivated by Machine Learning (ML) successes in performing object or event recognition and classification from perceptual data, at levels that can match and sometimes surpass the abilities of humans. The availability and affordability of massive amounts of data and computational resources, along with algorithmic innovations including large multi-layer artificial neural networks, has created a kind of gold rush phenomenon in the last ten years.

Looking for an example of leveraging networks to make positive change? Look no further than Massachusetts’ very own Nick Rotker, Bridging Innovation lead for MassChallenge Rhode Island partnership and current Department Manager of the newly formed Underwater and Acoustic System Department at The MITRE Corporation.

NewsLast September, about 80 MITRE leaders in the Health FFRDC participated in a two-hour introduction to the Innovation Toolkit (ITK)—a collection of methods and techniques curated by a team of cross-disciplinary MITRE experts to help teams work together to solve...

Forms, filings, hardcopy, transcripts. There are many examples of useful documents that are archived in various government agency systems that are typically not in usable condition – that is, usable for the automation of business intelligence solutions. Material that has been scanned from hardcopy or filed as structured forms (e.g., PDF) will often contain information useful to one mission area or another, but only when such documents are fully digitized, complete with metadata, and exploited by the right analysts and experts.