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.