Meet Tobi Ayodeji, a MITRE veteran employee at age 17. It makes sense when you learn his trajectory was high-school graduate at 15, MITRE Cyber Futures intern at 16, and—entering his third year at Bowie State University—is now so adept at the high-tech game that he’s tackling cancer research for the National Security Engineering Center (NSEC) FFRDC. Here, Tobi talks about his rapid rise, his favorite MITRE “perks,” and where he thinks a computer-science degree can take him in the future. There are a few not-so-great things about being underage in college. Some universities I applied to won’t even let a 15-year-old live on campus. And a major problem for me was that a lot of tech companies don’t want to hire an underage intern. MITRE was different. They were willing to look past the numbers and focus on my experience, interests, and potential. So I’m happy to be back for my second internship—this time in a health-data capacity.
Testing autonomy can be a challenge in any environment, but transitioning from computer models to physical robots is particularly tricky. Inside MITRE’s Small Robotics Lab, systems can be developed, tested, and even fail, without catastrophic risk to people, programs, or budgets. In MITRE’s Small Robotics Lab (SRL) big innovations come in small packages. Virtual reality headsets and remote-control vehicles cover desktops. A yellow boat, covered in sensors, sits in the corner. A robotic dog named Spot "sleeps" plugged into the wall, battery-charging light blinking. Quadcopter drones the size of hubcaps loom over microdrones that can fit in your pocket. While the scale of the experiments here is compact, they are key to a big idea. "When we started the Small Robotics Lab, we wanted to create a space where researchers could access physical platforms that allow them to transition their work out of simulation and into the real world, without the financial or physical risks that come from full-size systems," says Shereef Sayed, the lab manager and lead autonomous systems engineer. It's also a space to cultivate the skilled staff, ideas, and guidance MITRE's sponsors need.
MITRE announced that Mark Peters, Ph.D., will become its 10th president and chief executive officer, effective Sept. 3, 2024. He will succeed Jason Providakes, Ph.D., who previously announced his intention to retire after 37 years with the not-for-profit research and development (R&D) company and seven years as president and CEO. Peters is a recognized expert in nuclear fuel cycle technologies, nuclear waste management, and national security, with more than 25 years of leadership and scientific discovery for federally funded R&D centers (FFRDCs). He currently serves as executive vice president, laboratory management and operations, at Battelle Memorial Institute, who with other strategic partners operates eight FFRDCs for the government, with responsibility for governance and oversight of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and U.S. Department of Homeland Security national laboratories. Prior to joining Battelle, Peters was the director of Idaho National Laboratory and president of Battelle Energy Alliance, LLC, a large, multipurpose laboratory whose mission focuses on nuclear energy, national and homeland security, and energy and environmental science and technology.
As vice president for the Center for Government Effectiveness and Modernization (CGEM), Kevin Toner leads teams applying emerging technologies to transform how federal agencies serve the public. Personally, Toner has experienced firsthand what he calls a “growth curve” for LGBTQIA+ awareness and acceptance in society and at MITRE. He shares his story here. Like many MITRE employees, Kevin Toner keeps a collection of photographs and objects in his office that tells an autobiographical story. There are trophies and awards, photos of rockets whose launch Toner helped oversee while in the Air Force, and photos of his large, smiling family. One is a small, framed photograph he used to hide—of his now-husband, Anthony Pirrotti. “Since my early 20’s, I have identified as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community,” Toner says. “But for a significant portion of my career, I was obligated to keep it to myself.”
As someone in the Gen Z cohort, Sabrina Movitz reads her share of articles about what her age demographic wants in a career. With “doing good in the world” at the top of the list, she counts herself fortunate to be doing work she feels truly makes an impact. “When I have dinner with my friends and we talk about our jobs, I'm the only person who has so much agency over what they do,” Movitz says. “And I get to work with people who are all mission-driven as well.” Since joining the company in 2021, she’s directed much of her energy on one of our nation’s most-critical health challenges: the ongoing maternal health crisis—a problem that disproportionally impacts historically marginalized communities. “Black and American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) women, regardless of income or education, experience a greater share of these grave outcomes, as do rural women.” Movitz, who’s “always had a soft spot for maternal health” and an “interest in the intersection between science and society,” wants to change this.
MITRE is building a new capability intended to give its artificial intelligence (AI) researchers and developers access to a massive increase in computing power. The new capability, MITRE Federal AI Sandbox, will provide better experimentation of next generation AI-enabled applications for the federal government. The Federal AI Sandbox is expected to be operational by year’s end and will be powered by an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD™ that enables accelerated infrastructure scale and performance for AI enterprise work and machine learning. As U.S. government agencies seek to apply AI across their operations, few have adequate access to supercomputers and the deep expertise required to operate the technology and test potential applications on secure infrastructure. "The recent executive order on AI encourages federal agencies to reduce barriers for AI adoptions, but agencies often lack the computing environment necessary for experimentation and prototyping," says Charles Clancy, MITRE, senior vice president and chief technology officer. "Our new Federal AI Sandbox will help level the playing field, making the high-quality compute power needed to train and test custom AI solutions available to any agency." MITRE will apply the Federal AI Sandbox to its work for federal agencies in areas including national security, healthcare, transportation, and climate. Agencies can gain access to the benefits of the Federal AI Sandbox through existing contracts with any of the six federally funded
Less than a year at MITRE, Cecelia Kane is deep into our work advancing marine technologies. Kane applies her long-time love of the ocean and her engineering skills to help accelerate innovations for national security, climate, the economy, and more. Shortly after MITRE’s BlueTech Lab opened in Bedford, Mass., last November, sensors engineer Cecelia Kane became one of the first MITRE employees to use it for MITRE work. When she’d interviewed for a position with us the year prior, while a senior at Cornell University, Kane got a glimpse of the under-construction space. "They took me out onto the bridge and pointed to where the lab would be. And it was just a lot of construction equipment, so I didn't really have a picture in my head of what it would become." Only three months into her tenure at the company, that picture came into focus. Kane and colleagues from our underwater and acoustics department used the lab’s 620,000-gallon tank to research acoustic communications protocols for one of our government sponsors. The other thing that came into focus: Kane’s realization of her long-time dream to work in the maritime space.
MITRE Response to Cyber Attack in One of Its R&D Networks MITRE disclosed that despite its fervent commitment to safeguarding its digital assets, it experienced a breach that underscores the nature of modern cyber threats. After detecting suspicious activity on its Networked Experimentation, Research, and Virtualization Environment (NERVE), a collaborative network used for research, development, and prototyping, compromise by a foreign nation-state threat actor was confirmed. Following detection of the incident, MITRE took prompt action to contain the incident, including taking the NERVE environment offline, and quickly launched an investigation with the support of in-house and leading third-party experts. The investigation is ongoing, including to determine the scope of information that may be involved. Our CTO Charles Clancy explains in this video and a technical blog https://medium.com/mitre-engenuity/advanced-cyber-threats-impact-even-the-most-prepared-56444e980dc8
As shrinking Arctic glaciers signal a growing climate crisis, MITRE researchers set out to understand what lies within the thaw. Finding no identifiable way to detect disease-causing organisms, our experts demonstrated the potential benefits of a pathogen surveillance system. Searching for "cold hard" proof of global warming? Look no further than the melting ice of the Arctic. Warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, the region is recognized as a frontline for climate change. With potential global implications, the thaw begs the question: Do we know what pathogens lie in wait underground? Imagine the next pandemic developing from harmful microbes present within permafrost, part of the long-frozen Arctic terrain. This scenario may sound like science fiction but is an all-too-real threat. In 2016, for example, 13 people in Siberia became ill from anthrax spores linked to the thawed carcass of a reindeer that died 75 years prior. Surveillance systems do exist to monitor such incidents as disease presents in people. But no system exists to detect pathogens in the environment before diseases strike. "Essentially, we know when people get sick, but we don’t always know the locations where people were exposed," says MITRE epidemiologist Alex Wu. He led a MITRE research team in taking the first step toward developing a more proactive approach to battling diseases that could emerge from permafrost.
Abigail Gertner’s career has centered on artificial intelligence. The department manager of AI-Enhanced Discovery and Decisions at MITRE talked with Karina Wright about having a front row seat to AI’s evolution. She has watched artificial intelligence (AI) grow from a primarily academic study with few practical applications to today’s vast number of uses. “When I started out, we were developing rule-based systems and belief propagation algorithms to make inferences on probabilistic graphical models. The computing hardware didn’t exist to support the kind of large-scale model development we can do today.” The turning point, Gertner says, came with “the availability of GPUs [graphics processing units] for training larger AI models, along with the massive amount of data available on the internet.” Both led to the rapid progress in machine learning (computers learning models based on data) we’ve seen in recent years, “moving the field forward to solve a lot of the problems AI aimed to solve decades ago.”
