ICT was on the speaker line-up at the recent Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDC) – University Affiliated Research Centers (UARC) Industry Day at LAAFB
Dr. William Swartout, Chief Science Officer, ICT and Dr. Paul Graham, Director of Applied Innovations, ICT attended the Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDC) – University Affiliated Research Centers (UARC) Industry Day at the Los Angeles Air Force Base (LAAFB) on August 29th, 2024.
The day-long event was hosted by USSF Space Systems Command and the purpose of the meeting was to enable FFRDC and UARCs to provide USSF SSC (Space Systems Command) personnel with a summary of each FFRDC/UARC’s unique role and responsibilities, core competencies, and engineering functions. The hoped-for outcome was to equip USSF SSC with the ability to identify the appropriate FFRDC/UARC resource to fulfill their mission requirements.
FFRDC UARC Industry Agenda
Dr. Lynne R. Ray, Director, FFRDC Management Office, Space Systems Command, USSF, provided a few words characterizing the spirit of the day before setting the agenda.
Presentations then followed from 16 institutions including University of Alaska Fairbanks – Geophysical Detection of Nuclear Proliferation (UAF-GDNP); Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Lincoln Labs (MIT-LL); NASA Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL); Project Air Force (RAND-PAF); John Hopkins University – Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU-APL) and Georgia Technology Research Institute (GTRI)
ICT’s Chief Science Officer Dr. William Swartout took the stage before lunch, covering highlights from our basic and applied research, under the UARC contract for the US Army (DEVCOM SC) and other funding bodies. Professor Swartout, who also holds a faculty position within USC Viterbi School of Engineering, opened his presentation by showing ICT’s Overview video (the only UARCs to show a “trailer” – but ICT is representing Hollywood, as well as Academia and the Military).
Dr. Swartout then cycled swiftly through his slides, illustrating the impact of ICT’s research in the area of reducing the cost of Head-Mounted Devices (HMDs) while furthering ongoing innovation; award-winning mHealth apps for Veterans; and our role in successful transition of ground-breaking 3D geospatial R&D to Army Program of Record (One World Terrain).
Future Collaboration
After lunch, both Dr. Swartout and Dr. Graham, who has just (re-)joined ICT to head up Applied Innovations, met with various other UARC leads, to identify potential collaborations between the government-funded entities.
“To have this opportunity, in my first few months back at ICT, was very helpful,” said Dr. Graham. “This was USSF Space Systems Command’s first exposure to ICT’s UARC-developed R&D, and there was a lot of discussion and excitement about the future.”
“It was a very useful exercise,” confirmed Dr. Swartout, “To both present, and review, best practices and world class innovations throughout our UARC group, and to further deepen connections within our community.”
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Further Reading: Dr. Swartout looks back at his career in AI: https://ict.usc.edu/news/essays/50-years-in-artificial-intelligence/