MITRE | The MITRE Digest | Technical Exchange Meetings Bring MITRE's Expertise Together To Solve New Problems

At a company with thousands of scientists and engineers, ideas bubble up continually about ways to develop new technologies and use them to solve customers' problems. When these ideas reach a kind of tipping point, MITRE harnesses its resources to address the technology through Technical Exchange Meetings (TEMs).

For example, this spring some of these scientists decided it was time to hold a two-day biotechnology TEM to assess MITRE's capabilities in the areas of biodefense and biosecurity. Jordan Feidler, a lead engineer in MITRE's Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence Department, worked with Lynette Hirschman, chief scientist for MITRE's Information Technology Center, and others on the BioTechnology Roadmap Committee, to plan the event. Their purpose in holding the TEM was three-fold: bring together MITRE people who were doing work in biotechnology areas so they could make connections and share ideas; inventory the work that MITRE researchers were doing to determine how MITRE can help its sponsors; and provide a forum to discuss a biotechnology roadmap on how the company should proceed.

Like most TEM planners, committee members were worried about lining up the right number of speakers and also leaving enough time for discussion. There were plenty of MITRE experts to choose from who could report the latest research in areas such as machine learning, biological sensing, netted sensors, and computational biology. "In fact there were so many worthy candidates that the hardest part was narrowing down the list and telling some people that they weren't going to be able to give presentations," says Feidler. The solution, suggested by Hirschman, was to add a "Boaster Poster Session" to the TEM in which the 15 researchers who didn't give full presentations got two minutes each to describe their research. Their research was subsequently added to the intranet biotechnology TEM site.

"We have a slogan here at MITRE about 'bringing the whole company to bear,'" says Lehman. "A sponsor doesn't hire just one tech staff at MITRE. That employee is a conduit to the entire company and its 3,700 engineers and scientists. It's one of the key differentiators for MITRE. So TEMs are an important way for people to understand who the experts are within the company. If there is a complicated technical subject for which there is no firm answer, a TEM helps the company develop an answer or at least understand the various issues. TEMs help to determine the long-term strategic requirements in a particular area and then to identify what work MITRE is doing and what work we should be doing."

TEMs come in two flavors—internal and external. The internal TEMs focus on creating internal connections and educating MITRE staff. The external TEMs are geared to informing sponsors about emerging technologies and to gather information from sponsors about their problems and requirements that might be solved with these technologies.

Other Benefits

Richard Games, chief engineer of MITRE's Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems, says that TEMs solidify virtual groups by bringing people together face to face, even if it is through a video teleconference. "After a TEM, organizers are sometimes surprised at how much interest there is in a technology topic," says Games. Enthusiasm is created when researchers learn other people are interested in their work area, or that their research can be applied in a new direction.

"A different point of view can add a lot of value to your work," says Feidler. "That's been a big benefit to the whole company. For example, by knowing what resources are available throughout the company, someone with a customer project can draw on the right expertise in-house. While planning this TEM, we got many responses to our call for presentations from people I hadn't been aware of who are doing important and interesting work in this area. Now, their work is captured on our biotechnology Web site where the company can access it."

Benefits accrue to sponsors, too. "We are better able to support work for sponsors because of these community building and networking activities," says Feidler. "If we can bring the right expertise to bear in specific areas, we can be more productive and efficient. By making these connections throughout the company we can dynamically match a whole network of people with a range of expertise to a sponsor's particular problem."

TEMs also help the company make strategic decisions about investment in new research, according to Lehman. "For example, we've recently had TEMs on netted sensors, biotechnology, and privacy issues," he says. "MITRE's chief engineers and I pushed those three topics because they are new, complex issues for which MITRE needs to formulate strategies. Now we know how to proceed, where to focus, and who will do the work."

TEMs encourage collaboration and knowledge-sharing. "TEMs give people a voice in how to apply the technology they're working on," Feidler says. "They give everybody a chance to voice their views. That's really important in establishing a sense of community. For the BioTEM, people came away with a much clearer understanding of where MITRE is positioned in the biotechnology space and the role that the company should take."

Roadmap Committee members are now planning a BioTechnology TEM for the fall that will include sponsors. They're working to further build and share knowledge in biotechnology around the company by bringing in speakers and starting discussions on research reported in journal articles. One result of the TEM is that there are already six biology related proposals ready for the next round of internal competition for MITRE research funds. "Research projects are one measure of a TEM's outcome," says Feidler. "The research that's eventually adopted by a sponsor is the real payoff."

One person who benefited from the BioTem is Marie Erie, a computer scientist in the Geospatial, Visualization and Fusion Technologies Department in the Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems. Erie attended the BioTEM and gave a poster presentation, "DNA TagINTs," about using synthetic DNA as a bar code for tagging material and people. Her poster presentation received a wide audience and supported her entry for a MITRE Innovation Grant, which she recently won.

Erie also met two people from The Washington Center for Command, Control and Communications who would offer an unexpected opportunity. One is Monica Carley, a principal investigator in the Signal Processing Center of the Naval System and Technology Division. The other is Kenneth Smith, a principal database engineer, who is in charge of a neuroinformatics grant from the National Institutes of Health. Together, Carley and Smith manage MITRE's neuroinformatics project, which is helping the medical community find the best way to organize and share information about the human brain's structure and function. "As a result of a knowledge exchange with both Ken and Monica," says Erie, "I am now offering them my expertise in medical and scientific visualization using Open Source visualization tools. This is really exciting for me as I'll be bringing something new to MITRE and serve a direct need of this group."

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