MITRE's ACME Lab Drives New Thinking
November 2010
Technological innovation is part of MITRE's culture and charter. The corporation's Agile Capability Mashup Environment (ACME) Lab is an incubation environment that drives new thinking. In the lab, sponsors can come together with MITRE experts to quickly attack problems, brainstorm approaches, and prototype potential implementations in an agile way. The purpose of the ACME Lab is for sponsors to ultimately benefit from a solution of integrated technology—a solution that might not have otherwise occurred.
Recent ACME events have shaped work program direction in critical areas like unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), command and control (C2) information synthesis, cooperative intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), operations-intelligence integration, C2 cyberspace integration, agile software development, network operations management, emergency preparedness/response, and MITRE's Composable Capabilities on Demand initiative.
Regardless of the challenge, enthusiasm, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a willingness to be flexible are the lab's hallmarks.
Rallying Around a Sponsor Problem
We work with customers to apply existing products, projects, or programs developed internally (and by other customers, industry, and academia), to a specific mission theme in the ACME Lab. ACME's problem-solving techniques are rich in productive interaction that fosters entrepreneurial collaboration. Developing animated scenarios to test concepts like intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance interoperability solutions are emblematic of our work.
The ACME Lab encourages creativity through easy-to-use "think tools" not normally found in a typical lab: smart boards, a touch table, battlespace visualization equipment, interactive media, and even LEGO building blocks. There's also MITRE's Collaborative Story Development Kit (CSDK), which helps create complex multimedia projects, or simple videos that make the telling of a complicated story much easier.
How ACME Works
Though every ACME experiment is different, there are several elements you'll find in every exercise:
- Closing the Gap: Many ACME experiments are motivated by a gap in sponsor capabilities, either a reactive one (addressing a defined inability to do something), or a proactive one (trying something new or doing something differently). In either case, the experiment is tied to real mission needs.
- Technical Focus: ACME experiments may choose to investigate a particular technical or procedural area, such as the exchange of data in a specified format, or testing an agile systems engineering process.
- Participants: We value diverse, cross-functional, and cross-organizational participation.
- Duration: ACME events—known as spirals—typically range from one to five days, sometimes held on a recurring basis over weeks or months. Single-day events often focus on brainstorming, while longer events may include a mix of brainstorming and prototyping.
- Assets: ACME has dedicated facilities on MITRE's Bedford, Mass., and McLean, Va., campuses, as well as at our sites in Tampa, Fla., Quantico, Va., Norfolk, Va., and Hanscom AFB, Mass. Once in the lab, resources range from the physical to the virtual, from the temporary to the persistent. The labs are networked together and connected via videoteleconference to support live collaboration.
- Brainstorming and Execution: For many spirals, a brainstorming session in advance fosters better collaboration and prototype development. As the spiral execution unfolds in the Lab, ACME facilitators use video, audio, and use other multimedia products that capture the activities. Typically, there is a capstone demonstration or readout on the last day, to which senior stakeholders are invited. Similarly, participants provide a brief "after-action report" to describe their experiences and products, which is incorporated into an overall spiral report.
New Capabilities on the Fly
MITRE is helping save the government time, money, and personnel through innovative experimentation technologies put to test in the ACME Lab. Using flight simulation games with realistic formats, MITRE engineers have used Web technologies to build active, tailored scenarios quickly and easily.
For example, the U.S. Air Force wanted to incorporate more real-time data (such as weather conditions) to improve UAS operations efficiency. A quickly assembled ACME team devised a proof of concept "mashup" (the integration of content from multiple sources for a new purpose or user experience) to address the sponsor's challenges.
At the resulting "Information Synthesis for Predator Operations" three-day event, participants identified opportunities to develop and deploy near-term improvements to the UAS information synthesis process. The team rapidly deployed a system for weather alerting and multi-aircraft management, well in advance of the establishment of a C2 System Program office that will handle UAS operations and related challenges.
A senior military official attended two of the three ACME mashup days, interacting directly with MITRE technologists. He learned firsthand how the ACME facility is a means for working through and defining "living requirements," and Air Force officials plan to use the lab in the future to address other high priority UAS needs. |
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Whatever the challenge, the ACME Lab can be a valuable incubator—the first stage in an experimentation pipeline. While the goal is to produce new capabilities, the lab has also produced interesting results that have led to the need for deeper experimentation.
For more information on MITRE's ACME Lab, please contact Dave deMoulpied using the employee directory.
—by Cheryl B. Scaparrotta
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