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DoD funds Georgia Tech to enhance U.S. hypersonics capabilities

October 27, 2021 By Nancy Cleveland

Vastly different than conventional military weapons and aircraft, hypersonics systems are game-changing for national security, providing unprecedented speed and maneuverability.  Operating at more than five times the speed of sound, these systems can alter course after takeoff, making them hard to intercept.  The U.S. government’s proposed fiscal year 2022 budget for hypersonics research and development is $3.8 billion, representing a nearly 20% increase from the previous year.

Developing vehicles capable of traveling at over a mile per second — speeds that cause vehicle surface temperatures to heat up to 2,200 degrees Celsius — presents daunting engineering challenges for hypersonics materials and systems.

To address these hurdles and enhance U.S. hypersonics capabilities, the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics (UCAH) has tapped the Georgia Institute of Technology and key academic partners for four grants valued at $6 million over the next three years.  The awards draw on Georgia Tech and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) expertise across advanced, high-temperature materials science and aerospace and mechanical engineering research — areas critical for future advances of these vehicles.

“Hypersonics research is a big area of focus for Georgia Tech.  It’s an area where the College of Engineering and GTRI can really collaborate and build upon GTRI’s strong foundation to be a real force in hypersonics,” said Devesh Ranjan, Ring Family Chair and associate chair for Research in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, who also serves as co-director of UCAH.

Continue reading at:  Georgia Tech News Center

Filed Under: Georgia Tech News Tagged With: Georgia Tech, GTRI, hypersonics

$25 million project will advance DNA-based archival data storage

January 17, 2020 By Nancy Cleveland

The demand for archival data storage has been skyrocketing, and if a new research initiative reaches its goals, that need could be met by taking advantage of an efficient and robust information storage medium that has proven itself through the centuries: the biopolymer DNA.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity’s (IARPA) Molecular Information Storage (MIST) program has awarded a multi-phase contract worth up to $25 million to develop scalable DNA-based molecular storage techniques.  The goal of the project, which will be led by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), is to use DNA as the basis for deployable storage technologies that can eventually scale into the exabyte regime and beyond with reduced physical footprint, power and cost requirements relative to conventional storage technologies.

The technology already exists for storing and reading information into DNA — which also encodes the genetic blueprint for living organisms — but significant advances will be needed to make it commercially practical and cost competitive with established magnetic tape and optical disk memory.  While current archival storage has a limited lifetime, information stored in DNA could last for hundreds of years.

Continue reading at:  Georgia Tech News Center

Filed Under: Georgia Tech News Tagged With: Georgia Tech Research Institute, GTRI, IARPA

Research, sponsored activity awards top $1 billion at Georgia Tech

August 29, 2019 By Nancy Cleveland

Research, economic development and other sponsored activities at Georgia Tech passed a significant milestone during the fiscal year that concluded on June 30, recording more than a billion dollars in new grants, contracts and other awards.  The record amount comes from federal government agencies, companies, private organizations, the state of Georgia and other sources.

The growth in new awards for sponsored activity allows Georgia Tech to take on complex and significant challenges involving multiple disciplines and collaborating organizations that bring together teams of researchers with a broad range of specialized expertise, noted Chaouki Abdallah, Georgia Tech’s executive vice present for research.

“Tackling society’s most pressing challenges requires multidisciplinary teams of scientists, engineers, business experts, policymakers and humanists, crosses multiple areas of specialization and often necessitates involvement from more than one research organization,” Abdallah said.  “This level of funding allows us to participate in and lead more complex, more important and more impactful research projects.  We are grateful to our research collaborators and to the state of Georgia for the confidence they have placed in us by providing these resources.”

Continue reading at:  Georgia Tech News Center

Filed Under: Georgia Tech News Tagged With: economic development, Georgia Tech, GTRI

Georgia Tech Research Institute develops and teaches tactics to defend transport aircraft

July 31, 2019 By Nancy Cleveland

Air Force Capt. Courtney Vidt had already spent more than a week in a classroom studying the nuances of aircraft physics, radar theory, and the numerous dangers posed to military transport aircraft like hers.

Now, the C-17 pilot was presented with a new challenge: Craft a mission plan for a mock exercise that would achieve the mission objective and get herself and her crew back home safely.

“We fly in a lot of areas where threats can reach out and touch us, and this course helps us be aware of what tools and tactics we have to prevent them from doing that,” Vidt said, “whether it’s flying around it, flying over it, flying under it, or other methods — so they can’t touch us.”

Vidt was one of about a dozen pilots and aircrew from multiple branches of the U.S. military who in March 2019 descended on Rosecrans Air National Guard Base, located about 60 miles north of Kansas City.  They came for an advanced training course designed for the mobility air force — service members who fly the large military aircraft that carry people and supplies.

The course was taught at the Advanced Airlift Tactics Training Center (AATTC), which provides the highest level of training in defensive maneuvers, countermeasures, and tactics for mobility forces with the ultimate goal of keeping them safe while flying through potentially hostile skies.

But it’s not just military instructors in uniforms teaching those courses.  Working alongside them is a team of experts from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), which for decades has partnered with mobility forces to develop technology to counter the threats that confront the military’s transport aircraft.

The GTRI team plays a pivotal role at the training center, helping students understand the science behind threats such as heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles as well as providing foundational knowledge of onboard aircraft systems and the measures used to defeat the threats.

“The goal of these courses is to save lives in the combat environment,” said Bobby Oates, a senior research scientist and GTRI’s site lead for the program at Rosecrans.  “GTRI’s role here is to provide subject matter expertise.  We’re all prior military aviators, and all of us have been on some sort of C-130 platform.  That gives us a unique understanding of the needs of the mobility air force.”

Continue reading at:  GTRI Newsroom

Filed Under: Georgia Tech News Tagged With: Air Force, C-130, GTRI

GTRI wins $245M Air Force contract for engineering, advanced technology support

July 25, 2019 By Nancy Cleveland

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) has received a $245.5 million, five-year contract from the U.S. Air Force to support national defense and mature advanced technology.

The award, announced July 9, is renewable for an additional five years for a total potential investment of $491 million.

“This award affirms GTRI’s growing value to our nation’s defense,” said Lora Weiss, interim senior vice president and director of GTRI.  “As the U.S. faces increasingly more sophisticated technological threats from innovative and unconventional adversaries, this contract will expand GTRI’s ability to quickly apply its breadth of emerging and advanced technologies and leverage the creativity and expertise of a major university to solve critical national problems.”

Continue reading at:  Georgia Tech News Center

Filed Under: Georgia Tech News Tagged With: Air Force, Georgia Tech, GTRI

Georgia Tech names Director for Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI)

July 4, 2019 By Nancy Cleveland

The Georgia Institute of Technology has named James J. Hudgens to be the new director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), Georgia Tech’s applied research division.  Currently director of the Threat Intelligence Center (TIC) at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Hudgens will become a Georgia Tech senior vice president and GTRI’s director effective September 2, 2019.

Hudgens holds a Ph.D. in ceramic engineering from Iowa State University.  He has led research and development programs in national security, cybersecurity, quantum information science, and photonic microsystems.  He also led programs in data analytics, synthetic aperture radar, and airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems before becoming director of the $265 million-per-year TIC, which has a staff of 550 professionals working in six states and 136 different laboratories. 

A senior technology executive with 23 years of experience in national security research, Hudgens has also held positions at optical networking firm Mahi Networks, defense contractor Raytheon Electronic Systems, and semiconductor company Texas Instruments.  In 2013, he won the Department of Energy Secretary’s Honor Award for Achievement for leading the Copperhead counter-IED program.

“Jim Hudgens has extensive experience building and leading federally sponsored programs that are at the center of GTRI’s core research areas,” said Chaouki Abdallah, Georgia Tech’s Executive Vice President for Research.  “His experience developing and managing programs at Sandia National Laboratories and major private-sector defense contractors will support GTRI’s continued growth in service to our nation’s defense agencies and other important state and federal sponsors.”

Continue reading at:  Georgia Tech News Center

Filed Under: Georgia Tech News Tagged With: Georgia Tech, GTRI

Georgia Tech marks $42 million expanded research presence in Cobb County

May 23, 2019 By Nancy Cleveland

A Cobb County facility expanded to the tune of $42 million is expected to play a larger role in the state’s aerospace industry and the country’s defense efforts.

Officials with Georgia Tech Research Institute — a nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology — cut the ribbon Wednesday, May 8th on its expanded Cobb County Research Facility off Atlanta Road and adjacent to both Dobbins Air Reserve Base and Lockheed Martin.

Wednesday’s ceremony unveiled the redeveloped 350,000 square feet of space, which came to GTRI after it purchased for $21 million four buildings on an unused, 52-acre Lockheed Martin site in December 2017, the MDJ previously reported.  The additional space will give the university entity more room to support its research goals, which its interim director, Lora Weiss, said is of “incredible importance” to national security.

Continue reading at:  Marietta Daily Journal

Filed Under: Georgia Tech News Tagged With: Georgia Tech, GTRI, national security, research

Faster detection, cleanup of network infections are goals of $12.8 million Georgia Tech project

May 18, 2018 By Nancy Cleveland

Cybersecurity researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have been awarded a $12.8 million contract to develop fundamentally new techniques designed to dramatically accelerate the detection and remediation of infections in local and remote networks. Using novel machine learning techniques that take advantage of large datasets, the researchers will develop ways to detect network infections within 24 hours – before invaders can do serious damage.

The technical goal for the new system, dubbed “Gnomon,” is to detect changes in individual computer systems by analyzing suspicious network traffic that appears weeks or months before any evidence of malicious software – or malware – can be identified. As a proof-of-concept, the researchers will work with two major U.S. telecommunication companies and several petabytes of data in basic research aimed at detecting signals of malicious activity on their networks.

Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the four-year award is part of the agency’s Harnessing Autonomy for Countering Cyberadversary Systems (HACCS) program. Beyond rapid detection of infections, the project will also accelerate the cleanup after such infections, creating a clearer pathway in a process known as remediation.

“A compromise becomes a breach only if the original infection remains undetected long enough for the adversaries to do damage,” said Manos Antonakakis, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the project’s co-principal investigator. “If you look at the major breaches that have occurred, you see that the adversaries were in the systems for months. We want to identify them in a matter of hours to contain the infection before any real damage can be done.”

The new techniques to be developed will address the realization that network attacks cannot be completely blocked by existing defenses and malware-based detection systems. Dynamic intelligence will be a key feature of the system, with the intent of creating a continuously-updated dossier of every address in IPv4 space.

“Gnomon will search for illicit behavior in computer systems and network signals that indicate the start of an infection,” said Michael Farrell, chief strategist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), and the principal investigator on the program. “We’ll use our experience with taking down botnets – networks of infected computers – to accelerate the detection and remediation process. It’s imperative to evolve our view of the internetwork infrastructure at the same pace that the threat evolves.”

To protect millions of computers on the networks of the two companies, the researchers must find ways to identify troubling behavior on individual IP addresses without endangering the privacy of individuals. Among the signs of trouble are communications with network locations known to house malicious activity. Such communication is necessary for malicious groups to control computers that have been compromised, and to move data stolen from them.

“If you know where the infecting groups are located, you can very easily exclude most of the benign activities occurring on the network,” Antonakakis said. “We need to be able to identify what has changed in computers throughout the network, understand why the change has happened, and determine whether that change can be attributed to benign or malicious activity. This is a groundbreaking new approach to network security that will require tremendous computing power and infrastructure.”

Ever since the first viruses hit computers in the 1980s, cybersecurity has seen rapid evolution of detection and attack tactics. The success of Gnomon will likely drive adversaries to new attack techniques that may be more complex – and expensive – than existing activities. Making cyberattacks more costly to launch may reduce the profit from such activities, making them less attractive.

“If we can clean up our networks faster and more efficiently, that will increase the cost of the attack, making the adversaries work harder,” Antonakakis said. “If you raise the cost of an attack, the return on investment becomes smaller, while the risk of getting identified becomes higher. We would like to make the business of an attack so unprofitable and so risky for the adversaries that it will not make sense for them to conduct major operations in our networks.”

Success in developing new techniques with the first two telecommunication companies could open the door for scaling up Gnomon to other large networks in industry – and to U.S. government systems.

“Not only will deployment have an obvious benefit of improved hygiene for a significant portion of the U.S. internet infrastructure, but the public-private partnership will allow us to provide valuable feedback throughout the HACCS program on the sort of prototypes that will be necessary to have true business and mission impact in the real world,” Farrell said. “The goals are very ambitious, but if we’re successful, we’ll be able to close the gap between an infection and remediation.”

This program is the latest interdisciplinary research collaboration in cybersecurity at Georgia Tech, orchestrated by the Institute for Information Security & Privacy (IISP). In addition to the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and GTRI, the project will include Professor Brian Kennedy from Georgia Tech’s School of Physics.

Attribution of malicious cyber activity is an established research thrust at Georgia Tech, and this new contract builds on the early success of another Department of Defense (DoD) sponsored program to enhance attribution. The “Rhamnousia” program is now a $25.3 million contract being led by the same research team of Farrell and Antonakakis.

This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under contract number HR001118C0057. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Source: http://www.news.gatech.edu/2018/05/14/faster-detection-cleanup-network-infections-are-goals-128-million-project

Filed Under: Georgia Tech News Tagged With: cyber, cyber incidents, Cyber Security, cyberthreat, DARPA, data breach, Georgia Tech, GTRI, hack

Focus of Feb. 20th Georgia Innovation Summit is emerging technology

February 9, 2018 By Nancy Cleveland

How will emerging technologies affect small businesses and what that sector will be like in the future?

That core question is the theme of the 2018 Georgia Innovation Summit, scheduled for Feb. 20 at the Georgia Tech Research Institute Conference Center in Atlanta. (Register at this link: http://workforce.georgia.org/event/3rd-annual-innovation-summit/)

Now in its third year, the Georgia Innovation Summit is an annual gathering of the state’s top business, education, and government leaders who meet in a series of panel discussions to discuss emerging trends and innovations that will affect businesses of all sizes across Georgia.

The Georgia Mentor Protégé Connection — in partnership with the Georgia Department of Economic Development, the Georgia Centers of Innovation, and Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2) — is presenting this year’s summit.

Keynote speakers include Jen Bonnett, general manager of Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), and David Justice, the Georgia Centers of Innovation’s executive director.

“Emerging technologies are rapidly shaping and changing not only the types of businesses that are being created, but also how business itself is being done,” said EI2 vice president Chris Downing.

“The topics and themes we’ll be exploring this year reflect that understanding and will help attendees better understand how they can incorporate and use emerging technologies to drive business forward.”

Among the topics is financial technology (FinTech), an important sector in Georgia’s economy. Jeff Gapusan, ATDC’s FinTech catalyst, will moderate a panel discussion titled “FinTech’s Impact on Your Business.”

The industry is big in Georgia with 70 percent of the $5.3 trillion in annual U.S. card spending being processed through companies in Georgia. “FinTech isn’t static,” Downing said. “There’s constant disruption in this sector which is affecting everything from traditional banking to retail. This panel features the thought leaders in this space who are driving that innovation.”

Other panel topics include the Internet of Things (IoT), dealing with cybersecurity, and connecting businesses with the resources they need to navigate the ever-changing business climate.

Filed Under: Georgia Tech News Tagged With: ATDC, cybersecurity, economic development, EI2, FinTech, Georgia Innovation Summit, Georgia Mentor Protégé Connection, Georgia Tech, GTRI, innovation, IoT

Georgia Tech hosts ‘mad scientists’ for U.S. Army symposium

April 6, 2017 By Nancy Cleveland

The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) presented its Mad Scientist symposium on “Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy” at Georgia Tech on March 7 and 8, 2017.

TRADOC’s Mad Scientist Initiative is a collaborative partnership with academia, industry and government to help anticipate and prepare for the challenges of future warfare. By exploring the operational environment of the future, the Army seeks to shape the future of warfare, rather than respond to it, and increase the rate of innovation within its branch of the military.

Different themed events call on researchers and other partners to imagine the challenges facing the Army in 2030, and provide solutions to those problems today. Lee Grubbs, director of the Mad Scientist Initiative based out of Fort Eustis, Va., said the symposium came to Georgia Tech because that’s where the experts are.

“We want to partner with leading institutions in the topic areas we are interested in,” Grubbs said. “When we wanted to discuss robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomy, we knew that Georgia Tech is one of the leading academic institutions in the country. It seemed like a natural connection.”

Researchers from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and Georgia Tech joined faculty from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Maryland as well as Army and industry representatives to present their research and work on robotics and machine learning.

“The opening from Dr. [Stephen] Cross really set the stage in showing what Georgia Tech does for the state, for the country and for our military,” Grubbs said. “We’ve had the best experts in robotics with Dr. Egerstedt, the best in autonomy with Dr. Pippen and the best in artificial intelligence and sensory perception with Dr. Kira.”

Speakers included the following:

  • Dr. Stephen Cross, Georgia Tech Executive Vice President for Research
  • Dr. Zsolt Kira, branch chief of the Advanced Machine Learning Analytics Group within the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Division at GTRI
  • Dr. Charles Pippin, senior research scientist within GTRI’s Aerospace, Transportation and Advanced Systems (ATAS) Laboratory
  • Dr. Magnus Egerstedt, executive director for Georgia Tech’s Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines
  • Dr. Augustus Fountain, deputy chief scientist, Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army (Research & Technology)
  • Dr. Robert Sadowski, robotics senior research scientist, Research, Technology and Integration Director at U.S. Army TARDEC, U.S. Army Chief Roboticist
  • Alexander Kott, chief scientist, U.S. Army Research Laboratory
  • Juliane Gallina, director, U.S. Federal Solutions, IBM Watson
  • Dr. Gary Ackerman, University of Maryland, National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism

During the two-day event, attendees were encouraged to attend a robotics “petting zoo,” where they were afforded a close-up look at some autonomous vehicles and other examples of artificial intelligence, machine sensing and machine learning.

IBM Watson representatives showed off the ability for Watson to communicate and parse native human language, even detecting the “sentiment” behind the statements.

Georgia Tech researchers are working on several items, including:

  • A low-powered brachiating robot that swings by its “arms” to monitor plants in a field.
  • A 25-pound, helicopter-type unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that can deliver up to 65 pounds of payload in the field.
  • A combined LIDAR with a UAV to map areas, seeking changes to the environment, people’s walking habits, and reconstructing static and dynamic objects in three-dimensional space.

More than 100 registered and attended, including representatives from NATO, South Korea and from several other European countries. More than 200 watched the event at any given time online from around the world, and even were participating in live chatrooms during the event. All of the content are posted on the TRADOC G-2 OE Enterprise YouTube page.

Source: https://gtri.gatech.edu/casestudy/georgia-tech-hosts-mad-scientists-us-army-symposiu

Filed Under: Georgia Tech News Tagged With: AI, Army, artificial intelligence, Georgia Tech, GTRI

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