MITRE Tech Futures Podcast: Recent Episodes
MITRE Tech Futures
Want to learn about emerging technologies but don’t have time to read technical reports? Well then the Tech Futures podcast is for you! Each month, we will produce a 15 minute or less podcast highlighting a Tech Futures research project. Listen to learn about 6G, CRISPR gene therapies, Metamaterials and more!
Stefan Doucette has been worked on MITRE research that focuses on neuromorphic sensors on the International Space Station.
Host: Sonya Burroughs
Guests: Stefan G. Doucette and Paul G. Hartman
How Kaitlyn Raub, an early career researcher at MITRE, has been focusing on the study and tracking of objects in the Cislunar space, and the benefits of her work to MITRE and our sponsors.
Host: Dr. Marcie Zaharee
Guests: Kaitlyn Raub, Dr. Gabrielle Hedrick, Derek Ho, Dr Lesley Weitz
In November of 2022 Chat GPT was released to the public. Since then its popularity has increased dramatically and it has about a hundred million users. This natural language processing tool has been hailed for its intelligence and usefulness by users. If a natural language processing tool could have such an amazing impact on how we learn, what would happen if we applied it to other types of data?
Host: Courtney Clark
Guests: Dr. Liya Wang, Dr. Alex Tien, Eliza Mace
This episode explores current research into the combining of two statistical methods – Bayesian Models and Conformal Prediction. When used in tandem, this is called Bayesian Conformal Sets, which is helping stakeholders in high risk/safety critical scenarios evaluate risk and uncertainty when modeling.
Host: Patrick Hinson
Guests: Paul Scemama and Dr. Geoff Warner
The field of 3D rendering has come a long way from pure trigonometry, key point matching, and simple raytracing. A new family of algorithms called Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) combines classical rendering techniques with powerful Neural Networks to revolutionize missions in the fields of medicine, disaster relief, robotics, and beyond.
In March of 2020 millions of Americans went home on a Friday and didn't return to the office Monday morning. What followed was months of figuring out society's new normal. But what happened to critical industries like healthcare? Today, we're going to talk about the TRUSTS Framework and hear real life examples in the healthcare and defense industry.
Want to dive even further into the details of quantum software engineering? In this follow-on to Episode 14, we delve into the principles of superposition, entanglement, and interference – all from the perspective of software engineering. Tune in and then check out guest speaker Richard Preston’s online course on quantum software development at stem.mitre.org/quantum
Looking for a way to infuse domain expertise into your big data analysis? Need a fresh way to look at a tricky problem? Give graph theory a try! Tune in to hear what kinds of problems graphs can help solve and how to induce a graph on your own dataset. As an added bonus, we’ll take a peek into graph neural networks (GNNs). Check out not just one, but TWO recent MITRE papers on graph theory and GNNs at techfutures.mitre.org.
Many believe we are on the precipice of building the world's first scalable Quantum computer. But once they're here, how will we write software for them?
By Brinley Macnamara
Guests: Richard Preston and Jen Orr
Many of us are familiar with the so-called “macro-scale” effects of climate change. Global temperature is rising. Arctic Sea Ice is disappearing. Wildfires are intensifying. But how will climate change impact individual neighborhoods, streets, or your own backyard? With a cutting edge microweather model in hand, a MITRE team investigates.
How do humans learn new or complicated tasks? One possible way is by following a demonstration. What if we could train autonomous agents in the same way? Tune in to hear how Imitation Learning makes this intuitive idea into a reality, while producing agents that are adaptable to new environments and require less training time than existing methods.
When a group of Mechanical Engineers team up to investigate the emerging field of Mechanical Metamaterials, they find that recent advancements in 3D printing technology are enabling scientists to prototype everything from better shields against blunt force trauma to cloaks that could render an object undetectable by SONAR sound waves! Meanwhile, a Nanoscientist discusses both the challenges and the promises of fabricating Mechanical Metamaterials. Having had a hand in the nano-imaging and fabrication efforts underway at Lawrence Berkeley and MIT, she is acutely aware of the challenges the come with 3D printing at such small size scales, but sees great opportunity three orders of magnitude up the size scale—which happens to be the sweet spot for Mechanical Metamaterials. With a growing body of evidence showing jaw dropping performance enhancements with the use of Mechanical Metamaterials, will the manufacturing technology catch up fast enough so we can one day see the benefits of this technology?
As the worldwide rollout of 5th Generation (5G) cellular networks picks up pace, a team of researchers decide it’s time to start designing 6G. It’s an ambitious endeavor to say the least, as little is still known about what the impact of 5G will be, never mind what 6G will one day look like. Though one thing is clear: in 6G, digital information will no longer be confined to our screens. Whether it be through biocompatible computer chips, wearables, or self-driving cars, the world’s knowledge in our 6G future will be as accessible and seamlessly integrated into our daily lives as our own thoughts. This means that our future networks must be capable of transmitting vast sums of data almost instantaneously—a tall order when one considers the physical laws that will of course limit how fast we can transmit information over the air. Thus, 6G will be the first network wherein ubiquitous AI will be even more critical than the network architecture itself to drive the next wave of technological innovation. As the race to 6G begins, one question looms large: will it be China or the United States who builds our future?
When a bioengineer-turned-infosec expert learns of an advanced forensic technique that was used to hunt down the Golden State Killer, he is immediately concerned over how this technique will impact the tens of millions of Americans who’ve undergone genetic testing. Unable to stand by with millions of genetic profiles already online, he teams up with a biomedical engineer to identify the emerging threats to American genomic data. Their findings will lead you to second guess whether genetic testing is really worth it. Meanwhile, a renowned chemist who managed the world’s largest repository of DNA data—the FBI’s CODIS—discusses what the future of DNA analysis will look like at the FBI Laboratory. With fast, cheap, and universally accessible full genome sequencing on the horizon, the race is on to secure our genomes—but is it possible that our insatiable appetite for information might hinder our ability to secure our most intimate datasets?
Fresh off his PhD, a gifted engineer harnesses the power of Edge Computing to bring NASA onto the web. Meanwhile, Amazon has just invented cloud computing—a soon-to-be trillion-dollar industry that will quickly entice customers from both industry and government. But despite the immense potential of Amazon Web Services, engineers in government are increasingly concerned with the privacy risks posed by the public cloud and set out to build a totally open-source virtualization platform for hosting private clouds at the edge. It’s an audacious goal. Will they succeed?
With the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 just under ten years ago, we gained the ability to precisely alter the human genome overnight. Now, with this hyper-precise “swiss army knife” of gene editing in hand, a MITRE biologist decides it’s time to assess the emerging techniques for delivering CRISPR into cells that are within the human body and finds a great deal of promise in the same drug delivery system that was used to deliver the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Meanwhile, a pediatric hospitalist discusses the pros and cons of using re-engineered viruses to deliver CRISPR and an immunogeneticist explains why we are on the cusp of curing a major disease with a CRISPR-based gene therapy. With so much potential for CRISPR to cure a broad range of genetic diseases, will researchers be able to overcome the safety issues that surround delivering CRISPR to the precise tissues in the human body that need editing?
Just after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released their sixth report detailing the dire threats of our changing climate, two MITRE engineers decide it’s time to clarify what transitioning to “green” technology will look like for the United States federal government. It’s a daunting task, given there is no standard definition for what makes a product, technology, or organization “green.” Meanwhile, the Tech Futures Innovation Area Leader explains how she helped to reignite the broader climate change research effort at MITRE and gives her take on who in the government might be an early adopter of green technology. For our soldiers and public servants on the frontlines of the fight against climate change, there is a lot at stake. But will a top-down definition of “green” be enough to spur the nationwide deployment of the sustainable technologies that our planet desperately needs?
As our 3G and 4G networks struggle to keep up with increasing demand, two researchers investigate the potential solution to this traffic congestion problem - millimeter waves - and find that this new portion of the wireless spectrum will be critical for the expansion of bandwidth in 5G and beyond. Nevertheless, millimeter waves come with some serious performance tradeoffs. Thus, to better understand these tradeoffs, these two researchers start to compare different models for how millimeter waves propagate through different environments—also known as millimeter wave “channel models”-and their investigation takes a surprising turn when it leads to a profound discovery with implications that go beyond channel modeling, teaching us a lesson about the nature of science itself.
Back in 2017, the sudden appearance of ride share e-scooters on our sidewalks and streets ignited what some call a transportation revolution and what others call a disastrous experiment in unregulated mobility. E-scooter proponents argue this form of mobility will be critical to modernizing our ground transportation infrastructure. But as more and more road users have been caught in the crosshairs of the fast and unpredictable e-scooter, a growing contingent of detractors argue that the safety of our ground transportation system depends on regulators reigning in this new mode of mobility. With this contentious debate in full swing, a MITRE engineer decides it’s time to take a closer look at the benefits and challenges of the infamous e-scooter and finds that the debate is even more complicated than one could imagine. With the future of micromobility at stake, will the public ever buy in to this highly polarizing transportation experiment? Or are we just not ready for any innovative disruptors on our roadways?
In 2020, a paper titled Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Founded Assumptions took the cryptographic community by storm. While a bit mundane sounding to a layperson, cryptographers around the world (including MITRE’s own Dr. Moses Liskov) were quick to realize what Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Founded Assumptions represented: a once in a generation breakthrough in cryptography. With this in mind, Dr. Moses Liskov set out to figure out what this cryptographic breakthrough would mean for MITRE’s sponsors. From U.S. federal agencies to nearly every private company that relies on proprietary software, the world has been eagerly awaiting a solution that would allow for the protection of algorithms from reverse engineering attacks without impacting an end user’s ability to run them on their own hardware. Will Indistinguishability Obfuscation be the silver bullet that our software-driven world has been waiting for? Or will the challenges of putting this cryptographic scheme into practice be too great to overcome?
2021 will be remembered as the year of many firsts in space. In the span of only a few months, we saw three billionaires, a pediatric cancer survivor, the winner of a Super Bowl sweepstakes, and the oldest person in history go to space. As the world watched in awe, a team at MITRE wondered what the increasing diversity of Spaceflight participants will mean for the future of Space Medicine—the science of how the human body is affected by traveling and living in a place that is fundamentally inhospitable to human life—i.e., outer space. With the democratization of space travel underway, how will we balance the health risks of space with our species’ existential need to explore what lies beyond our little blue planet?
With the tighter integration of voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri into our daily lives, a MITRE team decides it’s time to take a closer look at how personalities for machines are designed. In doing so, the team brings together lessons learned from past failures and present best practices to generate a novel open-source approach for designing synthetic personalities: one based on the careful selection of personality traits that are closely aligned with a machine’s mission context. Meanwhile, Dr. Sarah Corley, a renowned Internist and Medical Informaticist, discusses how better designed synthetic personalities might one day enhance her ability to care for her patients. Nevertheless, researchers must overcome the persistent challenge of the misalignment of user expectations with machine capabilities if Dr. Corley’s aspirations are ever to become a reality.