Innovation and Collaboration
The Technology Office works to enhance inventiveness and innovation at the Laboratory through various opportunities and Laboratory-wide activities that sustain a culture of creative problem solving and innovative thinking.
Technology Office Challenges
Each year, we design scenarios that challenge multidisciplinary teams to invent creative solutions to emerging problems affecting national security. The goals of these challenges are to promote innovation, encourage people to work in new areas, and have fun.
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Symposia
We organize events at which researchers from national labs, academia, the military, and industry can learn about the latest developments in a wide range of technologies that can have significant impact on national security.
The Advanced Research Technology Symposium (ARTS) is typically held at MIT to connect with academics, students, and entrepreneurs on MIT campus and in the New England area. The symposium highlights some of the most pressing challenges confronting our nation's security and well-being, and proposes ways advanced technology can help address these challenges. Presentations, poster sessions, and panel discussions engage attendees.
The Recent Advances in Artificial Intelligence for National Security (RAAINS) focuses at a deep-technical level on current state-of-the-art AI applications that have been developed for national security needs. The workshop showcases examples of significant progress in applying AI and provides a glimpse into promising future R&D into AI technology.
Best Invention and Best Paper
Annually, to reward experimentation and creative thinking, we recognize one or two inventions that demonstrate an innovative solution to an engineering problem.
We also recognize a paper that presents the results of creative, high-caliber research, fostering the importance of publishing findings that can fuel the development of new concepts and technologies.
2023 Best Invention
Engineered Substrates for Rapid Advanced Imaging Sensor Development, invented by Dr. Kevin K. Ryu, Dr. Brian F. Aull, Joseph S. Ciampi, Renee D. Lambert, Dr. Christopher W. Leitz, K. Alexander McIntosh, Steven Rabe, Dr. Daniel R. Schuette, and David Volfson.
A novel method to achieve thinned silicon substrates for imaging detectors at the chip rather than the wafer scale allows for rapid prototyping of new image sensor concepts. Using this technology, imaging detector arrays can be thinned to just 5 µm after they have been attached to a readout integrated circuit (ROIC). The thinned substrates enable detectors with 1000x higher dynamic range for visible imaging and provide a path to fabricate curved ROICs. Applications of this technology include observing dim objects near the sun and dramatically reducing the volume requirements of optics systems to facilitate their insertion into platforms constrained by size, weight, and power.
2023 Best Paper
A Wide-Area Deep Ocean Floor Mapping System: Design and Sea Tests, written by Paul S. Ryu, David D. Brown, Kevin D. Arsenault, Dr. Byung Gu Cho, Dr. Andrew I. March, Dr. Wael H. Ali (MIT), Dr. Aaron Charous (MIT), and Prof. Pierre F.J. Lermusiaux (MIT) and published in Geomatics, vol. 3, no. 1, 2023, pp. 290–311.
This paper was chosen for describing a surface-based sonar array for cost effectively mapping the deep ocean floor at high resolution and high area-coverage rates. Despite oceans covering 71% of Earth’s surface, little is known about this underwater environment. Seabed maps generated by the array would have applications to oceanography, climate change modeling, infrastructure monitoring, disaster response, and natural resource exploration. The component technologies for precision-relative navigation are also extensible to other applications using cohorts of uncrewed vehicles to achieve a single effect. The scale, technical soundness, and breadth of impact of the work set this paper apart.
