On a quiet street just off of Nashville's historic Music Row, a dedicated team of more than 100 researchers are developing software systems that may very well revolutionize the modern world. From cutting edge cyber-security tech designed to defend America's most critical networks to computer-learning algorithms that could all but eliminate airline crashes, Vanderbilt's Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) is making our Internet of Things safer, better, stronger, and more resilient.I recently sat down with Professor Doug Schmidt, Associate Chair of the Computer Science and Engineering Program at Vanderbilt University, to learn more about what goes on at this secretive research center. You won't believe what they've got in store.Gizmodo: Can you tell us a bit about the projects you're currently involved with?Doug Schmidt: We do a lot of work with various government agencies, like DARPA and the military service labs. We do a lot of work at places like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. We also do work with industry, like Microsoft, Siemens, or General Electric, and with companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and so on.We have about a dozen different projects right now. One of the things that we've been doing has been focusing on trying to make it less expensive for the government to build large-scale defense systems. We're doing something called "open systems," trying to build systems that use standards-based off-the-shelf parts so that people don't have to spend a fortune trying to build them all in a proprietary way.We've been focusing on something called the future airborne capability environment, which is basically a common operating platform, composed of standards, reference notation, performance tools, and so on. We can use that to reduce the cost of acquiring software for military avionics systems—things like Joint Strike Fighter, the F18, and so on.We've also been spending a lot of our time working with DARPA to come up with a way to revolutionize how military vehicles are built. So, rather than going in and having people go on these things manually with screwdrivers and blow torches or bending metal by hand, we're building model-based tools that allow designers, architects, and systems engineers to essentially make the effective equivalent of a CAD diagram. Then we can analyze those diagrams for various properties electronically and computationally.Once people are comfortable and happy with how it looks in the simulator, then they can go ahead and actually develop tools that will fabricate the result. It's something kind of akin to 3D printing if you will. Rather than doing everything manually, you can use computer-aided design tools to do the composition, the synthesis, and the analysis at the design level. Then, when you're happy, you push a button and out come specs that are fed into robots to make the actual thing you're trying to build.Giz: That's fascinating. Now are the design aspects off-the-shelf components as well? Or have you guys had to develop custom software?DS: What we've actually done for, gosh, 10 to 15 years or so, is building a suite of tools that make it easier to design software. It's called the generic modeling environment—GME—and what we do is take the infrastructure and the tools that we've built in-house, and we've customized them on something called the advanced vehicle make program, and we customize them from the domain of designing vehicles....
...MUCH MORE
