Meeting Grand Challenges with Cadre of Geniuses

At MITRE's Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD), the department in charge of Traffic Flow Management Systems Engineering and Evolution represents a pool of some of the brightest minds in Systems and Software Engineering, not just in terms of the US but I believe globally. This department is developing software based on some of the most complex and intriguing multidisciplinary concepts. The Grand Challenge they face daily is to develop decision support and analysis tools that allow users to make better choices with regard to the use of our National Airspace System in an equitable manner within tight time constraints. The solutions that these individuals have created and are still producing could be applied to a much broader range of complex problems.

This team is comprised of many dedicated highly intelligent open minded professionals that continually embrace new ideas and approaches. They exemplify successful collaborative teamwork in research and development.

Seeing the forest all at once, knowledge discovery and data mining

A demand exists for developing methods to learn from vast data sets like those related to climate studies, macroeconomics analysis, etc. We might be able to discover knowledge by looking at these massive databases as single entities with features that can be compared from one instance of a set to another.

Multi-state transistors beyond binary

What could be done with a transistor capable of n-states?

With the advent of molecular switches and nanotech as well as optical and/or quantum based computing we may soon be presented with the opportunity to think about algorithms and software engineering in completely different ways. With limited fuzzy logic implemented in hardware like analog, we may be able to take wholly new approaches to many of the most complex problems.