SFI has consistently nurtured relationships with insightful practitioners and radical innovators. In robust discussions, these leaders have raised provoking questions and offered access to data, while SFI scientists have shared insights and tools to help business leaders tackle real-world problems. Over the past 32 years, many of these partnerships have been organized within SFI’s Applied Complexity Network (ACtioN). ACtioN members can access topical and bespoke sessions, select scientific meetings, and attend SFI’s educational programming. SFI’s longest-standing ACtioN member, The MITRE Corporation, has taken advantage of all of these throughout MITRE’s nearly 30-year relationship with SFI.
Founded to bridge a gap between academia, industry, and the U.S. federal government, MITRE operates six Federally Funded Research and Development Centers and employs more than 9,000 people. As a not-for-profit organization working in the public interest, MITRE addresses complex whole-of-nation challenges that threaten the country’s safety, security, and prosperity. Its independent research and development program pursues a wide range of research topics from national and cyber security to aviation safety to spectrum sharing — tough, important topics that require unconventional approaches.
“The systems we seek to engineer are only getting more complex. Increasingly, they are digital, and AI has added another layer of complexity,” says Charles Clancy, MITRE Senior Vice President, General Manager of MITRE Labs, and Chief Technology Officer. “We need new approaches to make sure that we get the needed performance from our systems.”
Over the past few decades, MITRE employees have attended SFI’s flagship Complex Systems Summer School, receiving a broad introduction to complexity tools and a forum to explore specific research questions. They return with a toolkit of new ideas and approaches.
“From an early-career perspective, we’ve found it particularly effective to send folks to the summer school,” says Matt Koehler, Principal Computational Finance Scientist and MITRE’s ACtioN liaison. “It’s a nice firehose and introduction to doing multidisciplinary science.” Studios and other meetings have shed light on particular topics of concern for MITRE. “Those have been effective examples of how we can take complexity science and leverage it for what we’re trying to accomplish for our federal government sponsors and the problems facing our nation.”
For instance, an SFI workshop co-organized by Koehler, SFI External Professor Seth Blumsack (Penn State University) and former External Professor Paul Hines (University of Vermont) offered new tools for analyzing the nation’s power grid; SFI Professor Melanie Mitchell has spoken with MITRE staff about artificial intelligence; and agent-based models, a tool used widely among SFI researchers, have matured to the point of being widely incorporated in both military and public-facing research questions at MITRE.
“We do regular reviews of our corporate memberships and the impact they are having,” says MITRE’s Claudia Froberg, Chief of Staff, Office of the Chief Engineer and Chief Medical Officer. “Every time we review it, we renew it. We see the value in the tools and techniques staff bring back from the summer school session and in the SFI network of experts and events.”
The relationship also infuses SFI with new ideas and insights from researchers at MITRE. Over the years, SFI and MITRE researchers have co-
authored multiple papers on topics ranging from counter-terrorism to financial system analyses. Researchers regularly welcome Koehler, who moved to Santa Fe more than a decade ago to nurture the partnership, into their workshops.
“It’s a symbiotic relationship,” says Casey Cox, director of the Applied Complexity Network. “MITRE utilizes their membership in the way that we always hope companies will.”