ONR awarded a $13 million grant to Saab for its Threat and Situational Understanding with Networked-Online Machine Intelligence (TSUNOMI) program, of which roughly $4.3 million is expected to filter to Purdue as a four-year subcontract.

 “There is an urgent need to create technological solutions that allow networks of sensors equipped with sophisticated AI to quickly detect and identify potential threats,” Shreyas Sundaram, Purdue’s Marie Gordon Associate Professor in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said in a statement this week.

Sundaram is one of many experts at Purdue who will be investigating a host of challenges for TSUNOMI, including where to deploy sensors for the best coverage, how to design machine learning algorithms for object identification, and how to blend information from multiple sensors to correctly determine objects’ type and intent.

Ultimately, through this research officials aim to produce “an explainable machine learning framework with multimodal automatic target recognition and sensor resource management for early warning and situational awareness from surface vessels equipped with an automated verification and validation machine learning pipeline,” the university’s press release notes.

Purdue plans to primarily use its funding to support graduate student research and faculty time — and to purchase sensors for the work.

“The project seeks to formulate effective techniques and algorithms to blend information from multiple sensors, such as cameras and radar, that have been deployed in an area to accurately identify objects that might enter that area. For example, one might wish to quickly determine if a flying object near an airport is a bird or a drone, and if it is a drone, whether or not it is adversarial and what its target might be,” Sundaram said.

Technologies developed through TSUNOMI are first intended for transition to a U.S. Navy unmanned surface vessel, and then into various commercial markets.

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Semiconductors are embedded in and power many critical modern-day technologies, like computers, smartphones, pacemakers, vehicles, the electric grid and much more. Microchips originated in America during the 1950s, but today, the nation consumes roughly half of those made worldwide. At the same time, only around 12% of microchips are currently manufactured in the U.S., which creates supply chain vulnerabilities.

In 2020, Purdue University announced it was selected to steer a national initiative sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense to confront the escalating need for engineering graduates specializing in microelectronics. That multi-university public-private-academic partnership — the Scalable Asymmetric Lifecycle Engagement Microelectronics Workforce Development program (SCALE) — saw an initial investment from the Pentagon of $19.2 million.

Purdue officials confirmed on Monday that the DOD has moved to expand SCALE with a commitment of $10.8 million in additional funding and a possible ceiling of $99 million.

“Part of the rationale for expansion is to continue existing work in areas like system-on-chip and embedded systems security / trusted artificial intelligence. The other part of the rationale was to extend the mission to K-12 programs, with an initial small-scale pilot aimed at providing a national model for introducing context and content to K-12 teachers, staff, and students,” Peter Bermel, SCALE director and the Elmore Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue, told DefenseScoop in an email Monday.

The U.S. will need 50,000 trained semiconductor engineers to meet rapidly increasing demand in the near term, according to Bermel, meaning there’s more room for students to support government and defense contractor requirements. 

“This is a unique opportunity to both help students pursue highly impactful career opportunities, meet national needs, and update the university programs to reflect the rapidly-changing research and educational landscape in this area,” he said.

Managed by the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division (NSWC Crane), SCALE connects faculty from nearly 20 universities, and experts from dozens of entities across the government and defense industry, with the ultimate goal of ensuring the U.S. has a personnel pipeline necessary to meet next-generation national security needs. Academic institutions involved are frequently informed by the dozens of public and private stakeholders on expectations for new entrants of the microelectronics-focused workforce, and typically update their curricula to reflect those insights. 

SCALE-enrolled undergraduate and graduate students can receive mentoring and research opportunities from the organizations involved, and there are also pathways for internships and job placements.  

The program is evolving, but as of June, government and industry partners included the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Missile Defense Agency, Space Force, NASA, multiple military research labs, Boeing, L3Harris, Northrop Grumman, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company — among many others. 

“SCALE’s impact includes reaching 287 students at 17 universities; 17 defense industry partners; and 17 government partners, with more to come in the near future,” Bermel told DefenseScoop.

In a recent survey of students associated with SCALE, 73% of respondents reported being hired into “a suitable summer internship or research position,” he said. The majority of those who participated in the survey also reported positive experiences around the mentoring provided. 

“Recent SCALE graduates, predominantly undergraduates so far, have been reported as going onto defense industrial base companies and graduate study,” Bermel said.

With the five-year expansion and extension from DOD, officials intend to grow student participation in SCALE fivefold — to more than 1,000 — and cooperate with community colleges to create microelectronics courses across the nation.

Microelectronics is a top priority for Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu, and it’s listed among 14 technology areas of critical importance to the Pentagon.

This new announcement also follows the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act, which revamps and advances domestic capabilities to drive the making of such nanotechnologies. 

In addition to SCALE, Purdue is leading other strategic initiatives to boost microelectronics development, including the MidWest Research Regional Hub effort, the first comprehensive semiconductor degree program conducted in partnership with SkyWater Technology, that is expected to generate a $1.8 billion future state-of-the-art chips manufacturing facility.

The Indiana-based university currently houses the Birck Nanotechnology Center — a facility focused on the production of microelectronics and semiconductors, as well as capabilities in other, generally related, disciplines.

In the last few months, U.S. government leaders including Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo have visited the center.

After touring the facility in August, where she observed microelectronics unfold in real-time, Hicks told faculty, researchers and students “there is no understating how critical that work is.”

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Lab officials announced the formation of this new science and technology ecosystem in February, with the intent to promote more collaborative research, translation, and workforce development pursuits strategically within U.S. regions.

Purdue and Cornell universities were tapped as the initial leading institutions that will help AFRL facilitate deeper work with businesses, venture capitalists, other academic institutions and government agencies in their surrounding areas. 

“Over the last six months, we’ve been very active in standing up the operations — everything from information security, to [intellectual property] relationships, to membership agreements and information-sharing — all the fun things that are behind the scenes to make something like this work,” Richard Vaia, AFRL’s chief scientist for materials and manufacturing, recently told DefenseScoop. “Starting this Fall, we’re going to solicit the initial pilot technical projects, with a scope of about an 18-month sprint for such a project.”

On a recent technology-focused trip to that lab and other federally-aligned research facilities with Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, DefenseScoop was briefed by Vaia and others on those in-the-pipeline projects and certain unique elements of this new experimental network of regional research hubs.

“I would argue this is like a grassroots version of what the future of research engagement could look like,” Purdue University mechanical engineering professor and laboratory director Jeffrey Rhoads noted.

The genesis

Based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, AFRL helps lead the discovery, development and integration of emerging capabilities for both the Air and the Space Forces. Officials there have historically relied heavily on other government entities, commercial vendors, and academic partners to do so, with which they engage both collaboratively or transactionally.

In 2017, then-Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson tasked the lab to explore ways to engage differently and more effectively “in the innovation ecosystem outside the gates,” Brian McJilton, director of the lab’s Small Business Directorate, explained to reporters during a briefing on Hicks’ visit. The deputy secretary received mostly classified briefings with more sensitive details on similar topics.

Officials brainstormed, McJilton said, asking, “What are some of those best practices that we can glean from industry, academia, and maybe other government organizations to be a much more cohesive and accelerated operation for the Air Force?”

Between then and 2019, AFRL officials conducted a number of ideation events with universities and companies across the United States, inviting many participants from different regions across the nation to engage in-person with lab officials to brainstorm and discuss various challenge areas they are collectively facing.

“What we found was that — while we pride ourselves on being well known — we found out that AFRL is not as well known across the U.S. as we thought we were,” McJilton said.

In some segments of the country, lab officials also found that broadly people had very little understanding of the Air Force’s mission “other than just planes,” he noted.

From those engagements AFRL officials also found that enabling subject matter experts to work “on the other side of its fence” provided new opportunities for learning and supporting those regional ecosystems. Since then, the lab has been targeting a number of implementation efforts to incentivize external collaboration and workforce development simultaneously.

“That’s what really led up to the genesis of the regional hub idea,” McJilton said.

The Air Force’s R&D arm kicked off the pilot in Summer 2021 and signed cooperative agreements in February. 

After a bit of research and analysis, the lab tapped Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, to lead the AFRL Regional Research Hub — Mid-Atlantic, and Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, to lead the AFRL Regional Research Hub — Midwest.

During briefings at AFRL, lab insiders emphasized that this work is inherently experimental, as a pilot. 

“The idea is that we’re establishing a new way of doing business with the outside community through this,” Vaia noted. “Instead of one-off relationships, we’ll work through an ecosystem. The two universities that were chosen, were chosen as the leaders of the ecosystem. So the hub is not with the university — the hub is with the university and the ecosystem that is surrounded.” 

He and his colleagues added that a key to success in this effort is to get technology accelerated through to industry via more direct engagement between all the sectors.

“This is really, truly partnering in the full definition of a partnership where we’re bringing our resources to the table, they’re bringing their resources together — and collectively together, we’re pursuing areas of interest, both from the military and commercial sense,” McJilton said.

What’s new

The ultimate aim is that the different partners will learn more about each other’s facilities, missions, talent pipelines and supply chain challenges to inform smarter solutions down the line.

“Another key attribute of this regional hub ecosystem is the experiential learning that our [subject matter experts] are going to be able to get from working side-by-side with other SMEs,” McJilton said. 

They could evolve based on national security and modernization priorities in the future, but the initial strategic technology focus areas that the Midwest hub will concentrate on are energetics, hypersonics and microelectronics.

“You will see an incredible suite of capabilities at Purdue associated with their new defense-oriented facilities that actually allow a lot of classified research on campus, which is very exciting,” Vaia told reporters who were heading to the university with Hicks.

Staff of that academic institution and AFRL have been actively enlisting membership in the hub. Currently, members of the regional ecosystem anchored at Purdue include less than a half-dozen companies from around Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. Academic institutions in that hub include the University of Wisconsin, as well as Purdue, Ohio State, South Dakota and Notre Dame universities.

“We’re still interested in engaging additional partners in the Midwest, or nationally, that want to engage more with the Midwest,” Rhoads told DefenseScoop in an interview.

A mechanical engineer by training, Rhoads is a professor and lab director at Purdue who is also deeply involved in the school’s collaboration with the government and companies. Any entities interested in working with the hub can reach out to him directly through the university, he noted.

In Rhoads’ view, the promotion of side-by-side, technology-focused personnel exchange opportunities for those employed by AFRL and hub members is one of multiple unique and defining features of this unfolding pursuit.

“That’s not to say there hasn’t been new segments of personnel exchanges in other contexts — but the concept that the Air Force or the Space Force, for example, might be willing to put personnel in companies to learn how those companies operate, but also share subject matter expertise, or to do the same at universities, I think is a much further extension of other things that have been talked about in recent years,” he said.

Rhoads is involved in benchmarking the program against existing efforts such as the Naval Tech Bridge and the Army Research Lab’s regional campuses. His team hopes this work will take related original concepts about public-private partnerships to the next level.

“There’s not just going to be a representative in the region. There’s actually going to be representatives and scientists and engineers embedded in laboratories and in companies,” he said. “If people aren’t talking and seeing the realities on the ground, they’re going to make decisions that are suboptimal because they just don’t have the best information available. So, to me, this is short-circuiting some of those communication chains so that people live and breathe and see things, you know, face to face.”

Another notable element of the work is the deeper access to facilities between parties and sharper awareness that could help reduce the duplication of technological resources across sectors. 

“A good example of that is the facility you saw. I mean, it doesn’t make sense to have hundreds of hypersonic wind tunnels around the nation. If there’s a select number well-distributed that a lot of different people can access, that’s a much more sustainable model from a national perspective,” Rhoads said.

While the notion of public-private partnerships is not novel, in Rhoads’ view, such engagements are typically very weighted in one component’s direction or another.

“My take on the hub, from the academic side, is it’s trying to think about new partnership models where you’re really bringing academia, government and industry to the table as near equal partners,” he said. “I don’t want to paint it as a three-way picture because I think the other piece of that is the venture [capital] community.”

In the past, only a small segment of venture capitalists generally engaged with the Pentagon, because their return on investment has traditionally been quite low. Rhoads hopes this will help de-risk the process to work with DOD for such organizations in the future.

During the briefing at AFRL, Vaia noted that plans for the Cornell- and Purdue-based regional hubs include initiating one to three projects and engaging five to 10 experts with each of the universities in this first year of the pilot. Officials envision having six 12-month projects ongoing at one time. 

The overarching intent of the pilot is for each regional network to approach the collective goals in their own special ways.

“After a three-year run, we’ll assess if this is really achieving the goals of engaging the ecosystem and accelerating technology — and at that point, we’ll either decide to expand the concept to maybe add a few additional regions or decide that it was a great experiment that we learned from and go back and reassess the next steps,” Vaia said.

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Hypersonic missiles are designed to fly faster than Mach 5 and be highly maneuverable. The weapons are anticipated to provide military advantage in the next era of warfare, prompting a sharp focus and additional funding from America, China, Russia and others in recent years. 

With that, and the growing hype around it all, there’s also increasing analyses essentially ranking how different countries are designing, testing and deploying hypersonics. But Hicks said making such comparisons are “the wrong way to look at the problem.”

“It has an arms race mentality to it and we hear a lot of it. So, it’s a fair reflection of where I think a lot of the conversation has been. The reality is that the United States has a series of concepts for how it believes it can fight effectively,” Hicks told journalists accompanying her on a multi-state tour of government and academic facilities that are supporting the nation’s development of modern platforms and tools necessary for future conflicts.

“And we have a good understanding now of where we would employ hypersonic capability in that. It’s different than how we believe the Chinese or the Russians look at how they would employ hypersonic capabilities,” she added. “The Russians, for instance, have used hypersonic capabilities in Ukraine to no noticeable effect.” 

While she did not elaborate on Russia’s employment of these types of missiles, Hicks said “it’s wrong” to focus solely on the numbers of systems Russia or other countries have, suggesting other nations wouldn’t necessarily use them as effectively as the U.S. military or its allies.

“We’ve seen this very clearly on the Russian tank side, for instance, as well,” the deputy secretary added, pointing to what many observers see as shortcomings in the Russian military’s employment of its forces in Ukraine.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is very intent on making sure the Defense Department stays “laser-focused” on the capabilities that the U.S. needs to effectively prosecute a campaign in any future war, Hicks said.

“I don’t want to say much more than that for obvious reasons,” she added. 

Pentagon officials have previously said that hypersonics could be used to hit time-sensitive targets or heavily defended targets.

The department plans to begin fielding newly developed systems next year. Russia and China have already fielded these types of weapons.

At Purdue University, the last stop on her two-day tour of high-tech facilities, Hicks engaged faculty, students and scientists on efforts pertaining to hypersonics, microelectronics and other critical fields.

Industry and academia contribute in major ways to the Defense Department’s hypersonics-aligned pursuits. On Purdue’s sprawling campus, Hicks was briefed on a wide range of topics including nanotechnology, workforce development and equity, quantum information science and public-private collaboration.

She also toured Zucrow Labs, where she received briefings on hypersonics research, energetic materials and propulsion. 

Assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics Joseph Jewell noted the university has pursued hypersonics research for decades. Currently, 14 graduate students are studying in its program — more than half of whom already hold security clearances.

“Most of them go on to work in defense-related technology once they graduate,” said Jewell, who served for more than five years in the Air Force Research Laboratory’s hypersonics office before joining Purdue in 2019.

The institution’s Zucrow Labs consists of six buildings that house 22 individual labs, a two-server cluster computing facility, a professional machine shop, and more.

“As part of the next-generation here, we are standing in Purdue’s new 65,000-square-foot, $41 million hypersonics and applied research facility, which will house two new hypersonic wind tunnels to add to our already world class, Mach 6 — the largest low disturbance hypersonic tunnel in the world,” he noted during the tour. 

Hicks walked through space that will house future hypersonic capabilities, including one that will be active by 2025.

“[It] will be the large Mach 8 low-disturbance flight tunnel — a full-flow but low-atmospheric disturbance level hypersonic tunnel that will also be the first of its kind in the world,” Jewell said.

Following the university visit, Hicks briefed reporters on some of her takeaways.

“I do think we’ve had some really promising movements on the U.S. hypersonic programs — plural,” she said. “And they’re in line with how we think about the employment strategy.”

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As the Pentagon’s No. 2 official, Hicks has been a driving force behind the department’s efforts to adopt artificial intelligence across the force, implement Joint All-Domain Command and Control, and other high-profile initiatives. Departing on a whirlwind two-day trip on Wednesday, she is set to visit Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Scott Air Force Base in Illinois and Purdue University’s hypersonics hub in Indiana. 

The trip marks one of multiple engagements Hicks is leading in the near term to promote tech collaboration across sectors and, explicitly, support U.S. strategic competition with adversaries.

“This is [all about] building our capacity and capabilities to compete against China,” a senior Defense official told reporters Tuesday during a background briefing to preview the trip. The briefers spoke on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon.

In Tennessee, Hicks will meet with Oak Ridge National Lab Director Thomas Zacharia and other Energy Department leaders and scientists to learn about ongoing efforts to bolster American supply chains — particularly as nations everywhere grapple with a semiconductor shortage exacerbated by the pandemic. Hicks will also meet with researchers and students, see the first U.S. exascale supercomputer, and tour two manufacturing facilities.

“From a broad perspective, what the unjust invasion of Ukraine has shown us is our ability to really network together — from a second-, third- and fourth tier-supplier base — what we need, and we’re reprioritizing that,” another senior Defense official noted during the briefing. “We obviously, from a domestic perspective, have stepped forward and you’ll see the next generation from procurement contracts of some of these weapons systems. But these older systems do have strategic relevance. And so we’re now rethinking exactly how we make sure, using things like additive manufacturing, we’re helping industry be responsive and flexible.”

After visiting Oak Ridge, Hicks will head to Wright-Patterson to visit the Air Force Research Laboratory. There, she will be briefed on counter-directed energy weapons experimentation and initiatives — and other cutting-edge capabilities being developed to advance national security objectives. 

At Scott, where U.S. Transportation Command is based, Transcom officials will brief her on efforts to integrate artificial intelligence into their logistics systems, among other topics.

For the last destination on the tour, Hicks will meet with faculty and students at Purdue University, and visit the Hypersonics Advanced Manufacturing Technology Center, where she’ll deliver a speech and be briefed on efforts to bolster the nation’s pipeline of professionals with microelectronics and hypersonics expertise, which will be critical for the Pentagon’s modernization efforts.

“We let our hypersonics capability sort of atrophy over time,” a senior Defense official said. “So, we are now trying to reengage — and that’s why the workforce has to be reengaged as well.”

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