The Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is marking 40 years as a cornerstone of advancing software as a strategic advantage for national security. For four decades, the SEI has worked to make software do more, be more secure, deploy faster, and cost less, improving software systems vital to national defense and the broader information technology ecosystem.

The DoD established the SEI in 1984, and the institute began operation in early 1985. Since then, the SEI has been at the forefront of technology transformations that changed how the DoD provides capabilities and protects its systems and networks. Early on, the SEI recognized the importance of process improvement in software development and evolved the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), a framework for assessing an organization’s software process maturity. Following the Morris worm attack in 1988, the SEI became a leader in incident response, vulnerability analysis, and cybersecurity research. The SEI led a third key technology transformation in software architecture, particularly through creation of the Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL), which enabled modeling and analysis of complex systems. And in the last decade, the SEI has advanced artificial intelligence (AI) from bespoke solutions and isolated algorithms toward an AI Engineering discipline and an AI system development lifecycle.