A Message from the Director and Chief Executive Officer
With the emergence of artificial intelligence, our society faces a time of great possibility but also great risk. The latest innovation is generative AI, which has appeared nearly everywhere people produce information digitally. The technology has tremendous potential, significant flaws, and few norms around its usage.
Like other challenges we’ve tackled, AI involves software, and software has faced other uncertain times. When the SEI was founded in 1984, software engineering lacked the necessary rigor, so we developed best practices for engineering dependable systems. When unsecured networked systems threatened the Department of Defense and businesses around the world, we formed the CERT Division to launch new defenses against cyberattacks.
Now, with AI, we don’t yet have a functional understanding of its end state or how we can best use the technology. Gaining this understanding is our next big challenge as we drive toward knowing the roles of AI, the rules that govern them, and how they apply to the DoD.
This challenge is not unlike the first ones we took on in the 1980s, and in the past few years we have been applying a similar approach with AI engineering. More recently, we’ve been testing generative AI’s initial usefulness and trustworthiness in different contexts important to our DoD sponsor. Over the past year, we expanded our capability to tackle AI risks more broadly with the AI Security Incident Response Team (AISIRT) and the Center for Calibrated Trust Measurement and Evaluation (CaTE).
AI may get headlines, but the SEI’s other core competencies in cybersecurity and software continue to support our national security mission.
Paul Nielsen SEI Director and CEO
AI may get headlines, but the SEI’s other core competencies in cybersecurity and software continue to support our national security mission. Our roadmap for software engineering research and development has led to important community discussions on U.S. leadership in software and AI engineering. Cybersecurity research has enhanced vulnerability prioritization at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and brought zero trust practices to Army tactical networks. Our involvement with architecture and systems modeling languages led to a breakthrough in the development of safety-critical software systems.
AI surely won’t be the last uncertain technology we face in our unique mission to advance the art of software engineering. We’ll keep adapting to emerging software developments as they arise, drawing on our dedicated, driven researchers and collaborating with government, industry, and academia to find the best path forward and continue delivering impactful solutions for the DoD.
Paul Nielsen
Execution Strategy
The SEI facilitates the transfer of research results to practice in Department of Defense (DoD) programs, the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s science and technology initiatives, and non-DoD U.S. government organizations where improvements will also benefit the DoD. In doing so, we gain deeper insight into mission needs—insight that forms the basis for new research. In addition, we transition matured technologies more broadly to defense industrial base organizations and others in the DoD supply chain.
We execute applied research to drive systemic transition of new capabilities for the DoD. Our deep understanding of DoD needs and of the state of the art inform our selection of challenges in software, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence.
To validate research and development concepts, we rapidly iterate with the research community and select mission partners. The results typically impact a single agency. We then scale the concept to multiple agencies and domains by iterating with additional mission partners based on their timing and needs. Finally, we engage policy agencies and industry partners and build the DoD’s awareness of and capacity for the solution to create DoD-wide capability.
Our multidisciplinary approach informs prototype tools, innovative solutions, and input for our sponsor’s policy decisions about software and related technologies. Through ongoing work and communication with customers, the SEI identifies priority areas for further research and development. We combine our body of knowledge with external material and systems engineering to deliver quantitative impact to U.S. government organizations, DoD organizations, and DoD end users.