CMU awarded $2.7B defense contract
Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute was awarded a $2.7 billion contract from the U.S. Department of Defense to continue federally funded research that focuses on software, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.
The contract, which was announced Tuesday, extends the work of SEI through 2025.
A federally funded research and development center, the Software Engineering Institute focuses broadly on helping advance national security efforts.
That includes projects like maintaining a catalog of all the malware in the country or a type of model-based software engineering that helps develop software programs quickly or a system that takes the methods of the commercial world and brings them into the work of the government.
The Department of Defense has renewed funding for the Software Engineering Institute every five years since it launched back in 1984, according to director and CEO Paul Nielsen.
When the institute first started, the personal computer was still in its early days and cybersecurity was not yet a concern, he said. Now, just about everyone has a computer, and cybersecurity makes up about 50% of the researchers’ work.
Most recently, researchers at the institute have turned to artificial intelligence, Mr. Nielsen said.
Rather than building AI systems, SEI works to answer questions such as: How can they prove the AI systems are safe? How do they know the data sets the AI relies on are not biased? How do we know the systems are making the decisions that we expect?
As long as the institute has been around, Mr. Nielsen said it has focused on “software architecture,” or how the different parts of the system work together. Think of it like an architect designing a house, he said. In addition to the structure of the building, they have to think about things like the plumbing and the airflow.
“When you’re building the software systems, you’ve got to think about what is the real mission of the software and then how does it interact with all the other things that are there,” he said.
This year, for example, SEI is working with the Army on a tool that looks at architectures and evaluates them quickly in order to help them develop helicopters and other vertical lift aircraft.
One of the goals of software architecture is to determine what is the most important quality of the system, Mr. Nielsen said. For something like Zoom or Skype, it would probably be user interface. For something like an aircraft, it would probably be performance.
“Throughout this period, we’ve worked on software architecture [and] the quality of software and we’ve worked on how do you develop software so that it’s cost efficient and on time and on schedule and does the job that it wants without having too many vulnerabilities,” he said.
SEI receives about $150 million in funding each year, Mr. Nielsen said. In fiscal year 2019, 58% of the institute’s funding came from the Department of Defense, 38% from the Department of
Homeland Security and other federal sources, and 3% from non-federal sources, according to an annual report.
The Software Engineering Institute is one of several CMU research efforts funded by the U.S. military, a fact that has sparked controversy among students and faculty in the past.
Along with regular contracts from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), CMU formed a task force with the Army last year to research military applications for AI. The Army invested $72 million in March 2019 for the project.
SEI employs about 680 people across its offices in Pittsburgh and Arlington, Va., Mr. Nielsen said, and they are always looking to hire.
He expects the Department of Defense will renew its contract again in 2025, a reflection of the quality and work coming out of the institute, he said.