An Overview of the Army Research Lab and the Role of Intelligent Things on the Future Battlefield
An Overview of the Army Research Lab and the Role of Intelligent Things on the Future Battlefield
Featuring Dr. Alexander Kott, Chief Scientist, Army Research Labs
November 2, 2017, 4:00 – 5:00 pm
Engineering & Science Building, Room 044
Dr. Kott serves as the ARL’s Chief Scientist. In this role he provides leadership in development of ARL technical strategy, maintaining technical quality of ARL research, and representing ARL to external technical community.
Between 2009 and 2016, he was the Chief, Network Science Division, Computational and Information Sciences Directorate, US Army Research Laboratory headquartered in Adelphi MD. He was responsible for a diverse portfolio of fundamental research and applied development in network science and science for cyber defense. In particular, he played a key role in initiating the Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance, among the world-largest efforts to study interactions between networks of different types. His efforts helped start Cyber Security Collaborative Research Alliance, a unique program of creating basic science of cyber warfare.
In 2013, Dr. Kott served as the Acting Associate Director for Science and Technology of the ARL’s Computational and
Information Sciences Directorate; in 2015 he also served as the Acting Director of the Computational and Information Sciences Directorate. Beginning his Government career, between 2003 and 2008, Dr. Kott served as a Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency (DARPA) Program Manager responsible for a number of large-scale advanced technology research programs. Technologies developed in programs under his management ranged from adversarial reasoning, to prediction of social and security phenomena, to command and control of robotic forces. His earlier positions included Director of R&D at Carnegie Group, Pittsburgh, PA; and Information Technology Research Department Manager at AlliedSignal, Inc., Morristown, NJ. There, his work focused on novel information technology approaches, such as Artificial Intelligence, to complex problems in engineering design, and planning and control in manufacturing, telecommunications and aviation industries.
Dr. Kott received the Secretary of Defense Exceptional Public Service Award and accompanying Exceptional Public Service Medal, in October 2008. He earned his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA in 1989, where his research proposed AI approaches to innovative design of complex systems.
He published over 80 technical papers and served as the initiator, co-author and primary editor of over ten books, including Advanced Technology Concepts for Command and Control, 2004; Information Warfare and Organizational Decision Process, 2006; Adversarial Reasoning: Computational Approaches to Reading the Opponent's Mind, 2006; The Battle of Cognition: the Future Information-Rich Warfare and the Mind of the Commander, 2007; Estimating Impact: A Handbook of Computational Methods and Models for Anticipating Economic, Social, Political and Security Effects in International Interventions, 2010; Cyber Defense and Situational Awareness, 2015; Cyber Security of SCADA and other Industrial Control Systems, 2016; and Cyber Resilience, (to appear, 2018).