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Leaping into Military Culture
Standing atop a thirty-four-foot tower on
the Fort Bragg Army base in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Rebecca
Willett was "terrified" to make her training jump.
"That first step is hard to take," said Willett, an assistant
professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke.
But equipped with parachute gear, a camouflage helmet, and a harness
attached to an overhead cable, she made the leap. Suspended from
the cable, she zipped down to the landing area.
Her colleague Ron Parr, an assistant professor of computer science,
says that his biggest challenge of the day the two spent on the
base was getting the milkshake in his Meal-Ready-to-Eat to reconstitute
after adding water. The two professors spent a day at Fort Bragg
as part of a new Defense Department program that encourages junior
computer scientists and electrical engineers to investigate technical
challenges faced by the military. The program, called the Computer
Science Study Panel (CS2P), has twelve scholars from various universities
making summertime visits to military bases and receiving briefings
on how the military uses—and hopes to use—information technology.
This year's CS2P participants toured bases from Naval Station Norfolk
in Virginia to MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, visited military
hubs at U.S. Joint Forces Command and U.S. Central Command, and
boarded crafts, including the USS Theodore
Roosevelt aircraft carrier,
the Norfolk nuclear submarine, and a Blackhawk helicopter.
Participating in CS2P also qualifies researchers to apply for a
$500,000 grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA). (At $14.8 million, DARPA was the third-largest external
source of research funds at Duke last year; the university does
not handle grants for classified research.)
Parr says the rationale for the program is for academic researchers
to gain "an understanding of what these short-term needs are
[for the military] and then figure out how the higher-level, more
abstract problems that we have could contribute to these short-term
needs."
"Most scientists and engineers perform their research not
only because it's interesting to them personally, but also because
they want to expand our body of scientific knowledge. For me, my
research is most exciting when I'm expanding our knowledge in a
direction that has a positive impact on society."
Both Willett and Parr say they appreciated the opportunity to be
exposed to military technology and culture. "We got to see
some pretty cool equipment," Willett says. "But I think
the people were most impressive."
Adds Parr, "I didn't realize how fond of PowerPoint they are."
https://cs2p.ida.org/
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