Training Programs

Recognizing the need to arm IC attorneys and policy practitioners with skill sets to excel in a national security landscape, ARLIS held a six-week program in June of 2020 that trained 31 legal and policy professionals from the defense and intelligence communities on various aspects of information technology and how the growth of IT is changing the dynamics of law.

Emerging Topics in Technology and Law is the first of a set of accredited courses held through UMD’s School of Public Policy, leading to a planned certificate and master’s level degree program in Technology, Law, and National Security.  More than 20 instructors with diverse areas of expertise gave lectures ranging from cybersecurity to international law to misinformation.

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The students represented almost all the U.S. government agencies across the DoD, the armed services, and the Intelligence Community.  Considered to be the best and brightest by their senior leaders, the pupils gained in-depth knowledge of the IT technologies relevant to current and future DoD/IC missions.  However, the course’s salient theme addressed how humans interacting with technology can create formidable legal and policy challenges.  ARLIS plans to offer more courses in 2021, in a classified setting and with more than a hundred participants, to help produce the next generation of cyber legal professionals to aid the intelligence and security community.

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The AI Research for IC Challenges (AIRICC) Internship Program, piloted in 2020, prepares and nurtures a pipeline of student talent, at the graduate and undergraduate level, to be the next generation of AI leaders.  AIRICC aims to both expose talented computer scientists to meaningful immediate security problems and to build personal connections to government technologists who are currently attempting to solve these problems. The inaugural 10-week program, which ran June through August, was sponsored by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The NGA funded the program to challenge students with current mission-driven applications that the NGA uses to solve real-world scenarios, which included exploratory research inspired by the neocortex in the brain, hurricane track prediction, the identification of traffic anomalies using sparse data, distinguishing sea vessels and icebergs using low-resolution satellite imagery, and the analysis of AI applications used in engineering systems

Eighteen competitively selected interns (fifteen undergraduates and three graduate students) came together to work in teams of three. While most hailed from UMD, one intern came from neighboring Bowie State University, reflecting ARLIS and IC interest in bringing more talent from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) into the national security technologist pipeline. Their disciplines included computer science, biology, mechanical engineering, computer engineering, and aerospace engineering.  The second iteration of the AIRICC program will be conducted in the summer of 2021.

2021 Technology and Law Academy

Presented by DIA and the University of Maryland Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS)

Academy Objectives

  • Immerse a small group of lawyers and technologists in a six-week high-intensity course that presents the substantive and legal dimensions of the most critical technologies in the national security realm, including cybersecurity, Al and machine learning, telecommunications, Internet exploitation, and Space.
  • Empower lawyers to meaningfully support their clients' efforts to develop and procure cutting-edge IT tools.
  • Give technologists the knowledge and perspective to work collaboratively with lawyers to design optimized solutions to modern IT challenges.

Location

Due to constraints relating to the COVID-19 public health crisis, initial TLA courses will be held online, with a condensed and unclassified curriculum but maintaining access to instructors from across technology, security, and legal communities.

Future courses will be conducted as in-person within the secure ARLIS facility to enable classified presentations, discussion, and student research, or potentially as a hybrid online/in-person model. We anticipate the initial fully in-person course will be offered Summer 2021.

Participation:

TLA will be open to participants from government, industry, and academia. It is critical for these three communities to interact effectively to address the legal and operational challenges presented by new technologies.

Registration:

To be enrolled in the course, you must register with the University of Maryland (UMD) as a non-degree seeking student.  The deadline for non-degree seeking student applications is TBD.  Prospective students can submit their applications for the program now through the UMD graduate school application process.

About ARLIS

ARLIS is a Department of Defense University-Affiliated Research Center for advanced research and development in intelligence and security. Located in College Park, Maryland, ARLIS is dedicated to supporting DoD and Intelligence Community missions by bringing together academic experts, leading practitioners, and industry innovators to confront the nation's most critical national security challenges.​​​​​​​

 

For more information, contact tla@arlis.umd.edu.

Insure Consortium

In 2020 ARLIS stood up the Intelligence and Security University Research Enterprise (INSURE), an academic research consortium to further its mission as a UARC supporting the Defense Security Enterprise (DSE) and the IC.  Consortium partners are selected based on symbiotic institutional strengths, having a track record of conducting applied, quick-turn, mission-relevant R&D, and offering unique capabilities for training the current workforce and growing the workforce of the future.  INSURE has initially brought in a targeted set of six initial partner institutions: George Mason University, Howard University, Morgan State, Texas A&M University, University of the District of Columbia, and the University of Wisconsin in Madison.  These schools were brought in to expand the pool of talent and technical resources available for supporting ARLIS core competencies and to increase the agility with which higher education resources can be harnessed for national security needs.

Modeled in part on the consortium approach of the Systems Engineering Research Center UARC at Stevens Institute of Technology, ARLIS and its university partners coordinate applied and use-inspired research activities for Intelligence and Security at associate Universities, aligning projects with specific DoD and IC program managers and activities.  This alliance improves the translation of products into operational use and enhances the pipeline of students and faculty to work directly on technology problems for the national security community.

Spring and summer 2020 activities have included candidate member engagement (coordinating in part with the Office of the Secretary of Defense team overseeing DoD investments in HBCUs); developing consortium agreements and master subcontract agreements to administratively streamline management; proposal development and submission yielding three consortium awards in September 2020; and working to build a financial model for resourcing consortia leadership activities from 2022 onward.  In the year ahead, activities will include:

  • Joint program development for the member universities with the DoD/IC.
  • Developing curricula for courses, training, and certificates for employees of the DoD/IC.
  • Organizing an INSURE Security Research Day for legislators on Capitol Hill and a 2-day INSURE Workshop for the DoD/IC to be held at ARLIS in 2021.
  • Building an inventory of shared testbeds, facilities, capability descriptions accessible to the DoD/IC via the consortium (i.e., AI V&V/T&E, computing, data curation, etc).
  • Establishing a shared plan for management of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) or restricted datasets, virtualization of desktops for R&D by the consortium and Coordination of student activities across all relevant disciplines.