Plug for MIT Lincoln Laboratory (“The Lab”)

 

 

For the past two years I have worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, or the Lab for short. Not many people outside of the research circles know about this place, and in fact I only stumbled upon it in my job search because I went to a job fair for high tech companies and got some literature.  In fact, the wikipedia page on the Lab is comically short considering the amount of research that has been conducted there for the past 50+ years – while the Lab didn’t invent radar, it probably perfected it. However, because most of this research is classified for national security, 95% of the amazing work by Lab scientists goes unpublished.  When I was looking around for information on the Lab, I could hardly find any online, so hopefully somebody may stumble upon this page when they are thinking about working there. 

While at the Lab, I worked for the Surveillance Systems group, Group 42. When I got to the Lab, the group was called the Air Traffic Control and Surveillance Systems Group, and about half of the group’s research is sponsored by the FAA. Most of my work centered around the TCAS collision avoidance system, which is mandated by Congress to be installed on every commercial passenger aircraft above a certain size.

I also worked on new collision avoidance systems for UAVs (Unmanned Air Vehicles). My major project was developing airspace encounter models for generating random, realistic encounters so that these systems can be tested in simulation. Over the course of developing these models, I learned a great deal about Bayesian networks, Monte Carlo methods, importance sampling, radar (note: the giant radar ALTAIR in that link is operated by Lincoln for missile defense in the Marshall Islands), flight dynamics, and especially air traffic control. It was a fascinating project, and only one of many fascinating projects that I was involved in (I will probably blog about my thoughts on ATC at some point in the future).

 

I’ve worked with some amazingly smart and capable people who I now consider my friends.  In particular Mykel Kochenderfer and Jim Kuchar have been my mentors, among many others who don’t have personal websites. Over half of the Lab employees have PhDs, most from MIT and other top schools, and the sheer brain power there is kind of awesome. People also work at the Lab for the love of their research, and that definately comes through as well.

I will be leaving the Lab in a couple months because I accepted an offer to be a LGO fellow at MIT. However, my work there has been very intellectually satisfying, and it has served to focus my future academic interests. For instance, I will recieve a MS in Computer Science, largely because my work at the Lab has piqued my interest in AI and machine learning. In particular, I hope to research how these principles can be applied to improve the efficiency and operation of manufacturing companies.  I would say that the Lab is an excellent place to work if you are interested in doing cutting edge research, are intellectually curious and smart, and enjoy tackling difficult problems in the area of national defense, homeland security or the FAA.