The Draper Lab Perspective

Abstract:

The past 20 years have seen tremendous growth in information science, giving rise to significant research, development and deployment of autonomous systems, advanced networking and communications technologies, and decision support systems. By the year 2020, the global population will approach 7.5 billion, the internet will connect 65% of the world, and internet traffic will exceed 1 zetabyte per month. These dramatic changes will result in many opportunities and challenges for LIDS and LIDS alumni in the years ahead. This presentation will highlight some of the emerging challenges, for example, in achieving reliable, robust, and trusted autonomy in complex and dynamic real world environments, developing and understanding social network influencing models, and discovering patterns of behavior and predicting actions from large datasets without pre-existing hypotheses, to name a few.

Biography:

Dr. Dowdle is the Vice President of Engineering at Draper Laboratory and a LIDS alumnus. He has over 30 years experience in the development of guidance, navigation, and control systems. In 2006 he became Draper's Chief Engineer, with responsibilities for all aspects of engineering execution at Draper Laboratory. Previously, he held positions of Director of Hardware Design, Director of Systems Engineering, Technical Director for guided projectile programs at Draper, and Group Leader. Dr. Dowdle holds several patents regarding navigation technology and has authored numerous papers and technical reports on the theory and application of guidance, navigation and control methods. In particular, he is a co-inventor of Draper's Deep Integration INS/GPS high anti-jam technology. His prior work includes inertial navigation, GPS receiver design, INS/GPS integration, vehicle guidance law optimization, and a wide variety of control system designs with application to missiles and space vehicles. He has also been involved with design and analysis of command, control, and communications (C3) systems, including sensor-to-shooter and sensor-to-weapon issues.

Dr. Dowdle is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a member of the AIAA Technical Committee for Management. He is former member of the Technical Committee on Guidance, Navigation, and Control, and was the Technical Program Co-Chair for AIAA's 1997 Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference. He was a recipient of Draper's Distinguished Performance Award in 1997 and the University of Central Florida's Professional Achievement Award in 1988 and Outstanding Alumni Award in 2009. He is a member of the honor societies Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, and Phi Kappa Phi.

Dr. Dowdle received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an ME in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Central Florida.