Page 16 - CARAHSOFT, November/December 2021

Building a Data-Driven Government
Executive Viewpoint
A conversation with
BEN GOLDMAN
BEN GOLDMAN
Technical Project Lead, Weapons Control and Integration Department, Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division
A technology leader discusses how an industry partnership is accelerating the Navy’s use of AI.
What do you hope to achieve
through your cooperative research and development agreement with NVIDIA?
The chief technology officer at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, Jennifer Clift, has put an emphasis on the partnership between government, industry and academia. There’s been a big push
to build bridges and make connections between the work we’re doing on the government side and the massive amount of investment and work being done in the private sector. Our CRADA with NVIDIA is a mutually beneficial way we can take advantage of all that progress.
We’ve previously acquired NVIDIA hardware and software to meet our business needs, and the CRADA is an opportunity for us to better understand how to use those products with the problem sets we encounter. We’ve been working for about a year now, and the relationship has been incredibly beneficial.
We are particularly interested in advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the hardware and software tools that NVIDIA provides are great assets in pushing that area
of research forward in terms of image processing, scenario-driven reinforcement learning, accelerated edge processing — and the list goes on.
It has been a good area to focus on with the company’s technical experts and the developers who create the hardware and software products. We’ve been able to leverage the NVIDIA ecosystems to gain more optimized performance of the company’s hardware when we integrate
it into Navy systems and to shorten the integration and development cycle in a lot of areas.
We’re hitting all the high points of what we set out to do with the CRADA, but the room for growth is still massive, which is exciting.
How has access to NVIDIA’s experts affected your ability to speed development times or introduce new tools or platforms?
We have weekly meetings with our technical team and the technical support at NVIDIA to share best practices, lessons learned and bugs found. We’ve been able to get quick turnaround on subject-matter expert support from NVIDIA on specific
We’ve been able to leverage the NVIDIA ecosystems to gain more optimized performance of the company’s hardware when we integrate it into Navy systems.
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