IHMC hosts the IGNITE event for the NATO Innovation Continuum

Recently, IHMC hosted an international group of experts tasked with innovation and experimentation in the capabilities for members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

In February 2024, NATO’s Allied Command Transformation launched the Innovation Continuum 2024 series with an event in La Spezia, Italy. From that first event, named Spark, came an initial list of operational scenarios and possible technical solutions to be explored further.

The Ignite event was the second event in the series. Senior Research Scientist and Associate Director Dr. Niranjan Suri was the host of the Ignite event. Throughout his career, Suri’s research has focused on networking, communications, distributed systems, information management, interoperability, the Internet of Things, and the application of machine learning to all of these domains.

“It was a pleasure to host NATO Allied Command Transformation, NATO Communications and Information Agency, NATO Center for Maritime Research and Experimentation, many national representatives, as well as many prominent companies, including IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, here in Pensacola,” Suri said. “We spent four days planning for the experimentation that will take place in the fall.”

Since 2014, Suri has co-chaired a NATO coalition of experts and thought leaders looking at military domains with an eye toward how civilian IoT data could be made available to warfighters on humanitarian or military missions.

The Innovation Continuum is a strategic initiative by Allied Command Transformation to use experimentation and demonstration of cutting-edge science and technology solutions to drive innovation and enhance warfare development through collaboration among NATO enterprise bodies and nations. The events are named Spark, Ignite, Glow, and Shine.

Ignite brought together military professionals, industry leaders, academia representatives, and subject matter experts in the fields of emerging and disruptive technologies. It included deep discussions and practical exercises aimed at operationalizing concepts developed during Spark.

As the Continuum unfolds, Ignite will serves as a catalyst for translating innovative ideas into concrete solutions for NATO to harness the power of technology to safeguard its collective security.

“Activities such as the Innovation Continuum are essential to rapidly take new and emerging technologies, consider how we might use them in the context of NATO, and evaluate these concepts in experiments,” Suri said.

IHMC is a not-for-profit research institute of the Florida University System where researchers pioneer science and technology aimed at leveraging and extending human capabilities. IHMC researchers and staff collaborate extensively with the government, industry and academia to help develop breakthrough technologies. IHMC research partners have included: DARPA, the National Science Foundation, NASA, Army, Navy, Air Force, National Institutes of Health, IBM, Microsoft, Honda, Boeing, Lockheed, and many others.