Today, at a luxurious Mediterranean-themed resort on California’s rugged Palos Verdes Peninsula, an auction will take place in a chandeliered ballroom. There won’t be Picassos, Rembrandts, or Hirst polka dots on offer, but rather “universal detachable infrared transmitters,” “search engine revenue maximization tools,” and “dynamically-configurable hardware architectures.” Welcome to the ICAP Patent Brokerage’s Spring 2012 IP Auction.
At some point this afternoon, lucky buyers will have the chance to purchase three sets of patents relating to autonomic computing and software production from NASA. Whoever walks away with these prizes will no doubt have visions of more adaptive robots, more secure encryption methods, or faster sensors dancing in his head. These types of IP auctions serve two key functions for NASA: to bolster its case as a contributor to the public good down here in the “real world”, and to add some much needed cash to its coffers in a time of budgetary uncertainty.
One company that has used this sort of NASA-developed technology is IPsoft, a New York-based group that offers autonomic services to a range of companies, from Canon to Gap to Univision. IPsoft’s Chief Commercial Officer, Jonathan Crane, came of age during the heady days of the Apollo program, which proved to be a formative event. “It was a significant July,” he recalls of 1969, when Apollo 11 touched down in the Sea of Tranquility. “From a standpoint of watching all of that and what it meant for the country, it was amazing.” The hyper-competence and precision of NASA’s operation sank in; Crane and IPsoft continue to look to the space program for inspiration, both technologically and philosophically.
Over the last century, air and space exploration has operated at the limit of human technological ingenuity. Carrying people and advanced equipment through the inhospitable vacuum of space has required advances not only of technologies related to the physical nature of this gravity-defying endeavor (i.e. propulsion systems and space-proof materials), but also of support systems – computing methods to analyze large data sets, optimization algorithms to fine-tune trajectories, and fiber optic cables to transmit information. These developments have coincided with, and accelerated, the globalization of technology.
It’s a brave new world that these space-born technologies have helped create. As Crane notes, “we’ve become so dependent on infrastructure services functioning that we have no tolerance for outages and problems.” Just witness the panic that ensued when Google’s Gmail went down for an hour in 2009.
Such disruptions are inconvenient and potentially costly, but in human spaceflight, the stakes are even higher. Because of the physical reality of what NASA has been tasked with doing – making sure an astronaut comes back alive after riding hundreds of tons of explosives to a speed of 17,000 miles per hour through space – there is no room for error, no second chances. NASA has proudly taken on the mantra “Failure is not an option,” and even if the tagline is a Hollywood construct, it nonetheless embodies the agency's mentality.
This philosophy has led NASA to automate as many tasks as possible in order to avoid potentially catastrophic consequences of human clumsiness, distractedness, or sleep deprivation. To IPsoft, increased automation means less time lost in repair work and more dollars saved for its clients. The foundation lies in developing systems to simulate biological function: just as NASA characterizes its autonomic programs as “the brain’s autonomic control of the heartbeat,” IPsoft likens its products to an immune system that “can detect, diagnose, cure, escalate, and learn.”
As Crane puts it, “if I could mimic what engineers do to solve problems, I could avoid using human costs to support that IT infrastructure.” Automated repair scripts start with a baseline of knowledge from a client’s history of IT problems and solutions, and a decision tree is created – if “x” is wrong, do “y” – that generally solves between 30-35% of the issues.
Onto this scaffold, IPsoft adds a layer of “scripted automation,” which helps the program learn from its environment, build its strategic arsenal, and solve up to 60% of its tasks. With increasingly sophisticated programs, says Crane, “the routine work is done by the system,” decreasing the reliance on unskilled and semi-skilled workers. The social ramifications of this approach are unclear – especially if the education system fails to keep pace with the demand for knowledge-based positions – but IPsoft’s mode of operation is certainly more streamlined.
Much of NASA’s most valuable intellectual property is based in the intangible world of information technology. It may not be the rocket engines or heat shield materials most people associate with space exploration, but it’s a critical part of the technological world NASA helped create and continues to shape. And as enterprising technologists refine their bids and prepare for the latest auction of autonomic programs, its impact will only continue to grow.
