Organization

Many of the staff members supporting Information Operations programs are members of APL's Applied Information Sciences Department (AISD).  Currently, more then 300 staff members are working on Infocentric Operations programs. There is a broad mix of disciplines, but most of the professional staff are engineers or scientists. There is also a mix of formal education levels ranging from bachelors to masters to Ph.D.s. A number of the staff have previous military experience.

The specific staff skills utilized by the Information Operations business area are listed below. In virtually every case, an additional requirement is the ability to effectively apply the fundamental principles of system engineering in the context of the science and technologies associated with these skill sets.

• Information System security, including expertise in:
• Secure operating systems
• Intrusion detection
• Multilevel Security/Multiple Security Levels issues and solutions
• Authentication (especially biometrics)
• Steganography
• Wireless security issues and solutions
• Information system attack
• Information System Networking, including expertise in:
• Ground, air, and space based RF communication
• Mobile ad hoc networking
• IP/MPLS Networking
• Routing protocols and secure routing
• Quality of service mechanisms
• Network M&S
• Communication Electronics Design
• Network Management and Control
• Information exploitation, including expertise in:
• Database systems
• Visualization
• Knowledge representation and ontologies
• Information retrieval and extraction
• Machine learning
• Modeling and Simulation
• Software development, testing, and integration
• Computer processor and memory system design

(For a brief description of the composition of the APL staff as a whole, see About Our Staff.)