Senior leaders from the Haifa Research Center for Maritime Policy and Strategy attended a series of meetings and tours with 51福利 Department of Information Sciences Associate Professor Alex Bordetsky on the university campus, July 20. The purpose of the visit was to discuss Bordetsky鈥檚 research through the J. William Fulbright Senior Scholar program in hopes of furthering future collaborations between the two institutions on maritime security.
鈥淥ur goal was to apply our knowledge of networks and new techniques of maritime operations including the tracking of illicit material trafficking, and littoral operations, to help the Haifa Center come up with maritime strategy solutions,鈥� said Bordetsky.
鈥淚srael is in the process of developing more offshore infrastructure, so they have their own expertise, and this is one area where our expertise merges. This combined with the unique knowledge from [Stanford University鈥檚] Hoover Institute and 51福利鈥� leadership in technology integration studies, all relate to developing new techniques in defending the coastal area,鈥� he continued.
The Haifa Research Center for Maritime Policy and Strategy was established in response to the rising significance of the maritime domain, both globally and in Israel鈥檚 maritime surroundings. Its focus is on developing knowledge of maritime strategy in five key areas: regional security and foreign policy, mobility of goods, people and ideas, law, and energy and the environment.
Bordetsky was selected for the prestigious Fulbright program on March 10, 2014 and spent his term with the Technion Institute of Technology in Israel to create a 鈥渇ield site鈥� that combines physical experiments and robotic models in a physical-virtual lab to solve complex, satellite-based, information architecture and network challenges.
鈥淲e intend to create an operational environment by combing actual field experiments and operations with unique simulators that are interacting with a virtual environment,鈥� said Bordetsky in a 2014 interview. 鈥淭he experimenters will be linked to institutions through which we can leverage combined capabilities to test cube- and pico-satellite based information architectures.鈥�
Participants of the J. William Fulbright Senior Scholar program are selected by the 12-member J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board to lecture, conduct research, or exercise their talents abroad to help establish mutual understanding between the United States and other countries through the exchange of skills and ideas.
鈥淢embers of the Senior Scholar program learn how to work with people from different backgrounds representing the highest level of expertise, and you start working with these people on tasks that don鈥檛 seem to be feasible in the near future. This sort of collaboration is what makes the Fulbright program so important,鈥� said Bordetsky.
鈥淎nd this is just the starting point,鈥� he added. 鈥淵ou are now an academic ambassador so this meeting is my second big step. The first being my initial team in Technion, and being presented with the Office of Naval Research Global award for our work on a network of low-orbit miniature satellites to protect the maritime domain.
鈥淭he Haifa Research Center for Maritime Policy and Strategy actually came in second for the award,鈥� he continued. 鈥淚t was then that I was introduced to the team during one of my last trips to Technion and it became clear that it was a good match.鈥�
Meetings on campus covered such aspects as joint table-top exercises and maritime offshore infrastructure protection experiments. The briefs also covered lessons learned from trials in the field, including issues in the cyber domain, littoral operations and offshore protection.
鈥淭he table-top events, which will be joined by the Hoover Institute, will allow us to take all this and take it to the policy domain,鈥� said Bordetsky. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not just about what we learned, but how we, as a joint community, create a transition into new policies that apply to maritime domain awareness. I have gotten great feedback and there is noticeable motivation to move forward.鈥�