Jumping on the Third Wave
Before coming to Northrop Grumman, Doxas worked as a researcher for nearly two decades at the University of Colorado, Boulder. There, he studied dynamical systems, essentially the backbone of the rule-based models that underpin complex systems. Dynamical systems theory illustrates how systems change over time and the theory doesn't have to be limited to what is considered pure scientific observations.
“A lot of human activity is a dynamical system, it's a story,” he said. “Humans are a story telling species. This is a fundamental thing to the way we are built.” Students at Ohio State University made a life log, using photos taken on their cellphones to catalog the routines of their daily lives. Inevitably, the string of photos showed that their routines formed a dynamical system, he said.
Now at Northrop Grumman — where he develops algorithms, software and computational hardware architectures for AI systems — Doxas has the resources to further pursue his study of dynamical systems.
He also found an ideal collaborator in Tom Strelich, a Northrop Grumman Fellow who specializes in the development of software systems. Strelich is a natural storyteller: He's a playwright, novelist and screenwriter. They and other colleagues are working on what they call the Third Wave AI Dynamical Systems (or TWAI-DS).
“Current AI methods stop at classification, which is useful operationally. We want to push into the next wave of AI with a Dynamical Systems approach,” Strelich said. We want to explore and discover the underlying dynamics behind how people build systems—how they communicate with each other to build the system…. Engineering itself is a structured, formal communication process that people use to design, build and maintain a physical thing, and we tell stories to do that.”
