Senior Computer Scientist, Computer Science Laboratory
Grit Denker, Ph.D., is a senior computer scientist in the Computer Science Laboratory at SRI International. With a proven record of successfully leading and executing numerous government projects, Denker is an expert in novel human-machine technology, specification and verification of communication, security, and network policies in distributed systems; cognitive and policy-based systems (both wireless and wired devices); modeling and reasoning; policy languages; and semantic web and ontologies.
Denker is currently co-lead of SRI’s bRIGHT program. bRIGHT is a new human-machine interaction paradigm. Leveraging state-of-the-art computing power and sensor systems, bRIGHT overcomes the bottleneck between a human and a machine — “the last meter bandwidth.” bRIGHT will increase efficiency and effectiveness for users that are cognitively loaded and heavily tasked, and has the potential for reducing critical errors and learning curves associated with complex systems. SRI has filed 12 patent applications for bRIGHT since its inception in 2010.
Denker came to SRI’s Computer Science Laboratory in 1997 as an international fellow, and joined the laboratory as a computer scientist in 1998. Prior to joining SRI, she was assistant professor of the database group in the Computer Science Department of the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany from 1995-1997. Prior to that, she was a research and teaching assistant at the university.
Denker has a Ph.D. in computer science and Dipl-Math in mathematics from the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany.
Principal Investigator (PI) roles at SRI
- PI on DARPA’s META program, with subcontractors Honeywell Aerospace, TTTech Computertechnik, and Vanderbilt University. She led the design and implementation of a probabilistic fault and performance analysis tool.
- PI of a subcontract to Lockheed Martin in DARPA’s Behavioral Learning for Adaptive Electronic Warfare (BLADE) project to develop cognitive jammers to achieve superiority in electronic warfare (EW). SRI developed a knowledge-based system to reason about threats and countermeasures of cognitive radios.
- PI of a subcontract to Raytheon BBN Technologies in DARPA’s F6 project, which aimed to replace large monolithic spacecraft that are maximally packed with resources with a cluster of smaller satellites each carrying a few resources and sharing these resources over a wireless network. SRI provided verification and validation (V&V) of safety-critical aspects of AETHER (Adaptive, Efficient, Trusted, Hardened, Environmentally Robust Network), an information architecture for MANET clusters in space applications designed by Raytheon BBN.
- PI of DARPA’s Next Generation (XG) Communication projects (2 projects: 1: XG Policy Control contract with DARPA; and 2. Subcontractor in Shared Spectrum Company’s XG Phase III project). Design, implementation, and field demonstrations of XG Policy Language and Reasoner, a publicly available reasoner for dynamic spectrum access radios.
- PI of National Science Foundation’s CYber Physical RESilience and Sustainability (CYPRESS) project, which explores techniques for dependability, resilience and sustainability in cyberphysical spaces. The project derives its name from the Cypress tree that represents durability and sustainability.
Other project roles at SRI
- Co-leader of ontology-based analyzer design in DUSD projects Open Netcentric Standards for Testing and Training (ONISTT), Analyzer for Netcentric Systems Test Confederations (ANSC), and Rule Authoring and Verification Environment (RAVE). Analyzer system to automatically generate system confederations that satisfy testing and training requirements for joint military events.
- Co-PI of NSF project, Formal Checklists for Remote Agent Dependability, which was co-sponsored by NASA. Developed a formal approach to deep space mission goal net specifications and domain models.
- Co-Developer of DARPA project, Common Authorization Protocol Specification Language (CAPSL), a publicly available toolkit for cryptographic protocol analysis.
- Leader of web service security coalition of DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) project.
Recent publications
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Semantic Instrumentation of Virtual Environments for Training
We discuss an approach in which the virtual environment is semantically instrumented in order to allow for the tracking of and reasoning about open-ended learner activity therein.
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Assessment and Content Authoring in Semantic Virtual Environments
This paper presents an approach to training in VEs that directly addresses these challenges and summarizes its application to a weapons maintenance task.
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Software-Defined Cyber-Physical Multinetworks
We discuss challenges in leveraging heterogeneous networking technologies to create resilient and flexible infrastructure for information collection and information dissemination in cyber-physical environments.
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Achieving Resilience of Heterogeneous Networks Through Predictive, Formal Analysis
We design and implement a “what-if” analysis methodology using formal methods. Our methodology analyzes the impact of failures and changes in heterogeneous networks on QoS of flows.
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Policy-Based Data Downgrading: Toward a Semantic Framework and Automated Tools to Balance Need-To-Protect and Need-To-Share Policies
We describe a new paradigm for articulating need-to-protect and need-to-share policies that shows promise for enabling automated derivation of the downgrading rulesets needed to comply with these policies in systems that share data.
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Constraint-Muse: a Soft-Constraint Based System for Music Therapy
We have developed a prototype tool for interactive music creation, called Constraint Muse, that uses monoidal soft constraints to ensure that a dynamically generated melody harmonizes with input from other sources.