NUWC Keyport holds its first-ever Technical Exchange Meeting – DVIDS

Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division, Keyport held its first-ever Technical Exchange Meeting on April 20 onboard NBK-Keyport, an event that brought together innovators in a wide range of fields from across the command including the Naval Sea Logistics Center.

The meeting was focused on Naval Innovative Science and Engineering-funded projects in technical areas such as data science, cyber security, sensor processing, and modeling and simulation, among others. In order to encourage collaboration and sharing of ideas across the workforce, it was open to all NUWC Keyport employees.

The event took the form of poster sessions showcasing each of the 20 featured projects, along with four interactive stations. At the poster sessions, the principal investigators stood by their posters to discuss their processes, results and next steps.

“The idea is the poster is not going to have all the information, but you’ve got the [principal investigator] standing right there, so if it’s something that attracts your attention, you can dig deeper,” said NUWC Keyport Chief Technology Officer Aaron Darnton. “This [event] is the sampling buffet. You get a little bit of everything and when you find things of interest, you’ve got the person right there. You can ask more questions, exchange contact information, talk later, whatever.”

Darnton said knowledge sharing and cross-departmental collaboration were key goals of the event. “Normally your workday is focused on your project, delivering your deliverables for your customer. This is an opportunity to go see what everybody else is doing across the station,” said Darnton.

The interactive stations included remotely operated vehicles from Keyport’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Program; virtual reality goggles from Keyport’s Human Performance Engineering Lab; and elaborate figurines made by 3D printers at the Keyport Innovation Center.

Another interactive feature was an iPad near the event entrance with a Microsoft Power App that visitors could use to virtually sign in to the event and rate the sessions. As they did so, their information was captured in real time on a Power Business Intelligence dashboard on a nearby large screen display that tracked metrics such as the total number of attendees, total attendees from each department at NUWC Keyport and the attendees’ average years of service.

At the end of the event, three top-winning entries were announced based on the votes of those who voted in the Power App. The winning projects were those deemed to be the most innovative, the fastest to adoption and the most likely to have the biggest impact, respectively. The winners received trophies made by 3D printers at the KIC.

This initial TEM was the first in a two-part series. The second, scheduled for April 27, will feature an additional 25 NISE project poster sessions.

Both events are the brainchild of Angie Meier, Department Technology Officer for NUWC Keyport’s Undersea Weapons Department, who got the idea after attending last year’s NAVSEA TEM hosted by Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division in China Lake, California, she said.

“I went to the big NAVSEA TEM last year, and I ended up writing a white paper saying, ‘Hey, I think we need a TEM for our local community,’ because I met some really cool people from Keyport, but I had to fly all the way to China Lake to do it, and I didn’t even know the projects they were working on,” said Meier. “So we said, ‘Let’s bring all that goodness back,’ I wrote a white paper and our command said, ‘Yes, we want this.’”

Darnton said he was “really encouraged” by the turnout at this first TEM, which exceeded his initial expectation of 50 attendees. He added that he looks forward to an equally good or better turnout at next week’s event.

KIC manager Jacob Snow, also present, said he was pleased with how the event went as well. “I think the event today was very successful insofar as it highlighted a lot of the things that people are doing, and it provided an opportunity to sort of get that face recognition, that person recognition to connect people,” he said.

In addition to these two local TEMs, NUWC Keyport will be hosting this year’s Navy-wide TEM on September 12 and 13.

-KPT-

About Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Keyport

NUWC Keyport provides advanced technical capabilities for test and evaluation, in-service engineering, maintenance and industrial base support, fleet material readiness, and obsolescence management for undersea warfare to expand America’s undersea dominance.