When I joined the SEI last year, one of my top priorities was to advance the scope and impact of SEI R&D programs, along with increasing the visibility of the excellent work of SEI technologists who staff these programs. While the SEI is well known for its innovation and impact in several key areas, the breadth and depth of our expertise extends far beyond our most popular technologies. To increase awareness of all that we're doing, we've established a blog to highlight SEI R&D initiatives, methods, and solutions that are meeting the needs of our customers and partners in government and industry. This initial post will introduce the goals and themes of the new SEI blog.

SEI technologists have many venues for publicizing their work, including books, journals, technical reports and notes, technical conference proceedings, and trade magazines. These venues generally disseminate somewhat delayed information in a one-way "read-only" fashion, however, and are often intended for highly specialized audiences. This blog will thus provide immediate and accessible insights into the broad spectrum of work we do at the SEI via a two-way "read-write" medium where we can interact with you, our audience, rapidly and effectively.

Writing publications for conventional venues requires a significant time commitment, which is a precious commodity for our technologists who work closely with customers. This blog will thus provide them with a vehicle to share best practices and lessons learned from their experiences solving vexing software acquisition and operational problems. This blog will also allow our research-focused technologists an outlet to disseminate their latest activities and results rapidly, in addition to their traditional publication venues.

Blog posts will be written by SEI technologists with different backgrounds, expertise, and interests. Some posts will summarize the goals and results of advanced research projects at the cutting edge of science and technology, such as our fuzzy hashing techniques in malware analysis or our tools that automate the painstaking and time-consuming process of checking the provenance similarities of binaries. Other posts will highlight the work of SEI technologists with customer-facing roles on applied, transition- and acquisition-oriented topics such as strategic planning , building a foundation for agile, or our work in helping the U.S. Army develop a software evaluation framework for a Common Operating Environment. In all cases, we will strive for clarity, brevity, and relevance.

This blog will be interactive since we believe the best insights come from dialogue and debate with other technologists, users, and stakeholders. Over time, we will group all the posts and responses into searchable topics that are relevant to the current and future needs of our customers and partners. Although we have expertise in many software and systems engineering topics, we're always interested in new insights and new opportunities to partner on emerging technologies and interests. We therefore welcome your feedback and look forward to engaging with you in ways that are most effective with web-based technical communication. Posts will include contact information and links to further information for readers who want to know more, or who are looking to collaborate with us on new ideas. Please feel free to comment on this blog in the space below. Or, if you prefer, you can contact us at info@sei.cmu.edu with your comments and suggestions.