Episode 13 - Sense 21: Do You Want to Make a Difference?

Trident Room Host Mike Wish sits down with Distinguished Professor Dr. Peter Denning and Vice President of the Alumni Association and Foundation Col. Todd Lyons. Mike dives deeper into their upcoming course Sense 21, short for “Designing a New Engineering Common Sense for the 21st Century.”

This episode was recorded on March 26, 2021.

COLONEL (RET.) TODD LYONS, USMC serves as the Vice President for the NPS Alumni Association and Foundation. In this role, he bridges the divide between industry, academia, and DoD entities to accelerate the responsiveness of NPS to the challenges arising from great power competition and emerging technology. Todd also serves as a volunteer instructor for Innovation Leadership at NPS.

Prior to coming to the foundation, Todd served in the Marine Corps for 30 years. In his last assignment, he served as the Senior Marine Representative and the Associate Dean of Research at the Naval Postgraduate School. In those roles, he connected the work of students and faculty to the operational challenges of the Marine Corps, the Navy, and the broader DoD. As an innovation leader, he leveraged the research at NPS and the operational experiences of the students to drive the adoption of new practices across the Naval Services.

Colonel Lyons began his career as a Marine artilleryman. After graduating from the Naval Postgraduate School in 2000, he became a Middle East Foreign Area Officer and an Intelligence Officer with assignments at the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Todd spent nine of his last eighteen years in the Marine Corps serving in a variety of assignments across the Middle East, including Qatar, Israel, Oman, and Iraq.

Todd Lyons earned a Master of Arts with honors in National Security Affairs from the Naval Postgraduate School. He earned a Master of Science degree from the University of Haifa and was the Honor Graduate from the Israeli National Defense College in 2007. For his reporting during the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, he received the Department of State Superior Honor Award. He received a second Superior Honor Award from the Department of State for his service in Oman from 2011-2014.

Todd is married to Kristi Lund Lyons and they have three daughters. Todd enjoys being active and keeping up with his teenage daughters. In his free time, Todd enjoys water sports, hiking, working out, reading, and long walks with Kristi and the dogs.

Faculty Page: https://www.npsfoundation.org/team/todd-lyons

E-mail: [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/todd-lyons-649a133/

PETER J. DENNING is Distinguished Professor, Chair of the Computer Science Department, and Director of the Cebrowski Institute for Innovation at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

He has been a leading engineer and scientist in computing since his graduation from MIT in 1968. At MIT he discovered the locality principle for how computations access storage objects and from it invented the influential working set model for program behavior. His original paper received the ACM systems best paper award for 1968 and was named to the Operating Systems Hall of Fame in 2005. The working set model became the universal reference model for memory management and the heart of memory caching systems, which are now deeply embedded into all computers and the Internet. He contributed important extensions to operational analysis, an approach to computing system performance prediction that overcame strong limitations of stochastic queueing models. He co-founded CSNET, the first open community research network based on ARPANET technology and a key transition from the ARPANET to the NSFNET. CSNET received the Internet Society's Postel Award in 2009. He led the Digital Library project for the Association for Computing Machinery; the ACM DL was the first complete digital library among professional societies and it set new standards for online publication and distribution of scientific information. He was founding Director of the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RIACS) at NASA-Ames, one of the first centers in computational science. He currently leads the Innovation Project, which is identifying and teaching foundational practices of innovation and is now exploring the consequences of interpreting innovation as emergence rather than idea creation. This work led to his book with Bob Dunham, The Innovator's Way (2010). He also currently leads the Great Principles of Computing project, which has gathered and focused the timeless basic principles of computing, contributed to a new image and respect for computing, and seeded the national movement to revamp the high-school Advanced Placement Curriculum and the development of CS principles courses at major universities. This work led to his book with Craig Martell, Great Principles of Computing (2015).

Dr. Denning’s Publications: http://denninginstitute.com/pjd/PUBS/

Email: [email protected]

Website: http://denninginstitute.com/denning/

Faculty Webpage: https://nps.edu/web/data-sciences/dr.-peter-denning

The Trident Room Podcast is brought to you by the Naval Postgraduate School Alumni Association and the Naval Postgraduate School Foundation.

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The views expressed in this interview are those of the individuals and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Government, the Department of Defense, the US Navy, or the Naval Postgraduate School.