A January 2025 Defense Innovation Board study on scaling nontraditional defense innovation stated, “We must act swiftly to ensure the DoD leads in global innovation and competition over AI and autonomous systems – and is a trendsetter for their responsible use in modern warfare." In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), chief technical officer Tom Longstaff discusses the SEI’s long-standing work to help the DoD rapidly scale technology including artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous systems.  

Warfighters in the Department of Defense (DoD) operate in high-stakes environments where security, efficiency, and speed are critical. In such environments DevSecOps has become crucial in the drive toward modernization and overall mission success. A recent study led by researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI) examined the state of DevSecOps within the Department of Defense. In this podcast, Eileen Wrubel, the SEI’s Transforming Software Acquisition Policy and Practice technical director, sits down with George Lamb, director for DoD Cloud and Software Modernization in the Information Enterprise Office of the DoD CIO, which is responsible for the DoD Software Modernization Strategy and its associated implementation plan, and Bill Nichols, lead of the SEI’s Software Engineering Measurement and Analysis work. They discuss DevSecOps successes in the DoD and opportunities for scaling its impact.

Deploying cloud-centric technologies such as Kubernetes in edge environments poses challenges, especially for mission-critical defense systems. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Patrick Earl, Doug Reynolds, and Jeffrey Hamed, all DevOps engineers in the SEI's Software Solutions Division, sit down with senior reesearcher Jose Morales to discuss a recent case study involving the deployment of a hypervisor onto edge devices in a resource-constrained environment.

A strong cyber defense is vital to  public- and private-sector activities in the United States. In 2019, in response to an executive order to strengthen America’s cybersecurity workforce, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) partnered with the SEI to develop and run the President’s Cup Cybersecurity Competition, a national cyber competition that identifies and rewards the best cybersecurity talent in the federal workforce. In six years, more than 8,000 people have taken part in the President’s Cup. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Jarrett Booz, technical lead for the President’s Cup, and John DiRicco, a training specialist in the SEI’s CERT Division, sit down with Matthew Butkovic, the CERT technical director of cyber risk and resilience, to reflect on six years of hosting the cup, including challenges, lessons learned, the path forward, and publicly available resources.  

Evaluating source code to ensure secure coding qualities costs time and effort and often involves static analysis. But those who are familiar with static analysis tools know that the alerts are not always reliable and produce false positives that must be detected and disregarded. This year, we plan on making some exciting updates to the SEI CERT C Coding Standard to better harmonize with the current state of the art for static analysis tools as well as simplify the process of source code security auditing. In this SEI podcast, David Svobodaand Joseph Sible, both engineers in CERT’s Applied Systems Group and primary developers and maintainers of the standard, sit down with Robert Schiela, deputy technical director of the Cybersecurity Foundations Directorate in CERT, to discuss the proposed changes, specifically in the area of risk assessment.

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Gregory Touhill, director of the SEI CERT Division, sits down with Matthew Butkovic, technical director of Cyber Risk and Resilience at CERT, to discuss ways in which CERT researchers and technologists are working to deliver rapid capability to warfighters in the Department of Defense. 

Grace Lewis, a principal researcher at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and lead of the SEI’s Tactical and AI-Enabled Systems Initiative, was elected the 2026 president of the IEEE Computer Society (CS), the largest community of computer scientists and engineers, with more than 370,000 members around the world. In this SEI podcast, Lewis sits down with Ipek Ozkaya, technical director of Engineering Intelligent Software Systems, to discuss her vision and plans for the IEEE CS presidency.

As software size, complexity, and interconnectedness has grown, software modernization within the Department of Defense (DoD) has become more important than ever. In this discussion moderated by Matthew Butkovic, technical director of risk and resilience in the SEI CERT Division, SEI director Paul Nielsen outlines the SEI’s work with the DoD on software modernization, including controlling the attack surface, incorporating industry practices such as DevSecOps, and the interplay between software, cybersecurity, and AI.