DARPA Decision-Aid Software STITCHES | Bullaki Science Podcast Clips with Timothy Grayson (7/11)

Опубликовано: 06 Сентябрь 2026
на канале: BULLAKI

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STITCHES (System-of-systems Technology Integration Tool Chain for Heterogeneous Electronic Systems) is a software-only and fully government owned (non-proprietary) toolchain specifically designed to rapidly integrate heterogeneous systems across any domain by auto-generating extremely low latency and high throughput middleware between systems without needing to upgrade hardware or breaking into existing system software. The toolchain does not force a common interface standard; rather it rapidly creates the needed connections based on existing fielded capabilities obviating the need to upgrade in order to interoperate.

This is the 7th part of our conversation with Timothy Grayson. We’ll be releasing this podcast in episodes every one or two days. If you wish to access the full podcast immediately please join us on Patreon (  / bullaki  , otherwise subscribe and turn on the notification and you’ll know when the other episodes will be available.

As the director of the Strategic Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA), Timothy leads the office in development of breakthrough technologies to enable war fighters to field, operate, and adapt distributed, joint, multi-domain combat capabilities at continuous speed. He is also founder and president of Fortitude Mission Research LLC and spent several years as a senior intelligence officer with the CIA. Here he illustrates the concept of Mosaic Warfare, in which individual warfighting platforms, just like ceramic tiles in a mosaic, are placed together to make a larger picture. This philosophy can be applied to tackle a variety of human challenges including natural disasters, disruption of supply chains, climate change, pandemics, etc. He also discusses why super AI won’t represent an existential threat in the foreseeable future, but rather an opportunity for an effective division of labour between humans and machines (or human-machine symbiosis).

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TG. Yeah, great question. So what you just described, I kind of real top level talked about these three thrust areas. We have planning, execution, the one in the middle we call interoperability, which is exactly this problem. The way we were tackling that is, to some degree, it’s not exactly one to one. But to some degree, it parallels the ISO-OSI network stack model. We start at that physical layer. We’ve done research in the past, and we’ll probably continue to do some [more] research on how do we make sure that given nodes, given tiles if you like, or just different data sources, how can I make sure I’ve got a physical pathway that can move between two points? It’s interesting, because I personally think one of the biggest problems is how can we make that process as, again, adaptable and flexible as possible, but at the same time, not making it overly complex?
People have, you know, the best, again, sorry, another metaphor, but the best analogy I’ve seen is comparing a Swiss Army knife to a Dremel tool. I can make a Swiss Army knife that does everything, I can make a radio gateway that speaks every part of the spectrum, and every possible protocol. The reality though is that that node is probably going to be insanely complex and insanely expensive and large and power-consuming to those platforms. The more Dremel tool model is maybe I want a node that only speaks two different waveforms, but I’ve got a bunch of those. Maybe I can build that smaller and cheaper. But I could take a bunch of those and scatter it, you know, throughout the environment. Again, statistically, if we are willing to live with a degree of uncertainty, statistically I have enough density of those sort of bilateral PHY-layer nodes, that I’ve got high confidence of being able to connect with each other.
Those are some of the things we’re kind of looking at the physical layer right now. And there’s the other interesting little side problems that gets to the software engineering side of the world. People certainly today know how to do software-defined radios. Gnu Radio is out there as an open source capability as an example. US DoD has invested a lot of money in software-defined radios in the past.