When Hurricane Sally hit the Florida panhandle in September, the mission-essential edict threatened Eglin Air Force Base personnel’s ability to participate in this year’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). Little did many of them know that a program proposed and shepherded by Wright Brothers Institute (WBI), operating for months, would come to the virtual rescue.
Under the guidance of Todd Rovito, a Sensors Directorate computer science engineer, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) was able to host the first enterprise-wide SAB using G Suite, Google’s collection of cloud computing productivity and collaboration tools. Such a cloud-based effort seemed unthinkable just a few short years ago, but AFRL is quickly becoming a believer in the capability and WBI is working tirelessly to provide the workforce with licenses and training needed to implement this heretofore novel solution.
“This came about because WBI was able to move fast,” said Bob Lee, WBI’s Open Innovation Program Manager. “AFRL got this environment up and running because of problems with the current system – we were able to demonstrate the capability of what you can do with this kind of thing.”
G Suite was introduced by WBI to AFRL’s Materials and Manufacturing Directorate via Dr. Dan Berrigan, a believer with some clout. He became a G Suite advocate and was able to convince his Directorate leadership that this was a computing platform worth pursuing. He managed a successful pilot program with members of his team, and word got out.
“Good ideas are usually the product of multiple people coming together,” said Mr. Lee. “We started pushing the whole idea of cloud computing, starting by bringing in Google to do a presentation. That led to Adam Gerlach asking to try it in RQ (Aerospace Systems Directorate).”
G Suite now has more than 126 million users and though only 1,050 of them are with AFRL, the capability is changing the way the enterprise does business.
“AFRL/RC ( has approved G Suite at IL-4 (meeting unique, including FOUO and Controlled Technical Information,” said Mr. Rovito, “and It is well known that Google has some of the best computer security people in the world. CVR (Commercial Virtual Remote) Microsoft Teams is not approved for Controlled Technical Information, which is 90 percent of the information that AFRL works with.
“For the SAB we used Google Meeting to conduct the video teleconferences and it worked flawlessly.
Other parts of G Suite utilized include Google Sites to publish the rapidly evolving schedule, Google Drive to share files, and finally Google Calendar kept us all synchronized so AFRL could present our large portfolio on Autonomy/AI/ML in a professional manner to the SAB panel.”
Mr. Rovito’s use of G Suite is leading to “all kinds of new endeavors,” said Mr. Lee. “One of the biggest problems in research is how to get the data to do the research. (With G Suite) you can go and collaborate with universities, where all the PhD and graduate students are – for free.”
“Without WBI working with Dan to pilot the use of this capability, we would not have been able to pull off the first ever virtual SAB,” said Mr. Rovito. “With this capability, the teams at Eglin were able to participate and present.
“Virtually impossible is now virtually possible thanks to this pioneering effort!”