Where Insight Meets Innovation

#PeoplePoweringPossible

Possibility starts with people. Our project teams push the boundaries of capability for our customers. We integrate extensive federal expertise with emerging technology experts to rapidly develop creative solutions that better serve modern mission needs. Operating in an innovation ecosystem, we combine market-leading technical resources, strategic partnerships, and agile development capabilities to accelerate mission speed. At LMI, our people empower customers to be more effective, more scalable, and ready for anything that comes next.

Sarah Lukens, Principal Technical Advisor, Data Science

Sarah Lukens, principal technical advisor, data science, has driven innovation by leveraging her expertise in scientific computing for industrial data. In recognition of her contributions, she was invited to participate in the prestigious German-American Frontiers of Engineering Symposium in March in Jülich, Germany, where she represented LMI and presented her team's work on developing a machine learning approach for a supply chain risk management decision tool. This effort is part of a broader interdisciplinary initiative at LMI (LogSmart™ Supply). 

Innovating Supply Chain Risk Management with Machine Learning

Sarah and team developed a machine learning approach to aid in decision-making for managing supply chain risks, which have been a significant challenge for the government and the world, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Inefficient supply chains have impeded the country's efforts to safeguard its citizens, leading to a reassessment of the origin and movement of products and services. 

Effective decision support tools for Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) must account for system complexities from disruptions and mitigations.  However, inventory management models incur scalability challenges as the size of the supply populations expand. The machine learning approach, coupled with a discrete event simulation of inventory management (through the Financial and Inventory Simulation Model™ [FINISIM™]), successfully captures large population dynamics. This approach results in a scalable decision support system, optimizing mitigations for specific supply chain risks to account for the complexities of a large trade space and enable on the fly user-interactivity to define, explore, and fine-tune scenarios and mitigation strategies through a front-end interface via LogSmart™ Supply. 

Sarah and team developed a machine learning approach to aid in decision-making for managing supply chain risks, which have been a significant challenge for the government and the world, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Damon Rousis, Principal Technical Advisor, Data Science

Damon Rousis, principal technical advisor, data science, has contributed to innovation at LMI for his development around sensor-based algorithms.  One key innovative component is the creation of a data quality scorecard for sensor data, which is a cost-efficient, scalable, and extensible method for evaluating the suitability of raw field data for sensor-based predictive analytics. 

Data Quality Scorecard for Sensor Data

The industrial internet of things (IIoT) has created opportunities to use sensor data to improve the availability of assets. However, despite significant investment in predictive analytics based on this data, many organizations struggle to see a return on their investment.  This is because working with field data presents many challenges that can make it difficult to develop accurate models, which are essential for realizing the full benefits of a health monitoring program.

To bridge the gap and mitigate these issues, Damon and his team developed the following:

• A step-by-step framework tailored to handle sensor data, including handling big data, addressing data quality challenges, integration of different data sources for modeling. 
• Reusable, repeatable code libraries through LogSmart™ Fleet management.  
• A full data quality framework to identify, measure, and apply data cleaning analytics, where appropriate.
• An integrated and standardized data model with contextual data from various sources, enabling extensibility and repeatability. 

This innovation results in a cost- and effort-efficient scorecard for evaluating data for predictive modeling capabilities, enabling decision-making for data adequacy. This development has brought benefits to numerous LMI customers.

Damon has contributed to innovation at LMI through his development around sensor-based algorithms. One key innovative component is the creation of a data quality scorecard for sensor data, which is a cost-efficient, scalable, and extensible method for evaluating the suitability of raw field data for sensor-based predictive analytics.

Holly Nixon, Consultant, Editing

Holly Nixon, consultant, editing, created a one-on-one premeeting template to help spark conversations for one-on-one meetings in her group and serve as a source of information for self-evaluations.

One-on-One Meeting Template

Holly’s manager regularly holds monthly one-on-one meetings with each team member, and she started asking the team to submit some key points ahead of time so both she and they could come better prepared for these discussions. The point of the meeting was for the individual employee to lead with their topics but sometimes team members found it difficult to find new things to bring up each month.  

Due to the enterprise service function of Holly’s team, they work on hundreds of tasks each year for internal and direct clients. While some projects can extend over the course of a year or more, many are quick-turn responses. Because of the rapid pace of their work, by the time Holly’s team writes their self-evaluations, it can be difficult to fully characterize the actions from earlier in the year.

Holly’s manager implemented this template at the start of the year. Already, it has driven deeper conversations during their monthly one-on-one discussions and it promises to serve as a reference of accomplishments to add to self-evaluations. Holly’s team also now regularly share kudos on our team calls to celebrate wins across the team.

Holly’s one-on-one meeting template has driven deeper conversations during monthly one-on-one discussions and it promises to serve as a reference of accomplishments to add to self-evaluations.

Download the Template

Sarah Russell, Senior Consultant, Talent Management

Sarah Russell, a senior consultant in talent management, proves that non-tech positions can often use technology to solve a problem or work more efficiently in their role.

Used ChatGPT to Improve Efficiency

Sarah works on digital enablement and scrubs videos and courses. She was able to use ChatGPT to help her locate pre-existing videos in Skillsoft on specific topics she wants to cover, reducing her research and compilation time by approximately 70%. As a result, Sarah was able to compile videos and supporting content into a draft course for the Digital Builder training several weeks ahead of schedule.

As a result of using ChatGPT, Sarah was able to compile videos and supporting content into a draft course for the Digital Builder training several weeks ahead of schedule.

Kassandra Lerman, Analyst, Management Strategy and Rachel Owens, Sr. Analyst, Management Strategy 

Small projects with rapid growth often experience difficulty automating. Our customer—NASA Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math—receives hundreds of charge codes to fund its self-supporting internship program but must process and obligate each work breakdown structure to the contract promptly. Recognizing the opportunity to innovate at the pace of need, we shifted a function from email exchanges (typically requiring 2–5 emails spanning several days) and manual data logging to a process reengineering solution for multiple NASA Centers and departments. Mentors now submit a single form with all the necessary information from the start.

Time to Value and Data Integrity Improvements

This capability increases time to value and data integrity, reduces bottlenecks to task advancement, and improves communication and information management using Microsoft’s Power Automate and Forms.  

The idea encompasses two innovations:

• Leverage Power Automate to close information gaps by generating automated emails for funding points of contact (POCs) based on user input. This advance connects project funding POCs with agency funding POCs and reduces the need for contractors to act as an information passthrough. 
• Reduce human error risk by decreasing the transfer of information between systems. Power Automate connects data from Microsoft Forms to an Excel sheet automatically. This shared sheet serves as a touchpoint for various stakeholders.  

The customer needed an immediate solution but did not have the infrastructure to build a product to support this need. Our capability solution used already available products and, through our knowledge expertise, we reimagined and delivered a novel workflow.

Customers that deal with a large volume of information input disseminating from and to a variety of stakeholders would benefit from this solution because of its quick and accurate communication between stakeholders and efficiency in collecting and organizing data.

Kassandra and Rachel recognized an opportunity to innovate at the pace of need. They shifted a function from email exchanges and manual data logging to a process reengineering solution for multiple NASA Centers and departments. 

Caitlyn Valadez, Program Manager

The NASA Internships Team has recently leveraged ChatGPT to more effectively support NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement Team. Rachel Silber and Cheri LaBelle continuously look for innovative ways to increase the time we can spend on high-value and high-impact activities for our NASA customer.  

Leveraged ChatGPT to Expedite and Improve Communication

The team, led by Rachel Silber, leveraged ChatGPT to reduce the amount of time it took to draft a high priority communication by 55 minutes. It typically takes roughly 1 hour to complete the writing process, but with ChatGPT it took 5 minutes. Every member of the team uses this communication, so this effort provided 55 additional minutes they could spend working on other high value work for our customer.  

Our team manages NASA’s agency-wide internships email inbox, which receives about 250 internal and external inquiries each month. Cheri LaBelle leveraged ChatGPT to improve the grammar, structure, and professionalism of our responses to intern and applicant inquiries. 

Ways in which our team is exploring ChatGPT in the future: 

• How might we use this to ensure all communications products are 508 compliant? 
• How might we utilize NASA AI experts to share with interns how to ethically leverage ChatGPT? What is NASA’s perception of ChatGPT? How might we use this as a professional development offering for interns?  

The NASA Internships Team has recently leveraged ChatGPT to more effectively support NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement Team and is exploring additional ways is can be used in the future.

Ebony Karim, Consultant

Consultant Ebony Karim joined forces with fellow cofounders Quintella Rodgers and Swanzetta Lewis to launch the Beauty Genie vending machines. 

The Beauty Genie

The Beauty Genie bridges the gap between historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) students and access to staple beauty products. The rural location of many of these institutions often limits the types of products students can find. Through the Beauty Genie’s innovative machines, students can buy such items as bonnets, gels, bundles, braiding hair, shampoos, conditioners, and edge control from the convenience of their campuses. As former HBCU students themselves, the founders understand the importance of access to these everyday items.

“We are addressing the lack of access to quality hair care products for our brothers and sisters earning education in rural spaces and predominately white institutions," said the founders. The Beauty Genie machines will begin beta testing this summer at several HBCUs with the official launch during the fall 2023 semester. For more details on the Beauty Genie corporation, visit its Instagram and Facebook pages. 

“We are addressing the lack of access to quality hair care products for our brothers and sisters earning education in rural spaces and predominately white institutions."

LMI's Space Market Team

The LMI space market team supports highly technical customers who aggressively drive and challenge the upcoming state of the art for space-based systems in support of joint Department of Defense warfighters. The team is examining the evolution of space data transport architectures from military satellite communications architectures to highly resilient architectures integrating commercial industry and partners. These extremely complex analyses spread millions of possible architecture variations across low, mid-, and geostationary earth orbits. 

Bringing Space to Life

To bring the space data transport story to life, make complex architectural concepts intuitive to understand, and inspire decisions, senior leaders are pivoting away from PowerPoint briefings, instead using full-motion videos to showcase these stories. The LMI space market team invested in enhancing storytelling by building a new dynamic media team whose intrinsic inspiration crafted a world-class storytelling approach in support of the February 2023 Force Design Conference.

As a key differentiator to the space market’s innovative approach, space market leadership specifies the needed elements of deliverables and when to deliver them. The team is then empowered to brainstorm across skill sets to define their own innovative solutions. The dynamic media team brainstormed with our Rapid Analysis and Prototyping Toolkit for Resiliency (RAPTR^®) modeling, simulation, and analysis framework software development team. After several iterations, they drove their state-of-the-art video production in multiple integrated ways. In one pipeline, RAPTR^® performs the space data transport analyses and sends the relevant telemetry data sets to Unreal Engine (a popular real-time video game rendering engine) through an application programming interface. This approach for real-time simulation visualization generates an enhanced user experience on top of the idea-driven conceptual storytelling that cinematic video production offers. This tool opens additional mission-specific insights, grounded in real data and space astrodynamics. This new approach required a unique paradigm of thinking, centered around flexible future adaptation at our customers’ rapidly changing pace of need. 

For more information, please contact the dynamic media team lead, Ben Shearn. 

The LMI space market team invested in enhancing storytelling by building a new dynamic media team whose intrinsic inspiration crafted a world-class storytelling approach in support of the February 2023 Force Design Conference.