NIS-ITA
The International Technology Alliance in Network and Information Sciences (NIS-ITA) was a research program initiated by the UK Ministry of Defence (United Kingdom) (MoD) and the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL), which was active for 10 years from May 2006 to May 2016. It was led by IBM Research in the U.S. and IBM Hursley in the UK. NIS ITA was the first International Technology Alliance started by the two countries. Overview. The complete name of the alliance that ran from 2006–2016 was United States/United Kingdom International Technology Alliance in Network and Information Sciences. It was  a research group tasked with conducting fundamental research in network science and information science which affected coalition operations. The program was a combination of country-specific research programs that were run by ARL and MoD respectively. The ARL runs several programs called Collaborative Technology Alliances (CTAs) and the MoD runs equivalent programs, each of which are collaborative research programs involving multiple research institutes and universities. The CTAs programs are run for the duration of 3–5 years, and usually involve a consortium of industrial research laboratories and universities to team together to solve research problems in a specific domain. The International  Technology Alliance differed from the CTAs primarily in the fact that its scope was international, and spanned two countries, the United States and the United Kingdom. Thus, the alliance consisted of researchers from ARL and MoD working together with several UK and US based industries and universities to solve several fundamental research problems. The research work in ITA was fundamental in nature, and the goal was to perform public domain research by means of published papers. The restriction of research to fundamental research was done in order to avoid running into any issues related to ITAR which often arise in  work focused on or sponsored by the armed forces of a country. A unique aspect of ITA was its focus on solving scientific problems in the context of coalition operations. However, due to the nature of fundamental research, many results are applicable in situations which fall outside coalition operations, e.g. within networks of a single country military or for federation of commercial networked systems. During the first five years of its existence, ITA was focused on research in four technical areas (i) network theory focusing on wireless and sensor networks (ii) security across systems of systems focusing on solving security  issues that arise when two different networks need to inter-operate (iii) sensor information processing and delivery focusing on issues involving sensor network information management and (iv) distributed decision making and coalition planning focusing on how humans from different countries use the network to make informed decisions. In the last five years of its existence, the four technical areas were consolidated and revised into two technical areas (v) Coalition Inter-operable Secure & Hybrid Networks and (vi) Distributed Coalition Information Processing for Decision Making. Hybrid networks were defined as mobile networks that also leverage infrastructure networks such as cellular and wired  networks. Members. The ITA consistses of several research laboratories and universities in U.S. and UK. These included the U.S. Army Research Laboratories and the UK Defense Science and Technologies as participating Government research laboratories. The non-government members of the alliance in both countries consisted of both industrial and academic research organizations as listed below: UK industry. All of the organizations were members at the initiation of the program, with the exception of Cardiff University and Airbus UK which were added in the middle of the life-time of the alliance. Leadership. The alliance was led by a team consisting  of technical leaders from U.S. Army Research Laboratories, UK MoD, IBM Research in the U.S. and IBM UK. During the life-time of the program, the following people served in the role of alliance leader listed above: Each of the six technical areas was led by a panel of four scientists, one each from the U.S. Army Research Laboratories, UK MoD, an academic member of the alliance, and an industrial member of the alliance. The following is a table of researchers who acted in the role of the technical area leaders (TAL) for each of the technical areas within the  scope of the research program. Significant results. As per the end of program book of achievements published by the alliance, its major scientific advances include: