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.

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.