The Pentagon has agreed to a deal with Carnegie Mellon University, worth up to $2.7 billion, to continue operating its Software Engineering Institute (SEI) for an additional five years.
SEI is sponsored by DoD’s research and engineering office to study software-related security and engineering, with a recent focus on robotics and artificial intelligence.
“Carnegie Mellon is pleased to continue to operate the federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) dedicated to software and cyber security, providing the government with leading-edge software expertise to ensure our systems are dependable, resilient, and secure,” Farnam Jahanian, the university’s president, said in a statement. “CMU’s longstanding expertise in computer science, cyber security, engineering, and artificial intelligence are essential for national defense as well as for the nation’s critical infrastructure and our commercial enterprises.”
SEI was first established in 1984, receiving its most recent FFRDC contract from the Pentagon in 2015.
“The contract ensures that the institute, a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC), will continue to support national security by advancing and transitioning the science, technologies, and practices needed to make software a strategic advantage for the DoD,” the university wrote in a statement.