John James

Dr. John James commanded three times at the company level (twice with Air Defense Artillery (ADA) units in Germany and as a District Senior Advisor in Vietnam). His last active duty assignment was as Director of the U. S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Center where he led development of over thirty small knowledge-based decision support systems, at least two of which were used for over 25 years. As a contractor with research engineers from the Lockheed Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL), he investigated implementation of netted, distributed control of theater-level air defense fires for the Medium, Extended Air Defense System (MEADS), https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/meads.html . He has been teaching at USMA as a civilian faculty member since 2000. He deployed twice for short periods to Afghanistan to work with the Computer Science department of the National Military Academy of Afghanistan (NMAA) in 2009 and 2010.  John has taught Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Information Technology, and Cyber classes. John received a B. S. degree from the United States Military Academy in 1967, an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley in 1973, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1986.  His research interests are in computable models of command intent which affect evolution over time of system logical behaviors and resilient distributed control, including interfacing of logical constraints of system safety and security components which affect logical system evolution over time with physical constraints of continuous system components which affect physical system evolution over time.

Michael “Misha” Novitzky

Dr. Michael “Misha” Novitzky is an Assistant Professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point and an MIT research affiliate. He joined in October 2019 as part of the Robotics Research Center housed in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Dr. Novitzky established the Human-Robot Teaming Laboratory within the Robotics Research Center.  Dr. Novitzky’s focus is on human-machine teaming for cooperative tasks in stressful and unconstrained environments. Prior to joining West Point, Dr. Novitzky was a postdoctoral research associate (2015-2017) and then research scientist (2017-2019) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Laboratory for Marine Sensing Systems (LAMSS). While at MIT, Dr. Novitzky led the Project Aquaticus testbed in which humans and fully autonomous robots were embedded in the marine environment and played games of capture the flag against similarly situated teams. Dr. Novitzky studied multi-robot teams at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) where he earned his PhD in 2015, Masters of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2014, and Masters of Science in Computer Science in 2009. Prior to becoming fascinated by robots, Dr. Novitzky earned a Bachelors of Arts in Psychology at the Colorado College in 2003. When not working on robots, Dr. Novitzky supports cadet clubs including the combatives team and the Future Applied Systems Team (FAST).