Who is the I/ITSEC 2022 Fellow
Warren Katz graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with dual degrees in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering and started his career in Modeling and Simulation as an engineer at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), Inc. working on the Simulation Networking (SIMNET) program – the pioneering distributed simulation program sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The purpose of this ground-breaking program was to create a prototype research system to investigate the feasibility of creating a real-time distributed simulator for combat simulation. SIMNET, the resulting application, was to prove both the feasibility and effectiveness of distributed simulation for combined arms training. Warren’s team at BBN developed the vehicle simulation and network software, as well as other software such as artillery, resupply, and semi-automated forces often used for opposing forces. After proving the feasibility of distributed simulation, the DoD sponsored the development of the Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) standard, and Warren left BBN to become the co-founder of MAK Technologies in 1990. Soon after, MAK released the first commercial distributed simulation toolkit – VR-link – a product that is still thriving over 30 years later! Warren continued to lead MAK as its visionary COO and CEO for more than two decades, and his “Dial-a-Tank” concept was a precursor to today’s modern reconfigurable virtual simulators. He forged some of the earliest links between the defense M&S community and the gaming community – launching the “Spearhead” commercial tank simulation game through publisher Interactive Magic in 1998; and the first DIS/HLA plug-in for the Unreal game engine a few years later. Warren also helped to develop the concept and architecture for the DARPA “DARWARS” program in the early 2000’s and leveraged funding from the US Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, and other customers to develop the Battle Command line of low-overhead tactical trainers. By Warren’s retirement from MAK in 2012, his company’s product line had expanded to include a commercial Run-Time Interface for the High Level Architecture (HLA RTI); a market-leading Computer Generated Forces tool (VR-Forces); a streaming terrain server (VR-TheWorld Server); and one of the first 3D rendering engines that could generate visual terrain at run-time directly from GIS source data (VR-Vantage). Warren Katz is recognized as the 2022 I/ITSEC Fellow for being an innovator that has promoted the use of commercial technologies throughout his career, long before the Government began to accept and adopt commercial technologies to “accelerate change by transforming training".
Come see the I/ITSEC Fellow Presentation!
Warren Katz has focused his I/ITSEC Fellows paper on his many years of M&S experience in the training and acquisition domains, describing “a slow and fitful transformation” from a business model where all development of simulation software and technology was custom crafted for every new project, to an industry that consists today of a large number of vendors of finished commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) items that can be purchased at a firm fixed price, are of commercial software quality, are well supported, and can be integrated, and adapted into finished systems quickly and easily. Warren discusses that to enable this market, open interoperability standards first needed to be created that would allow the exchange of data of various kinds emerged such that content (e.g., environmental data, entity state, scenario initial conditions, after-action review archives, etc.) can all be transmitted and received by products from different vendors and leveraged repeatedly without re-creation. Please join us as he recounts the trials, tribulations, successes, and failures of the conversion of this ecosystem into a free market of competing vendors!