This post is based on an interview with Dr. Bob Baxley. It is part of our series of interviews of OODA Network members. Our objective with these interviews is to provide actionable information of interest to the community, including insights that can help with your own career progression. We also really like highlighting some of the great people that make our continued research and reporting possible.  For the full series see: OODA Expert Network Bio Series.

 Career Progression: When he was in High School in Jacksonville, FL, Bob participated in a Botball team-oriented competition that built autonomous robots.  He loved the challenge.  Upon graduation he was accepted into Georgia Tech where he studied Electrical Engineering.  Bob joined the Rowing Team, which was a natural for his competitive nature.  And he loved Atlanta!

Bob blasted through his education like a steamroller. He went on to earn his Master’s and PhD from Georgia Tech in Electrical Engineering. He was lucky to have some good Professors that inspired him and gave him challenging and tangible problems to work with. He especially enjoyed Signal Processing and thrilled to find innovative ways to extract useful information from them.

When he graduated, he was recruited by flashy Silicon Valley tech companies and some of the best National Laboratories, but his roots had grown deep in Atlanta, a vibrant city that he loves.  Bob stayed on to work at Georgia Technical Research Institute and teach as an Adjunct Faculty member.  In his role as the Director of the Software Defined Radio Lab, he worked with Cognitive Radios, discovering the many ways the energy coming from antennas can be combined.  “The spectrum is crowded, and contentions are becoming more common. There is a great opportunity to be smarter about how the spectrum is used.” Bob says.  Bob developed an additional degree of freedom within the spectrum: spatial movement.  “The radio signal already moves in frequency and time.  But when you combine a spatial element, through the use of autonomous vehicles, you can get a much better look at things.” Picture a swarm of autonomous drones with radios on them!  They can be moved around to gain much more clarity on what is being investigated.

While at GTRI he participated in a DARPA spectrum challenge competition.  Each team was given two radios.  The team that could push the most bits across the link (despite all the challenges to the spectrum that DARPA could throw at them) won.  His team came in second out of 90 teams.  With his competitive nature in full gear, Bob decided to start a new adventure with a start-up company that has transformed the way we can “see” the spectrum and the devices in our environment – gaining visibility into threats within the spectrum in a way not possible before.   That company was Bastille Networks.

“I love working for a small, innovative company.  In some ways it’s very similar to the work I did at GTRI.” Bob says.  “I’m still ‘selling’ research.  But now I have a much closer connection to the customer which results in a much tighter improvement loop.  At Bastille, I get to stay with the technology, constantly making it better.  I don’t have to bounce around multiple customer missions, like I did in Academia.”

Today, as Bastille’s Chief Technology Officer, Bob is building products to give enterprises granular visibility into all of the radio frequency (RF) devices in their facilities.  That is, Bastille will put a dot on a map of a customer’s floorplan for each emitting RF device. He’s also looking at adjacent needs that haven’t yet been addressed, such as small, portable solutions that can be used to clear a space of RF devices for short-term events.  Bastille’s technology moves us from the era of the honor code (“Secure Area!  Leave cell phones outside!) to a more accountable era of “If you violate this regulation, you will be caught!”.  As users extend their use of the spectrum to multiple devices (ear buds, Fitbits, etc.), the ability to understand the environment gets much harder.  Bob feels confident that Bastille’s technology and dashboard can slice open the space to provide full visibility – in a near-real time and actionable way.

Bob says “Bastille has software defined radios that are doing digital demodulation.  Legacy systems can identify if there is a signal there, but they can’t really tell what’s happening.  We take it down to the digital level – to the ones and zeros.  We check the packets to determine if it’s a signal or a false alarm.  We then map this on the floor plan, over time.  We can’t see the content (which is encrypted), but we can see where it came from and where it went and what it did while it was there.  It’s a game changer.”

Risks in the Near Future: “The artificial intelligence/machine learning revolution is here.  Commodity ML/AI toolboxes make it very easy to develop sophisticated capabilities with minimal effort. For instance, at Bastille, ML/AI tech makes it easier to do device mitigation. But across the Department of Defense, the adversaries are also able to leverage this technology to lower their barriers of entry into sophisticated capabilities.  Everyone will need to be alert.”  Bob says.

Technology of Interest:    Bob is watching the new proliferation of wireless protocols.  “Amazon is creating their own wireless protocol, Sidewalk, to link their gear together.  We will soon have an Amazon Mesh Network from their linked devices that will create better access to data and the opportunity to deploy more services.  Amazon is just one example; we are seeing a proliferation of RF protocols coming from all kinds of vendors.  That proliferation is making it more critical that enterprises keep an eye on their spectrum.” Bob says.Read about

Quick Hits:

• Book Recommendation: The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz and High Output Management by Andrew Grove
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbaxley/