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I am Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon, and Director Emeritus of the Baldrige Program. I joined the Program in 1992 after a decade in management in the analytical chemistry and chemical sciences laboratories at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the home of the Baldrige Program. I started my career at NIST (NBS) as a bench analytical chemist. My favorite aspects of the Baldrige Program are: (1) the opportunity to interact with leading thinkers from all sectors of the U.S. economy who serve as volunteers in the Baldrige Program, who participate in the Baldrige Executive Fellows Program, and…

Credit: NIST In honor of NIST’s 125th anniversary this year, anonymous donors commissioned a piece of music to honor NIST and its contributions to science and industry. A nonprofit organization paid to have the piece recorded.This musical gift is an exciting and moving addition to NIST’s 125th anniversary celebration this year.The resulting piece is titled “Mensurae in Aeternum” (Latin for “Measurements for Eternity”). The seven-minute commemorative work was recorded last year by the Legacy Scoring Orchestra (directed by Todd Maki) and Illuminare Choral Ensemble (directed by Jon Simsic).Taking Measure spoke with composer Alex Cap to learn about his inspiration and…

Kelly Sauerwein is a physical scientist with the Special Programs Office at NIST. Credit: M. King/NIST As a person who studies how bodies decompose, I think a lot about something most people probably prefer not to think about — death.I’m a forensic anthropologist by training, a type of scientist who offers expertise in the decomposition of human bodies to legal investigations. Forensic anthropologists help law enforcement and medical examiners learn as much as they can about human remains, such as age, sex and time of death. And our research helps practitioners solve crimes and give families closure in mysterious death…

NIST researcher Susana Deustua works on a telescope.  Credit: M. King/NIST Many of modern astronomy’s achievements can be traced back to relatively unknown women who painstakingly cataloged the stars in the early 1900s.Called the Harvard Computers (because they performed calculations), these women combed through thousands of photographic plates of stars and cataloged them. That’s like being given massive stacks of photo albums and having to manually find and identify every picture of a particular person.While learning about stars and the cosmos is endlessly fascinating, staring at those plates must’ve been very tedious work.But more than 100 years later, the field…

Credit: BIPM/NIST The modern metric system — known as the International System of Units, or SI — is a model of consistency and logic. But in some cases, the logic seems to break down. In this blog post, we’ll explore some of these quirks and why they (mostly!) make sense at the end of the day (or approximately 86,400 seconds, as we might say at NIST).1. Why is the kilogram (a thousand grams) a basic unit of measurement instead of just the gram?In the metric system, we express quantities using individual units, such as length in meters and time in…

Actor Ryan Gosling plays a science teacher in Project Hail Mary. Credit: Shutterstock/lev radin Let’s be honest here. If you’re a scientist — or, in our case, scientist adjacent — and you’re watching a movie that involves science, your viewing experience may be just a bit different than that of most moviegoers. That’s because scientists, especially NIST scientists, are a — let’s just say — precise bunch. They like to analyze. They like to question. And they like to discuss the accuracy of how science is portrayed in books and movies. So, with that in mind, we thought we’d treat you to…

Credit: NIST On March 23, 1916, officials and citizens gathered in Washington, D.C., to celebrate a new era in the nation’s ability to measure. Secretary of Commerce William C. Redfield took his place at the podium to celebrate the beginning of construction of NIST’s (then known as the National Bureau of Standards) Chemical Laboratory, saying the expansion would add to a vital service that “pushes back more and more each day the shades of darkness that limit our present knowledge.” Redfield then helped set a massive one-ton cornerstone into place, signifying the federal government’s commitment to supporting American innovation.Following the secretary, Director…

Authored by Drew Keller, Ryan Steed, Stevie Bergman, and the Applied Systems Team at CAISIBuilding gold-standard AI systems requires gold-standard AI measurement science – the scientific study of methods used to assess AI systems’ properties and impacts. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) works to improve measurements of AI performance, reliability, and security that American companies and consumers rely on to develop, adopt, and benefit from AI technologies.Among other groups at NIST, the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) works in concert with the larger community of AI practitioners to identify and make progress on open questions…

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Cybersecurity Framework Profile for Artificial Intelligence (Cyber AI Profile) Workshop in January! The input we received on the Preliminary Draft during this workshop has been invaluable and is informing the development of the next draft of the NIST Cyber AI Profile. We are working toward publishing a full workshop summary soon that captures themes and highlights from the event. In the interim, we would like to share a preview of what we heard…Background on the Second Cyber AI Profile WorkshopThis workshop was a continuation of the past months public dialogue regarding the…

By Maia Hamin and Benjamin EdelmanAI evaluations are designed to assess and compare how AI models perform on different tasks. Developers, users, and independent evaluators — like the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) — can use evaluations to track trends in model capabilities and inform decisions about real-world use.Agent evaluations test whether models can use tools in a multi-turn feedback loop to solve complex problems like debugging software or uncovering cybersecurity vulnerabilities. They allow evaluators to measure new and increasingly economically valuable capabilities, but also bring new methodological challenges — including, as CAISI and other evaluators have found,…