In 2019, Greta Gerwig became the latest in a line of writers, directors, and producers to make a pilgrimage to a toy workshop in El Segundo, California. Touring the facility, the Mattel Design Center, has become a rite of passage for Hollywood types who are considering transforming one of the company's products into a movie--a list that now includes such names as J. J. Abrams (Hot Wheels) and Vin Diesel (Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots). The building has hundreds of workspaces for artists, model-makers, and project managers, and it houses elaborate museum-style exhibitions that document the company's history and core products. These displays can help a toy designer find inspiration; they can also offer a "brand immersion"--a crash course in a Mattel property slated for adaptation. When a V.I.P. visits, Richard Dickson, a tall, bespectacled man who is the company's chief operating officer, plays the role of Willy Wonka. He'll show off the sixty-five-year-old machines that are still used to affix fake hair to Barbies; he'll invite you to inspect life-size, road-ready replicas of Hot Wheels cars. The center even boasts a giant rendering of Castle Grayskull, the fearsome ancestral home of He-Man.

Experts say artificial intelligence -- which has wide applications across the military, civil and private sectors -- will be critical to furthering space technology as the cosmos becomes more contested. "The space environment continues to rapidly evolve," said Melanie Stricklan, CEO of Slingshot Aerospace, a space simulation and analytics company based in Austin, Texas, and El Segundo, California. "We continue to proliferate with new users and capabilities, new sensors both on orbit looking down, and on the Earth looking back up at space." Artificial intelligence can improve space domain awareness, accelerate command-and-control decisions as well as inject resiliency into satellites and their corresponding networks, she said during an online panel discussion hosted by Booz Allen Hamilton. "There's a lot of limitations for space today, but I think AI solutions really offer a transformative opportunity for ... the protect-and-defend mission on the defense side [and] for improving operations on the commercial side," Stricklan said.

Faced with a congressional mandate to test its GPS system for cyber vulnerabilities, the Air Force commissioned a digital replica of the satellites and then asked contractors to hack the system. The use of "digital twins" is expanding from modelling in conventional simulators to include testing of emerging technologies and systems, predicting engine performance, or training automated systems to fly a plane. With GPS, Booz Allen Hamilton built the SatSim twin for Lockheed Martin's Block IIR GPS satellite for the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), in El Segundo, Calif. "The satellite itself was on orbit," BAH Vice President Kevin Coggins told Air Force Magazine. "So we built this digital model … and then we went looking for vulnerabilities. We did [penetration] testing and we saw what we could discover."

NASA'S Planetary Defense Coordination Office uses the Catalina Sky Survey facility in Tucson, Arizona, to catalog space objects Even in this age of high-speed data analysis, a keen human eye normally can't be beaten when poring over images of potential asteroidal impactors. But Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) could soon change all that. The El Segundo, Calif.-based Aerospace Corporation is now testing A.I. software designed to help astronomers speed up the process of identifying and tracking threatening Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office already uses numerous telescopes to find and monitor NEOs that might have the potential to impact Earth. But the non-profit Aerospace Corporation's A.I. team is working with NASA on implementing software dubbed NEO AID (Near-Earth Object Artificial Intelligence Detection) to differentiate false positives from asteroids and comets that might be real threats.

The Army offered a $100,000 prize for a solution to an increasingly tough problem for commanders in the field: In a battlefield dense with electromagnetic signals, is there a better way to distinguish friendly transmissions from hostile attacks? There is, according to a team of eight engineers from Aerospace Corporation, based in El Segundo, Calif. They won the prize by correctly detecting and classifying the greatest number of radio frequency signals using a combination of signal processing and artificial intelligence algorithms. The competition, known as the "Blind Signal Classification Challenge," was sponsored by the Army's Rapid Capabilities Office, a small organization that looks for ways to apply commercial technology to solve military problems. When the challenge kicked off in April, the Army gave all 49 competitors a large amount of recordings of various types of radio signals to use as "training data" so they could develop their algorithms.

After one week with a new chief executive, Mattel Inc. is already stepping into new territory -- partnering with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba to design products for China and announcing its first male American Girl doll. The El Segundo toy maker said Tuesday it will sell items through Tmall.com, Mattel will also work with the Chinese tech giant's artificial intelligence lab to develop "innovative products" to nurture childhood development. It's the first public move by Margo Georgiadis, a former Google executive who took over as CEO last Wednesday. In another splash, Mattel announced it will add a boy character for the first time to its American Girl line of dolls and accessories.

Five minutes prior to the start of a speed-dating program called "Drawn to You" at the El Segundo Museum of Art, organizer Chelsea Hogan confides that no men have RSVP'd. It is a January evening, Friday the 13th -- a nightmare dating scenario. Eight women mill about the museum lobby, carefully dressed and nervously snacking on a cheese and veggie platter laid out beside bottles of Champagne and wine. The clock ticks 10 minutes past 6:30 p.m. as the awkward truth of the situation dawns on the women. A few men walk past the picture window on Main Street, but none turns and enters.

The US Army has installed PRIDE Merlin is an expert system developed (Pulse Radar Intelligent Diagnostic at Hewlett Packard's Networked Environment), a diagnostic expert Computer Manufacturing Operation system developed by Carnegie Group (Roseville, CA) to forecast the factory's (Pittsburgh, PA), in Saudi Arabia in product demand. Lucid (Menlo Park, CA), producer of American Airlines (Dallas, TX) has the Lucid Common Lisp language, developed an expert system - Maintenance has acquired Peritus, a producer of Operation Control Advisor C/C and FORTRAN compilers. Consolidated Edison (New York, Nova Technology (Bethesda, MD), a NY) has developed the SOCCS Alarm new company founded by Naval Advisor, an expert system that recommends Research Center scientist Harold Szu, operator actions required plans to commercialize neural networks to maintain the necessary and continuous made from high-performance power supply to its customers. Kurzweil AI (Waltham, MA) has Inference (El Segundo, CA) has received a federal grant to develop named Peter Tierney CEO and president. VoiceGI, a voice-activated reporting Tierney was formerly VP of and database management system marketing at Oracle.