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Team CANA would like to welcome Anna Sterrett, our new Director of Business and People Operations! We are excited to have Anna as a member of our team. Get to know Anna below. Anna Sterrett Director of Business and People Operations “We can choose courage, or we can choose comfort, but we can’t have both. Not at the same time.” - Bréne Brown Anna is experienced as an innovative director, supervisor, private practitioner, and trainer, with over 25 years of progressive behavioral health, education, and managed care experience. She has a proven track record in roles of supervision, quality assurance, and leadership. Prior to joining the CANA Team, Anna was an Education Director for a not-for-profit agency, which serves underprivileged and disadvantaged children and adolescents. Within that role, Anna was directly involved with the development and oversight of the clinical model within the educational environment. She was the project lead for the internship program, training and professional development, and trauma-sensitive classrooms. Anna also took point on quality control and regulatory compliance with the Department of Human Services, the Office of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, and The Joint Commission. Anna holds a Master of Social Work from the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Pennsylvania. She is licensed in the state of Pennsylvania as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and possesses a certification in Project Management from Coursera. As the Director of Business and People Operations at CANA, LLC. Anna is responsible for managing internal business capabilities and developing CANA’s people strategy across the company. She is uniquely positioned to manage and supervise business operations to include, including financial, contracting, and internal and external social media outreach. Together with the line directors, Anna promotes and supports personnel management which involves resourcing, recruiting, reporting, and retention. You can reach Anna at asterrett@canallc.com or on Linkedin.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful." - George Box Nick joins CANA as a Hiring Our Heroes Corporate Fellow as he transitions from over 22 years of active duty military service. Nick spent his active duty years as a Navy Supply Corps Officer where he gained experience and leadership in logistics, inventory and supply chain management, budgeting, contracting, and manpower analysis. He is on the Executive Council of the Military Operations Research Society, Chairperson of the Veterans Interest Forum for INFORMS, and is a Certified Analytics Professional (CAP). While at CANA he is supporting work with FMI, WS2, and AERT. Nick graduated from Missouri University of Science and Technology with dual B.S. degrees in Management Information Systems and Economics, an M.S. in Operations Research from Naval Postgraduate School, and executive courses at UVA Darden and UNC Kenan-Flagler. Nick can be reached at nulmer@canallc.com and on Linkedin. To learn more about our veterans programs, visit https://www.canallc.com/veterans. #hiringourheroes #teamCANA #CANAAdvisors #CANAConnect CANA Advisors is a veteran-owned, woman-owned, equal opportunity company based out of Gainesville, Virginia in the United States of America.

Live, Virtual, and Constructive Simulation (LVC Sim) by Chris Cichy The vision of this IRAD is to utilize a game engine that supports modifications and scripting to develop Live, Virtual, and Constructive (LVC) training environments to support concept, doctrine, and requirements development. LVC Simulation (LVC Sim) training has multiple markets within and outside of the Department of Defense; it is applicable to any agency in which training is cost or effort prohibitive, in this case, interagency firefighting. LVC Sim, built on an open-world gaming engine, would allow real-time wargaming capability with a minimal investment and could be made playable by a large audience to increase the sample size and remove currently existing stovepipes. Playable demonstrations and videos can be made to visualize and pitch new technology and concepts and could be used to develop new marketing tools for a customer’s requirements. For this particular IRAD, CANA could augment its game modification experience through a proposed innovation challenge, or “hackathon.” The goal of this hackathon would be to modify one virtual twin of a technology from an automated firefighting research and development project led by partners NIWC Pacific and the NavalX SoCal Tech Bridge called Project Vesta. With this head start in development and the experience gained by working with the innovation challenge participants, CANA would develop each of the assets from Project Vesta and create playable use cases for the pilot. Randomizing certain variables within the game world would then allow for a Project Vesta specific virtual training system. The long-range potential is limitless. Follow-on exploration might include producing a virtual training environment for autonomous vehicle software; developing tactics and doctrine lesson plans as modification packs; synthetic training data for Artificial Intelligence (AI) models; or developing synthetic environments with integrated Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for the training of deep learning models. They are ideas on the cutting edge, and CANA is excited by what our team will think up next! #CANA #socaltechbridge #projectvesta #navalX #innovation #AI #LVCsim #GAN

Today is the birthday of the greatest Navy in the world. No other country comes close. On this day I would like to reflect on how the Navy has shaped me and the importance of these experiences in my life. I was in the U.S. Navy from May 1992 until July 2016. I entered right after high school on a football scholarship to the United States Naval Academy. I started school a year early and was undersized coming out of high school so I elected to start my career at the Naval Academy Preparatory School (NAPS) in Newport, RI. I finished my naval career after two frigates, one nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, a tour to Basra, Iraq, and multiple port visits to Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Korea, Japan, and other parts of Southeast Asia. When I look back on my time in the Navy I think back to the phenomenal leadership opportunities and leadership examples that were given to me at an early age. The amount of responsibility and accountability the Navy gives to its junior officers is unmatched across all the other services. You get a short break as a new division officer but after your first tour, you are on the hook to perform. No excuses..figure it out. The Navy requires its leaders to be ‘technically and tactically proficient', always ‘self-improving’, and flexible and adaptable in times of battle (1). A quote that captures what I love so much about the U.S. Navy is - “The reason that the American Navy does so well in wartime is that war is chaos, and the Americans practice chaos on a daily basis.” - WWII German Admiral Karl Donitz. Here are also two of my personal favorites for media that showcase U.S. Navy culture: The Sand Pebbles (Steve McQueen) (2) Battlefield Detectives: The War of 1812: The Chesapeake and the Shannon (3) From the world’s first nuclear-powered Navy to the field of operations research (4) (data science before it was a thing), the Navy has always been the innovative arm of the military services and at the forefront of integrating new technologies and process improvement. The Navy's innovative culture coupled with a wide variety of job assignments and training not only challenged me but also prepared me for life post-Navy. After retiring from the Navy after 20 years I am now focused on supply chain and healthcare challenges. I was a supply corps officer (logistician) so supply chain and transportation issues are second nature to me. For healthcare, my research and focus area is personalized medicine. Personalized medicine is the optimization of an individual's healthcare plan based on data. This is very similar to the optimization and life cycle planning I would do with the Navy’s F/A-18s. A Navy F/A-18 is the Navy’s legacy premier fighter attack aircraft. The Joint Strike Fighter is its replacement. If you haven’t seen the movie “Top Gun” or a Blue Angels airshow - please do to see what these legacy aircraft are capable of. There is a wide and expansive support network that builds and maintains these aircraft for mission readiness. To pull all the repair and supply chain data together for the most optimal and efficient “buy vs. repair” decision is not a simple task. The same challenges and issues exist with healthcare data (collecting and merging family history, electronic healthcare records, genomics, environment, patient behavior, and other data for analysis). The actors, network, and processes are much different but the same operational research and data science tools can be used. I am taking my lessons learned from Navy F/A-18 lifecycle planning, as well as other Navy training and experiences, and applying this to a patient-centric, personalized healthcare model. I thank the Navy greatly for where I’ve been and where I am going. Happy birthday and Go Navy! Jerome is a Senior Operations Research Analyst here at CANA. You can contact Jerome at jdixon@canallc.com. https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/the-navys-11-leadership-principles/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060934/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1605101/ https://www.britannica.com/topic/operations-research/History

Innovation has become a major buzzword of the 21st century and many companies feel they have established incubators for innovation in their market. Hard to believe? Search any major company plus the word “innovation” and you will find it appears at least once on their website; in fact, it probably appears repeatedly. They probably even have their own “Innovation Lab,” but do they understand how to design innovation for success? At CANA we strive to continually perfect how we tackle tough problems, and we would like to challenge your perception of the approach to innovation. What is innovation? Wikipedia defines innovation as the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. Many companies innovate and bring new goods or services to market. Some succeed and some fail due to a wide range of factors. It is intriguing, though, to dig a bit deeper into the traditional approach to innovation. What we find is that the design phase has the greatest influence on profitability, market acceptance, adaptability, time to market, and inevitably, success. Yet, the least amount of time and money is often spent on design. Focus is often given to the quickest solution in an effort to obtain first to market. The critical long-term success factors can be overlooked as companies rush to push a product out the door. As we look back through history, it is often the approach to innovation that singles out successful icons such as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. Most companies focus on the newest shiny object. Any company with enough funding and time can release new features that are tacked onto an existing product or copied from the greatest competitor. The product needs to be more than just the shiniest object in order to succeed. Often the innovation itself is in the design: what’s going on under the hood or the work that takes place behind the curtain before the product hits the shelf. It is not a shiny object at all, but a facilitator of success through calculated design and implementation. We need to identify and design to the critical factors of success surrounding the problem: What differentiates it from the competition? How long does it take to build? How to minimize or eliminate dependencies? How cost-effective is the solution? How are quality and longevity addressed? How to source the supply chain or human resources? Who is the market and will it be embraced in the final form factor? How does the design support automation? What is the training required for staffing to scale? What features, data and processes are being duplicated with the new components? Can it be marketed, and how? Countless dollars and time are spent on band-aiding new products and features onto existing platforms rather than developing from the ground up to achieve real success. The result is a spider web of poorly integrated capabilities that provide a less-than-ideal user experience and rarely scale. We need to challenge the status quo that throwing out what works today and starting from scratch to meet tomorrow’s needs is bad. Adding new features often requires the removal of as many components as it adds. Just because something has always been done a certain way does not mean it will make sense tomorrow. We should approach problems with the most naive and childlike perceptions: forget everything we know and start from the ground up. Elon Musk said, “I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. We are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing.” Instead, we should, “[b]oil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.” You must break the paradigm. Do not become so attached to the current state, and so lost in the details, that you cannot see the forest for the trees. The simplest solution that will reduce total accounting cost, and training, and meet the delivery timeline while also increasing quality, is often staring us right in the face. Thomas Edison is often credited with the invention of the light bulb. The fact is that several inventors, some claim up to 20, had developed incandescent lamps prior to Edison. Where Edison succeeded was the first commercially practical light bulb. Rather than simply inventing an incandescent lamp, he was innovating using design considerations for incandescent material, such as exterior packaging to achieve a higher vacuum and higher resistance to allow power distribution from a centralized source. His innovation was not the light bulb, otherwise, cavemen would have been credited with the invention through their discovery of fire. Edison’s innovation was in the identification of an economically viable solution to the light bulb: a product that could be widely accessible to the general consumer. This is why he is credited with success. Henry Ford graced us with the Ford Model T. It was a brilliant innovation that was a simple and robust solution to all the downfalls of a horse and buggy and was far more versatile and superior in capabilities. The problem was that Ford could not scale because of minimal cost margin, and it was too expensive for the average American. This primarily was due to the fact it took over 12 hours to build a single vehicle. While flying over a meat packing plant in Chicago, Ford was intrigued watching cows march into one end of the plant, and packaged hamburgers flowing out the other. He determined if a cow could be processed through a disassembly line, then his Model T could be built much more efficiently through an assembly line. When we think of Henry Ford, we often think not of his Model T, but of his innovative design of the automotive assembly line. It changed the industry forever. His design to bring that innovation to market was what made him successful. Steve Jobs was arguably the innovation mastermind behind much, if not all, of Apple’s success. He continually beat the competition, but his approach to innovation was his greatest strength. Just one of his great achievements was the iPod. The Sony Walkman was, by all standards, the industry leader, but continued to focus on removable magnetic memory (cassette tapes and CDs). Steve Jobs saw this as a limitation so he went back to the first principles of the problem. Jobs went back to the drawing board and designed a solution with solid-state memory that allowed the portable music player to be delivered in a more user-friendly and smaller form factor. His innovation was not the portable music player, but an innovative design to the form factor, battery life, capability, and future features through updates that the Walkman could not deliver. Elon Musk has succeeded in beating the odds over and over again. One can argue launching rockets and sending payloads to space was barely innovative, as this was first achieved in 1958 with the Explorer 1. It can also be argued that electric vehicles are not groundbreaking inventions; after all, the first electric vehicle was developed in 1832. In fact, several attempts were made to produce them on a wider scale in the 1870s and beyond. Elon Musk instead focused on the practical fundamentals of these problems. His innovation was in the cost-effective delivery to market. At SpaceX, Musk focused on developing reusable first-stage rockets that effectively reduced the cost of a rocket launch by 80% per launch. At Tesla, he focused on developing and building his own battery technology at scale, while limiting the number of parts and designing for reusability. A Tesla EV drivetrain has, on average, just 17 to 18 parts compared to roughly 200 in a standard internal combustion engine. And, each model of Tesla shares up to 75% of its parts with other models. In addition, Musk focused on robotic assembly lines that would scale to reduce the cost of entry to electric vehicles for the average consumer. Elon Musk defined a 5-Step Design Process that SpaceX utilizes to reinforce these concepts during their innovation process: 1. Make the requirements less dumb. Requirements often make too many assumptions and are not clearly defined. Take a rigorous approach to the question and simplify the requirements. Test all assumptions. 2. Delete the part or process. Simplify through the removal of parts or processes that unnecessarily overcomplicate the solution. Musk challenges his team to delete until they have to add back in to achieve meeting the requirements. “If you’re not adding things back in at least 10% of the time, you’re clearly not deleting enough.” 3. Simplify or optimize the design. Do not optimize something that should not exist in the first place. 4. Accelerate cycle time. Ensure efforts are being utilized to move forward in the right direction. “If you’re digging your grave, don’t dig it faster. Stop digging your grave.” 5. Automate. Design for automation, but automate last. Make it work first before wasting time automating something that is not required in the first place. When approaching a problem, step back and reason from the first principles. Look deliberately at the approach to innovation from the entirety of design through delivery. Develop a solution without any preconceived notions. Realize the solution may not be the quickest nor the easiest. The goal is to beat the odds by reinventing from the ground up for long-term success. At CANA we embrace this challenge and continually evaluate, adapt and execute an approach to innovation that will solve our client’s toughest challenges and ensure their long-term success. Todd is a Principal Software Engineer at CANA. You can contact Todd at tallison@canallc.com or on Linkedin. 1 “Innovation.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation. Accessed 21 October 2022. 2 Kevin Rose. (2012, September 7). Foundation 20 // Elon Musk [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-s_3b5fRd8 3 Christopher McFadden. “Who Actually Invented The Indcadescent Light Bulb?” Interesting Engineering, https://interestingengineering.com/science/who-actually-invented-the-incandescent-light-bulb. (2019, April 3) 4 “Ford’s assembly line starts rolling.” History, A&E Television Networks, LLC, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fords-assembly-line-starts-rolling. Accessed 21 October 2022. 5 Ron Adner. “Innovation Success: How the Apple iPod Broke all Sony’s Walkman Rules.” Knowledge Insead.” https://knowledge.insead.edu/strategy/innovation-success-how-apple-ipod-broke-all-sonys-walkman-rules. 7 March 2012. 6 “Explorer 1.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorer_1. Accessed 21 October 2022. 7 “Timeline: History of the Electric Car.” ENERGY.GOV, https://www.energy.gov/timeline/timeline-history-electric-car#:~:text=Around%201832%2C%20Robert%20Anderson%20develops,an%20English%20inventor%20in%201884. Accessed 21 October 2022. 8 “SpaceX just saved NASA $500 million with one rocket.” Quartz, https://qz.com/2040243/elon-musks-spacex-saved-nasa-500-million. 29 July 2021. 9 Tristan Perry. “How Many Moving Parts Does a Tesla Have?.” Green Car Future, https://www.greencarfuture.com/electric/tesla-number-moving-parts. 12 April 2021 10 Fred Lambert. “Tesla Model Y teardown: shows some great improvements over Model 3 despite sharing 75% of parts.” electrek, 11 Everyday Astronaut. (2021, August 3). [SUMMER 2021] Starbase Tour with Elon Musk [PART 1] [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw 12 Ibid

CANA Foundation contributed a monetary donation to Girl Scout Troop 46709 in support of their Silver Take Action Project. The Girl Scout Silver Award is a Take Action Project that addresses an issue and makes a long-term impact in the community. The Girl Scouts state that Silver Take Action Project is, "a project that addresses an issue by tackling the factors that cause or contribute to it. As you may expect, these projects have a far-reaching influence. They’re designed to change something for the better—forever. Projects associated with Journeys and the highest awards (the Girl Scout Bronze, Silver, and Gold Award) are Take Action projects." The Silver Project selected by the Troop was to build, paint, and erect thirty bluebird boxes in the Somerset County community. Bluebirds and other species often use nest boxes for roosting in cold weather. Female bluebirds build tight cup nests within the boxes. Thin bark strips, pine needles, and dry grasses are typical nesting materials. Each year the Troop will clean out the boxes for the new mothers. Over time the maintenance of the boxes will be passed to another Troop. This project was made possible by CANA Foundation, Somerset County Conservancy, and the PA State Game Commission. To learn more about the CANA Foundation, visit https://www.canallc.com/giving-back. #CANAFoundation #GirlScouts #TheSilverProject Kristin Fairman Kristin is a Senior Contracts Manager here at CANA. You can reach her via email at kfairman@canallc.com or on Linkedin.

Across all the military services, wargaming has become an increasingly popular tool to test new warfighting concepts, examine the use of new technologies, and exercise various scenarios against near-peer and peer adversaries. As an example, the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory executes 10-12 wargames per year, with multiple overlapping game lines of effort running simultaneously. Yet despite its broad adaptation, wargaming has some acknowledged limitations. Those limitations, and the risks they pose, were the subject of a recent War On The Rocks article by Dr. Jon Compton, where he argued that the DoD’s over-reliance on wargaming for investment planning could have significant negative impacts. Wargames as event planning are fun to attend, and most who attend them come away convinced they learned a great deal. Yet, these event-style wargames produce little in terms of ways forward, innovation, or usable answers. Further, they frequently create negative learning and reinforce existing biases due to the lack of any foundational research or ancillary support studies. Regardless, wargame providers continue to conduct them to the exclusion of more analytically robust designs of research that incorporate smaller, more focused games into broader discovery efforts, and resistance to change appears to be high. For logisticians participating in wargaming events, the frustrations articulated in Dr. Compton’s article are often felt even more acutely. Despite acknowledgments from very senior leaders across the DoD that logistics challenges must be analyzed and addressed, it is rare to find a wargame’s objectives bounded or informed by the limitations of logistics capabilities. Others in the wargaming community argue that trying to bring quantitative analytics, such as logistics feasibility, into wargaming events risks detracting from their primary focus–exploring the human dimension of complex problems. In a September 2022 article titled, “Wargaming and the Cycle of Research and Learning” Dr. Peter Perla emphasized the distinction between a wargame and operations research: “A true wargame is best used to investigate the decision processes of its players, what they believe that leads to those decisions, and how those processes interact; it is not well suited to the calculation of outcomes of physical events–such calculations when they occur, are inputs to the game, not outputs.” The Cycle of Research In their articles, Dr. Compton and Dr. Perla make a similar case for an integrated “cycle of research” where wargaming, modeling and simulation, and analysis outcomes are combined towards focused learning objectives. While theoretically sound, this approach can have challenges in execution. First, how accurate can a cycle of research be if its wargaming inputs reinforce existing biases or ignore hard problems like logistics? And what if other inputs to a cycle of research are also flawed? Like wargaming, operations research – the process of reducing highly complex problems into component parts and seeking quantitative and repeatable outcomes – has its own set of limitations. Where wargaming events frequently leverage the collective experience of multiple senior leaders and subject matter experts, operations research projects tend to encounter the opposite: very little senior leader involvement, especially in their early stages. This can lead to flawed models, inaccurate assumptions, or results that lack operational context. Thus, independently, both wargaming and operations research have the potential to come up short. Ultimately, the cycle of research could be enhanced by more closely linking the key leader engagement opportunities wargaming events afford with the precision and rigor of operations research techniques. What if, as an example, analytic techniques could be brought to bear fast and in unobtrusive ways during a wargame, effectively quantifying the impacts of participants’ decisions without impeding the pace of the game or altering its primary objective? Imagine if after wargame participants set operational objectives and developed their plans to achieve those ends, weapon-to-target pairings could be quickly assessed to measure a plan’s efficacy. Imagine also if logisticians could quickly and visually “map” the supply chain required to support an operation, overlay distribution resources necessary to maneuver and sustain the force, and rapidly simulate the movement of forces, supplies, and follow-on sustainment resources. These tools could provide valuable in-game feedback on the logistics feasibility of proposed plans. The good news is that the technology required to deliver these types of analytic enhancements to wargaming already exists. Working in partnership with Headquarters Marine Corps over the past four years, CANA developed and applied a unique set of analytic techniques to support the planning for prepositioning and war reserve programs and their material investments. More recently, the Office of Naval Research began working with CANA to incorporate similar analytic methods into a science and technology project designed to aid operations and logistics planning for fleet-level and maritime operations center battle staff. Tailoring these analysis methods to support wargaming applications is a logical next step and a mission we are excited to embark upon. CANA at MORS: Examining Logistics and Supply Chain Resilience Through Wargaming For this reason, we’re excited to announce our participation in the upcoming MORS Wargaming with Pacific Partners special event in February of 2023. This event will provide an ideal forum for CANA to highlight how currently-available analytic techniques can be adapted and applied to wargaming for enhanced outcomes. And because it is such an underserved element in almost every wargame, our primary focus will be highlighting its use in logistics and supply chain resiliency, demonstrating ways to rapidly quantify the implications of operational plans and provide objective assessments of feasibility. But the most powerful use of these innovative analytic methods could be to enable the design of wargames with logistics as the main objective. By examining key variables such as supply routes, supply locations, amounts of prepositioned stocks, transportation fleet design and positioning, and how/where operational energy is produced and transported, planners can determine what logistics investments are most influential in determining mission success. Supply Chain Analysis as a Service at CANA Logistics wargaming is, in fact, part of a broader line of effort underway at CANA called Supply Chain Analysis as a Service. Our team of subject matter experts and operations research professionals are designing ways to examine the key components of a supply chain and dynamically test its resilience under stress. Customizing these analytic techniques for use in both wargaming and more long-term planning or design applications is a key part of this line of effort. Moreover, this methodology has the potential for value in non-military applications such as food security, disaster preparedness, or other related scenarios. This exciting new frontier, at the nexus of wargaming, logistics, and supply chain analysis, offers many opportunities to enhance support for stakeholders in the DoD, Federal agencies, state governments, and beyond. With both analytics and logistics in our company DNA, CANA is well-positioned and prepared to be an influencer in this important area. Jesse Kemp is a Principal Program Manager here at CANA. You can reach Jesse at jkemp@canallc.com or on Linkedin.

The MORS analytics community is coming together next week for an important meeting on the role of analytics in national security and climate change preparedness. The goal of the meeting is to identify ways that analytics can be used to improve our understanding of climate change and its potential effects on national security. This information will help us develop a roadmap and analytical agenda that will support both areas. The importance of this meeting cannot be overstated. Climate change has the potential to cause all sorts of problems for nations around the world, from increased natural disasters to political unrest. With countries around the world just now starting to come to grips with the implications of this impact, it’s more important than ever that we have a strong foundation in our analytics approach in place. This meeting is an important step in developing that foundation. By bringing together some of the top minds internationally in analytics and climate change, we can start to develop a better understanding of how these two fields intersect and what steps need to be taken in order to prepare for the future in both what and how to model and the data that supports that modeling. CANA is excited to support this event. It’s sure to be an informative event that will help us all take the necessary steps towards national security plus climate change preparedness. If you plan on attending in person be sure to look us up. Renee Carlucci and Walt DeGrange will be attending and representing Team CANA. Walt DeGrange Walt DeGrange is the Director of Analytics Capabilities. You can contact him via email at wdegrange@canallc.com or on Linkedin.

The esports industry has seen tremendous growth and popularity over the past few years. However, despite the rapid interest and participation in esports, the industry is playing catch up with their solidified pathway to pro. Unlike traditional sports, such as football, basketball, and others, esports encompasses many different types of games, not just one. The pathways to pro in those aforementioned traditional sports are more linear than in esports. Take football, for example, where the pathway to pro has set steps that almost every professional NFL player takes. Once the players get to the high school level, they are ranked and recruited to play in college, and then drafted to the NFL right from college. There are obviously outliers that take a different path, but this is the normal process most professional football players take. In regard to esports, there are a variety of video games in which you can go professional, but there is no set pathway. The main, current path to pro revolves around a player’s networking, entering specific events that recruiters are going to be at, and live streaming their gameplay, hoping a recruiter is interested in them. These are not nearly as effective as a set pathway to pro would be, but again the esports pathway has yet to be solidified. This is due to many factors, but the main contributor is the vast number of leagues within the industry. Each video game has many leagues at every level of play: youth, high school, collegiate, and professional. This can lead to recruiters not knowing that certain leagues exist, having an overwhelming amount of places to look for players, as well as having uncertainty about which leagues represent the most talented player pools. Also, most professional gamers are actually recruited before they are even in college and their careers are much shorter than traditional sports athletes, often ending in their mid-20s. This is again due to multiple reasons but a huge factor is the lifespan of the video game (how long a game stays popular). This average shorter lifespan of professional esports athletes, and the sheer number of games and leagues, leads to difficulties in setting a clear pathway to pro. However, with the exponential growth esports has seen, more areas have begun creating youth and scholastic esports programs to help mend the fragmentation. Developing more of these programs at an established and credible level can help define a process each aspiring esports athlete should take, instead of just entering random leagues and events with hopes of being recognized. Scholastic esports programs and leagues are fairly similar to how traditional scholastic sports would work, just on a smaller scale at present. At both the high school and collegiate levels the school/university decides if they want to field an esports program and which games they want to support. They then decide if they want to join a league or just have the team play within their school/university. Collegiate esports is now seeing many colleges/universities build esports specific venues for their program play. Again, this area is still fairly fragmented, but there are a few organizations working to organize and govern this part of the industry. Implementing these governing bodies for scholastic esports is a great step in building a credible and solidified pathway to pro. For high school esports, Generation Esports is one of the main organizations working to support its sustainability, and for collegiate esports, it is the National Association of Collegiate Esports (NACE). It is important to note there are also many other organizations working with these two to support the overall effort to make scholastic esports sustainable and help it grow. There are also many scholastic and collegiate one off, or repeating, events produced by other organizations. All these events and leagues have the purpose of trying to help grow the opportunities for students to succeed and have fun while doing so. This esports pathway to professional is not mutually exclusive to esports gameplay. This effort includes creating a set pathway to obtain a successful career in the esports industry. Colleges and high schools are implementing esports curriculum and offering esports majors around the world. Within almost all academic esports programs there are opportunities to work behind the scenes of events. Providing these students with the opportunities to help organize and produce these esports events gives them real life experience in areas in which they can build transferable professional skills and potentially make a successful career. The pathway to pro in esports is being built for both gameplay and supporting careers. Members of our CANA team, Stephanie Allison and Todd Allison, have first hand experience with one of these newly created scholastic esports programs. Their son had his first high school Rocket League tournament this past month. The high school has an entire room set up with high end PCs and monitors to facilitate the Rocket League program and events. Speaking on the event and her son’s overall participation in esports, Stephanie stated, “When my son decided to join his school's esports team this year, I was so excited for him! He's involved in several other activities but his passion is in gaming, esports, youtube, and the like. Every kid is different! So it's great to see another activity not only be offered but take on worldwide popularity. Plus, due to that popularity, the amount of opportunities it opens for players at all levels is outstanding - from scholarships and awards to jobs and successful careers!” This first hand experience with esports programs at the high school and youth level is exactly what needs to occur more frequently. A huge barrier in the esports industry now is the understanding and adoption of esports by parents. Stephanie also mentioned something not many people realize: “Several of the kids on our team play esports AND soccer, football, hockey, etc. But for a lot of them, esports is all they do. They finally have something that is a fit for THEM.” If more parents can understand why their children are invested in video games and esports, they will see the true benefits it offers and realize esports is something that can lead to a successful career for their children. In regards to youth esports, there are scattered programs and leagues across the country and the world. There are a few organizations doing a very good job at organizing and running these youth esports programs, but right now a big limiting factor is the overall buy-in. These programs and leagues place a major emphasis on using esports to help children develop lasting life skills. They provide a number of resources, such as personal coaching and personal training, in addition to setting up games and leagues. The esports industry has been growing rapidly for a few years now but has yet to reach its full potential. The industry needs to mature and really solidify the pathway to success for both professional gameplay and professional careers in order to be universally accepted. There is still much work to be done, but esports is such an exciting and fun industry with unlimited potential. Jack Murray Business Analyst You can contact Jack at jmurray@canallc.com or on Linkedin.

By Shawn Charchan, CANA Technical Director of Energy Solutions As CANA's Technical Director of Energy Solutions, I also serve as the Modeling, Simulation, and Analysis (MS&A) Coordinator for several CANA clients. In that capacity, I have the privilege of working with the analytical leads of various pilot programs to ensure the composite group is capitalizing on work already completed and working with unity of effort. This ensures the collective body of work continues to expand in line with the client’s larger objectives. The analysis and research that CANA supplies often relies on modeling and simulation (M&S) when completing studies in support of pilots. M&S is a powerful, yet often misunderstood, tool that has many uses in the analytical realm; it can be used for applications spanning requirements analysis, to forecasting, to - in several instances -system impact assessments. One of the challenges our teams face when performing pilots is the data we obtain is based on limited lab testing and/or field demonstrations comprising one or two of the systems being tested. M&S can provide the study team a rich synthetic environment in which 10s or 100s of the systems being tested can be represented as a digital twin in a virtual scenario, thereby enabling our study teams to explore the contribution fully fielded systems will (or will not) supply in the context of future warfare. The combination of real-world system testing combined with analysis in a synthetic environment has proven time and again to be an excellent method for obtaining the type of insights that help us engage external stakeholders, inform requirements, and ensure each pilot ends with success. #digitaltwin #optimization #modeling Shawn Charchan Technical Director of Energy Solutions scharchan@canallc.com

By Anna Sterrett, Director of Business and People Operations On Wednesday, January 18, 2023, several CANA employees volunteered their time to participate in a virtual event with Georgia Tech students. Throughout the course of the day, mock interviews were scheduled with several students, and they had the opportunity to receive immediate feedback to improve their personal presentation and employability skills. Resume reviews also took place, where students were provided with helpful tips and constructive criticism to broaden student knowledge of what employers look for when considering an applicant. The day was a great success, and students expressed gratitude for the experience coupled with optimistic reviews from CANA employees. Mr. Cliff Carpenter, CANA Principal Logistics Analyst commented,"[g]reat opportunity for CANA to interact with top talent - I hope we were able to give these graduate students a flavor of what to expect in an interview experience with top tech firms." While Ms. Jackie Knapp, CANA Senior Business Operations Manager shared, “I believe it was a great experience for both of us. It allowed me the opportunity to hone interviewing skills that I haven't had the opportunity to use in a very long time. For [the student], I think it was excellent practice and provided some insights for his next interview.” This event is a small sampling of what the CANA Futures Program is doing to make significant connections with students preparing to launch into internships, and fellowships, as well as into their chosen profession. Throughout CANA’s history, there has been a desire to extend an arm to assist with providing professional opportunities to young people. From this passion, the CANA Futures Program was born, where CANA developed this program specifically to seek out and provide a professional experience to college students, transitioning military members, their spouses, and veterans. The CANA Futures Program consists of two programs. The first is the CANA Veterans Program (CVP). CANA prides itself on being a veteran-owned company and believes whole-heartedly in providing opportunities to others who have served our country. CVP provides those opportunities to not only veterans, but to their spouses as well. Through partnership with the federal programs Hiring Our Heroes Fellowship and DOD Skillbridge, CANA has been able to offer veterans and their spouses experience and training in the corporate environment. From first hand experience, Ms. Ashley Castillo spoke to her experience with Hiring Our Heroes: “I would say as a spouse Hiring our Heroes really focuses on the silent ranks. They give us back the ability to speak and be equal in an area that sometimes feels impossible. In the workforce it is hard to prove why someone should take a chance knowing you may be leaving or to explain why you have gaps in employment. They work with companies such as CANA who believe and give possibilities to do it all.” Ms. Castillo was hired by CANA through Hiring our Heroes as a Business Operations Analyst, and has proven essential to its Business Operations Team. The second program within the CANA Futures Program is the Corporate Interns & Fellows Program or CIFP. CIFP provides college students and graduates the opportunity to gain valuable experience in CANA specific industry sectors, such as logistics, program management, business development, software development, and operations research. CANA has found this process to provide a seamless transition from being an in-house trained intern or fellow joining the CANA Team as a hired professional. One such success story belongs to Mr. Jack Murray, who began his professional career within CIFP. Mr. Murray shared, “[t]he internship program here at CANA was my first true professional job, and I was fortunate enough to get this experience during my time in college. I think that the way CANA’s internship program is run truly allowed me to develop my professional skills in a manner that was both comfortable and challenging at the same time. There was a good amount of independence and independent work that allowed me to take things in the direction that I wanted, but the support was always there if and when I needed it.” As Mr. Murray progressed through his internship, it became clear that he was an asset to the CANA Team. He was hired as a Business Analyst, and what he learned within his education, in conjunction with the skills he developed through CIFP, proved to be a perfect match for what CANA was looking for. From his perspective, the experience was also one of great value. He stated, “[t]he blend of independence and guidance is done very well within CANA’s internship program. The best thing about the program is that you can reach out to anyone in the company, and they are more than happy to help you. Everyone here wants to see you succeed! CANA’s internship program directly led to my full-time position here at CANA, and it taught me a great deal about transitioning from the collegiate world to the business world. This program sets you up for success!” For more information, please contact our CANA Futures Program Coordinator, Ms. Stephanie Allison. #CANAFutures #hiringourheroes #internship Anna Sterrett Director of Business and People Operations asterrett@canallc.com

R’s Tidyverse is a collection of R packages that work together with a common functional interface to accomplish data transformations and analysis in the R programming language. To see it in action, let’s consider the following sequence of data transformations on some dataframe (called df) as an example. df <- read_csv(“some_file.csv”) df <- groupby(df, name, a, b, c) df <- summarize(df, qty = qty) df <- ungroup(df) df <- mutate(df, version = “20230130”) Each of the functions groupby( ), summarize( ), ungroup( ), and mutate( ) are from the Tidyverse collection. Notice that the first argument of each of these functions is the data (usually a dataframe) to be operated upon and is the data just updated on the previous line. However, the standard practice is to code such a sequence, not as consecutive assignment statements, as above, but as ONE expression where each step is a “link” in a “chain” of transformations, as in the following code. df <- read_csv(“some_file.csv”) %>% groupby(name, a, b, c) %>% summarize(qty = qty) %>% ungroup() %>% mutate(version = “20230130”) Notice that each step of the transformation is now “linked” to the next with the infix operator %>% (sometimes called “pipe”). Also, note that the first argument of each Tidyverse function is now dropped. That is because the passing of the data from one transformation function to the next is handled by the pipe operator %>%. Eliminating the repeated “noise” on each line also makes the code more readable. The chain of such transformations is called a “pipeline.” Code Usage Example Now, here is a usage of the above idea that we see a lot in our code. If we want to create a dataframe A for output (and possibly use A for further processing), we like to write code like the following (where [step i] is not real R code, but represents some Tidyverse function call, as in the concrete example above). A <- [step 1] %>% [step 2] %>% [step 3] %>% [step 4] %>% [step 5] write_csv(A, "A.csv") But in our codebase, we've seen a variant of this code too, where we want to peek at what the data looks like after step 3, but before going to step 4, as in the following: A_intermediate <- [step 1] %>% [step 2] %>% [step 3] write_csv(A_intermediate, "A_intermediate.csv") A <- A_intermediate %>% [step 4] %>% [step 5] write_csv(A, "A.csv") The variable names often don't say "intermediate" and this fragmentation of the pipeline is often more difficult for the reader to read, especially when this “peeking” method occurs several times in a long pipeline. To the rescue, enter the idea of tee which is an old UNIX utility. UNIX shell expressions have pipelines too -- I believe that R pipelines are inspired by them (or by something else that was in turn inspired by UNIX shell pipelines). A Unix pipeline looks like this: [step 1] | [step 2] | [step 3] where each [step i] is some UNIX command, and each command is “linked” to the next by the | character (analogous to %>% in Tidyverse pipelines). If a call to the utility tee is inserted into the pipeline, e.g., as follows: [step 1] | [step 2] | tee foo.txt | [step 3] then the file foo.txt has the intermediate result of the pipeline after step 2, but before step 3, and can be inspected for audit or debug purposes. Using this idea, we write an R function called tee( ) so that our code looks more like the original (non-fragmented) version of the pipeline: A <- [step 1] %>% [step 2] %>% [step 3] %>% tee("A_intermediate.csv") %>% [step 4] %>% [step 5] write_csv(A, "A.csv") The definition of tee( ) is simply: grab the given dataframe, write it to a file and then pass it along (for further processing down the rest of the pipeline). tee <- function(df, filename) { write_csv(df, filename) df } More Tee Fun We can simplify our new code even further by reusing tee( ) for writing the final version of A also. A <- [step 1] %>% [step 2] %>% [step 3] %>% tee("A_intermediate.csv") %>% [step 4] %>% [step 5] %>% tee("A.csv") This puts all the processing for dataframe A in one expression, making it easy for the reader to see it as completely self-contained. This final version is the form of the data transformation found in our codebases. Summary We can see how the Tidyverse package collection is an extremely useful programming construct for data analysis. Tidyverse functions have a common interface which can be leveraged so that we can code our data transformations into easy-to-read pipeline expressions. Easier reading entails easier development, less coding mistakes, and easier debugging, if it should come to that. We have additionally leveraged an idea from UNIX to help us “peek” into the partially transformed data in a pipeline to help us understand what the data looks like at a particular point in the transformation pipeline. Rick Hanson is our Senior Operations Research Analyst here at CANA. You can reach him at rhanson@canallc.com or on Linkedin.