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Oceanit Kaua'i scientists ride the high-tech wave of the future
Nov 25, 2009 (The Honolulu Advertiser - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
Inside Oceanit Kaua'i's ordinary-looking office at the West Kaua'i Technology Center in Waimea, the next big thing for protecting soldiers in battle is under development.
It's an integrated system that can detect a bullet fired from 250 meters away before the bullet reaches the target.
It's small enough to be mounted on an armored vehicle or a helicopter. And it gives its operator enough information to dodge the bullet and know where to return fire.
If you guessed the U.S. Army is very interested in this, you'd be right. Police SWAT teams, too.
Since it's high-tech and has military applications, of course the system has an acronym name. It's HFDS -- Hostile Fire Detection System.
"It protects people who could come under attack," says Basil Scott, technology director for Oceanit Kaua'i.
It's the cerebral offspring, you might say, of another technology developed by Oceanit Kaua'i -- MOST, the Multi-target-tracking Optical Sensor-array Technology.
MOST uses telescopes installed on a flying airplane in combination with infra-red cameras (and a lot of other mind-boggling technology) to assess whether hostile ballistic missiles have been entirely destroyed by defending missiles.
Since 2004, Oceanit Kaua'i has been contracted by the Missile Defense Agency to develop and refine MOST. But the company, not the government, holds the patent to certain key elements of the system.
And the same creative thinking that invented MOST is already spinning off other applications. Enter HFDS, which if all goes well with the federal defense budget, will allow Oceanit Kaua'i to expand its staff to work on the next phase of its development.
It takes a special group of people to do things like this, with talents ranging from electrical engineering and physics, to computer software programming and astronomy.
Meet the brilliant minds of Oceanit's Kaua'i office.
Though Oceanit's Kaua'i office has only been here since 1999, it's "not a service organization for the main office on O'ahu," Scott says.
Neither is it only about defense contracts. The group has worked on solar energy projects, for example. And the company as a whole is known for its innovative approach to problems -- and ability to spin off technologies for other uses.
Founded in 1985 on O'ahu, Oceanit is one of the state's largest and most diversified science and engineering companies. It invented the world's only rapid test for ciguatera toxin in reef fish, has done jobs for NASA, and created computer-controlled systems that can detect water levels in lakes or sewage levels in pipes -- so managers can avert sewage spills or dam overflows.
Where does the name come from? Some of the firm's first jobs involved engineering issues related to the ocean and the company applied innovative thinking to them, thus ocean + "it," for "innovative thinking."
Oceanit's Kaua'i office has a mutually supportive relationship with the O'ahu office. As it happened, "Kaua'i started a research project five years ago that turned out to be dynamite," Scott says.
Because it's contract-driven, the staff size of Oceanit on Kaua'i has fluctuated from 9 employees, down to two and back up to the present 18. Scott is hopeful that they will get close to 25 employees next year, if certain projects go forward. And that's with shifting some of its work to the O'ahu office.
Oceanit Kaua'i makes it a point to give back to the community. The company's main way of doing that is by volunteering more than 1,000 hours a year to help the Kaua'i Island high school team in the annual For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) robotics competition in Honolulu. (See box for more information.)
Each team builds a robot that accomplishes a task on the field of play. To win, a team must employ not only mechanical and computer engineering skills, but also develop business and marketing plans for their products, Scott says. And they have to work as a team.
So while the "nerd" label may seem like a fit for some FIRST players, a variety of talents are needed to make the team successful -- just like in real life for an engineering company like Oceanit.
Though the Oceanit team enjoys nurturing the talent of Kaua'i's young people, there is also a motive to their giving. They hope that some Kaua'i's youth who get a taste for technology careers will come back to the island after college or training and work for Oceanit.
Oceanit Kaua'i also offers internships to college-age students, some of whom have gone on to technical jobs at Pearl Harbor or as civil engineers.
While some of Oceanit Kaua'i's employees are mainland transplants, a significant number are born-and-raised Kauaians. And Scott would like nothing more than to increase the kama'aina ratio.
Jason Badua, a network engineer, used to work as a contractor at the Pacific Missile Range Facility. Now he's all about coordinating the computer aspects of the sniper detection system at Oceanit.
"I'm really fortunate to be in the defense industry and living on Kaua'i," says Badua, who returned to his home island in 1990 and is raising his family here. "Most people don't know how important the PMRF is to our national defense."
The HFDS he's working on "is going to help protect our war-fighters on the ground," Badua says.
Scott Liebert, a software team leader, married Kaua'i girl Cynthia Macatombas and they were thrilled when he got the Oceanit job and they were able to move to Kaua'i a year and a half ago from the mainland.
Says Liebert, who is involved coaching the FIRST robotics team: "My dream is that we're going to have a bunch of local kids someday who want to work here."
Reach Diana Leone at dleone@honoluluadvertiser.com.
To see more of The Honolulu Advertiser or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to
http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com. Copyright (c) 2009, The Honolulu Advertiser
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