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Dream built on a napkin – SRI lab in Helena is on the cutting edge

It’s as nondescript as offices get. The outside door, with no sign and no hint of who labors behind it, opens onto an alley.

But inside the vanilla downtown Helena workplace, some of the most cutting-edge software development in the country takes place.

By JOHN HARRINGTON – IR Business Editor

http://www.helenair.com/articles/2004/01/18/business/e01011804_01.txt

Working in virtual anonymity — at least locally — six employees of the research lab SRI International find practical, commercial applications for once-futuristic technologies like artificial intelligence or advanced voice recognition and translation software.

SRI is nearly 60 years old, founded in Northern California as the Stanford Research Institute in 1946. (The lab formally separated from the university in 1970.) Over the years, the institute has developed hundreds of technological advances that are now commonplace in everyday life, from the computer mouse to liquid crystal displays, high-definition television, ultrasound imagery, ink-jet inks, lithium batteries and heart valves.

Today, SRI is one of the largest independent research labs in the world, with 1,400 employees in Menlo Park, Calif., Washington, D.C. and almost 20 other offices around the country. In 2001, the lab rang up $180 million in revenue.

"We’re not a government lab, and we’re not a large corporate lab. We’re independent, so we compete for everything we get," said Jim Arnold, who opened the local office some 16 years ago. "In the long run, that has made us much stronger."

Arnold moved to Helena in 1988, after three years with SRI in Menlo Park. Essentially a lone consultant for the lab at the time, he wanted to get out of the big city and raise a family in the country.

"I’ve been with them 19 years, but the job changes so much that I’m able to stay with it," he said.

Today, Arnold goes by the title of Director, Technology Commercialization, Information and Computing Sciences. His focus is business development, working with researchers, industry and investors to realize value from SRI-developed technologies.

To that end, he spends nearly half his time traveling, often to the Bay Area but also to Japan and Europe.

"SRI does not do any business in the state of Montana," Arnold said, though with six employees and the overhead of office space here, the lab certainly contributes to the local economy. "Sometimes the office feels like an embassy, where you walk in and you’re in a different country."

And while their work may be unknown around Helena, it’s noticed back at headquarters.

"This is a fabulous team here, highly respected in the Bay Area for their skills and their attitude," Arnold said.

In general terms, the five software specialists working in the Helena office work with results from basic research, fine-tune and mature them and make the technology ready for commercial markets.

"We clean up the code, make sense of it, take proof of the concepts they have and modify it into a system robust enough to get to the first stage with a commercial client," said software engineer Lynn Voss.

Arnold said that when it comes to finding real-world applications for the lab’s research, there are advantages to working in a satellite office.

"Living here, I have a much better, more balanced sense of what would be of interest to the general public," he said. "You don’t have the general public in the Bay Area, and certainly not in Menlo Park."

Like the other four members of the software team here, Voss attended Montana State (Arnold earned degrees from Wisconsin and Stanford). Nearing graduation, he was surprised and thrilled when the opportunity to apply his skills in Montana arose.

Voss interviewed firms in Portland, Fort Collins, Colo., and the Bay Area before learning of the opportunity at SRI. For a guy from Circle, the chance to stay in Montana in the high-tech field was too good to pass up.

"I get to work on all these cutting-edge codes, close to home and for a decent salary," he said.

If education is any measure, the Helena office is a pretty bright bunch — the six have 12 degrees between them.

"It’s pretty amazing we can all put our educations to work here in Montana," Voss said. "Bozeman has a lot of start-ups, but they don’t tend to pay as well, and there’s a lot more risk."

SRI International is on the Web at http://www.sri.com.

John Harrington can be reached at 447-4080 or [email protected].

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