Optics.com reports that Philip Perconti, the US Army Research Lab director, spoke at the SPIE Defense & Commercial Sensing (DCS) conference about the importance of research collaboration with top universities.  The development of the Internet of Battlefield Things is of paramount importance to the Army of the future, explained the director of ARL.  Research will focus on multi-domain command and control as ARL and their research collaborators focus on a constantly changing digital topography and heterogenous machine learning environments.