The NASA Technology Taxonomy Recommender System (T-Rex)

NASA tracks over 16,000 technology projects across the Agency, from propulsion systems to software. These projects are classified according to NASA’s Technology Taxonomy to facilitate data search, extraction, and application. In 2020, the Taxonomy was revised to better align strategic goals with project technical disciplines. Manual re-classification of current and historical projects was estimated to take thousands of technologist labor hours. Instead of manual classification, our team developed T-Rex, a recommender engine, trained on just a small set of manually classified projects. T-Rex was used to classify the projects and then integrate the data into TechPort to recommend classes to users when updating projects. The system and methodology are used in other NASA projects, and T-Rex has achieved 95% accepted accuracy overall.

The system has been deployed for over two years and recommended almost 40,000 classifications. It is used by multiple groups, and similar methods have been used in another recommender system for technology Target Destinations. T-Rex achieves high accuracy of almost 95% on both small sets of training data and observations in practice.

T-Rex provides API-based interactivity, serving as a resource for a variety of NASA projects that may need to classify technology. T-Rex can also be integrated into user interfaces, as it has been on the TechPort project editor user interface, in order to save data owners and editors time. T-Rex also decreases learning curves associated with the NASA Technology Taxonomy, requiring less time to be spent reviewing the entire taxonomy before making a classification determination. Additionally, because T-Rex contains mechanisms for analysis of technology project descriptions, it can be used as a platform for additional models, including the aforementioned Target Destination recommendation system, but for more complex use-cases such as technology gap analysis.

This is a mature technology (TRL 9) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.