•December 2012: Army awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop an Interoperability Architecture for Simulators and Radio Models.
•December 2012: Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a Bayesian-based Trust Initialization Mechanism for Reputation Management in Wireless Sensor Networks.
•November 2012: Navy awards IAI a new contract for developing a Network Sensing, Assessment, and Intrusion Detection System for Software Defined Radio Technology.
•November 2012: Army awards IAI a new contract to develop a Sensitive Mental Workload Assessment Tool enhanced with Multi-Task Learning.
•November 2012: Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop SecureVisor for protecting Weapon Systems against Cyber Threats.
•November 2012: Navy awards IAI follow-on contract for using Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) for wire fault detection in the Electrostatically Supported Gyro Navigator (ESGN).
•October 2012: Army awards IAI a new contract to develop a Numerical Model for Variable Surface Roughness Distributions to Estimate Parasitic Drag.
•October 2012: Army/DARPA awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop High Fidelity Synthesis of Dynamic Social Networks.
•September 2012: Navy awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a Distributed and Standard Based Data Warehouse and Mining System for Large-Scale, Multi-Modal Sensor Data.
•September 2012: Army awards IAI a new contract to develop a Virtual Laboratory to Study Collective Behavior and Inter-Group Conflict.
•September 2012: DOT awards IAI a new contract to develop Next Generation Ground Penetrating Radar Technology.
•September 2012: Army awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop an Open-Architecture Agent-Based Intelligent Control Framework for Robotic Counter-IED Operations.
•September 2012: NIH awards IAI a new contract to develop a personalized, game-based, immersive cessation program for addiction treatment.
•October 2012: Visit IAI at MILCOM 2012 – Booth 1310.
•August 2012: Navy awards IAI a new contract to develop a Multi-Arm Robot Control System.
•August 2012: NIH awards IAI a new contract to promote cardiovascular healthy by delivering computer-generated reminders for diet and exercise via desktop and mobile apps.
•October 2012: IAI researchers’ publications to be presented at the 2012 IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC).
•October 2012: IAI researchers are to be awarded the Best Paper for ITC 2012.
•August 2012: Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a novel method for Network Application Security using Policy Guided Isolation and Strategically Shielded Exposure.
•September 2012: IAI’s Private Cloud Computing Capabilities.
•September 2012: IAI exhibits at the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus 2012 Science and Technology Fair.
•September 2012: Intelligent Automation, Inc.’s ARGUSTM Perimeter Security System Completes Army Tactical Evaluation.
•September 2012: IAI makes available for free download a beta release of its desktop GISTe application.
•July 2012: OSD/Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a Real-Time Cognitive Readiness Assessment Tool.
•July 2012: NIH awards IAI a new contract to develop an Early Alert System for Emergency Vehicle Proximity.
•September 2012: IAI researchers publications to be included in the AIAA Conference in Indianapolis.
•September 2012: IAI will be participating in the 2012 ATCA Conference at National Harbor.
•July 2012: Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop Routing Protocols for Small Unmanned Aerial Systems Networks.
•Fall 2012: IAI continues its support of the Colloquia Series at ISR for the Fall 2012 semester.
•July 2012: Navy awards IAI a new contract to develop a Diversity Rank-Based Summarization Tool for Stream Texts.
•July 2012: Air Force awards IAI a new contract to develop a Text Mining System for Modeling Social Dynamics in Groups.
•July 2012: Air Force awards IAI a new contract to develop an Inlet and Exhaust Damage Registration Sensor for Aircraft.
•July 2012: Navy awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop Topological Robust Agent-based Algorithms for Massive Data Sets.
•August 2012: IAI makes a beta release of our desktop client Proteus available for free download.
•August 2012: IAI Distinguished Lecture Series welcomes Prof. Davis and Prof. Milner from the University of Maryland on August 28th at 10:00am.
•July 2012: NIH awards IAI a new contract to develop a Medication Ingestion Compliance and Adherence Monitoring System.
•June 2012: OSD/Navy awards IAI a new contract for developing an Adaptive, Biologically-Inspired Framework for Identifying Salient Data.
•June 2012: NASA awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop an Exercise Sensing and Pose Recovery Inference Tool.
•May 2012: DOT awards IAI a new contract to develop an Automated Trailer VIN Identification and Sequencing System.
•May 2012: DOT awards IAI a new contract to develop a Robust Anti-Texting Law Enforcement System.
•June 2012: OSD/Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a novel Dynamic Cross-Layer Cognitive Radio Networking Architecture.
•May 2012: Navy awards IAI a new contract to develop a Highly Available and Securely Coded Data Storage System for Wireless Mesh Networks.
•May 2012: Air Force awards IAI a new contract to develop a Mesh Enhanced Tactical Airborne Link (METAL).
•May 2012: Air Force awards IAI a new contract to develop Hyperspeed Mobility and Security Capabilities for Next Generation Airborne Networks.
•May 2012: Air Force awards IAI a new contract to develop a Long-term Sustainable Net-centric Framework for Space Surveillance Networks.
•April 2012: OSD/Navy awards IAI a new contract to develop a Discovery and Information Retrieval System from Distributed Multi-INT Data Sources in a Cloud Environment.
•April 2012: NASA awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a Security-Enhanced Autonomous Network Management System (SEANM) for Space Networks.
•April 2012: MDA awards IAI a new contract to develop a Waveform Agile Telemetry Transmitter (WATT).
•April 2012: Navy awards IAI a new contract to develop an advanced Channel Simulator using Physics-based models.
•March 2012: OSD/Army awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a Hand-Free Kinetic System for Medical Simulation.
•March 2012: DHS awards IAI a follow-on contract for developing a Portable High-Resolution Imaging System for Concealed Currency Detection.
•March 2012: Air Force awards IAI a new contract to develop a Trusted Computing Framework for Embedded Systems.
•March 2012: IAI's Multi-Arm Unmanned Ground Vehicle Shaves Head for Charity.
•February 2012: NASA awards IAI a new contract for developing a Demand Generation System for Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Studying its Airspace Impact Prediction.
•February 2012: NASA awards IAI a new contract to develop technologies for Cognitive State Assessment of Crew Members for Improving Aviation Safety.
•February 2012: Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a Secure Content Distribution System for Military Operations.
•February 2012: Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop Intelligent Optimization Solutions for Virtual Networks.
•January 2012: Air Force awards IAI a new contract to develop a Reconfigurable Digital Transceiver for Space Applications.
December 2012: Army awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop an Interoperability Architecture for Simulators and Radio Models.
Simulation and modeling are important tools in developing and evaluating network and communication technologies, and many discrete event simulation (DES) systems have been developed. Each DES is implemented differently and its unique application programming interface (API) with the radio model causes radio models to be heavily tied to a particular DES. Ideally, radio models should be DES-agnostic to allow flexibility in their use, reduce licensing costs, shorten the development cycle, and accelerate the improvement of radio technology. An adapter between the DES and the radio model that supports a plug-in architecture can help achieve this objective. To address this issue, IAI has been awarded a follow-on contract to develop an Interoperability Architecture for Simulators and Radio Models (ISAM). The proposed system has a radio model adapter that supports the complete, automatic, and verified conversion of a wide range of radio models. ISAM creates an automated process for compiling and using existing radio models in any DES, regardless of which DES the radio model was written for. A key innovation is a minimally invasive, multi-stage approach to translating API differences. Further, ISAM has a three-tiered compartmentalized adapter design that reduces complexity, increases flexibility and minimizes duplication of effort. Another key innovation is the capability to easily share models among multiple DESs since the entire adaptation process for a model is performed automatically without requiring user input. ISAM can be an enabling technology for combining legacy radio models with DESs and other components in new ways, thus reducing costs and delays associated with current practices. It can improve the compatibility and flexibility of existing simulation technologies and models, and has already shown success in converting several radio models.
December 2012: Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a Bayesian-based Trust Initialization Mechanism for Reputation Management in Wireless Sensor Networks.
Distributed sensing systems, especially Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), are highly vulnerable to compromise. Trust and reputation management systems have been proven to be effective in solving many security issues in WSNs. Trust initialization is however challenging, as there are no historical interactions to provide information to help reach valid conclusions during the initialization phase of the reputation management system. An automated evaluation technique to estimate the initial reputation of nodes within a system is needed, using assessment techniques to evaluate each component on its inherent trustworthiness or risk, with respect to the system. To address these issues, IAI and its collaborator, Argon ST, have been awarded a contract entitled, “Bayesian-based Trust Initialization for Reputation Management in Wireless Sensor Networks.” An effective Trust Initialization Mechanism (T-INIT) based on Bayesian Fusion for evaluating the initial trustworthy of WSNs. Existing trust initialization strategy will be improved by taking a set of context parameters into consideration. The final target is to build an advanced trust initialization strategy, which is integrated with existing reputation and trust management systems, so that the warm-up period can be successfully minimized. This will take full advantage of the trust and reputation management system and reduce the time that the system is vulnerable. This technology also has commercial applications in large-scale networked devices for ubiquitous computing applications that use reputation services to identify and isolate misbehaving nodes.
November 2012: Navy awards IAI a new contract for developing a Network Sensing, Assessment, and Intrusion Detection System for Software Defined Radio Technology.
Emerging portable software defined radio (SDR) technology has great potential for improving the communication capability of dismounted and Special Forces personnel. This is because of SDR’s ability to quickly acquire operational information in a hostile environment, and to adapt to it based on spectrum needs and available resources. The major challenges lie in the following five aspects of effectiveness of spectrum sensing, network identification, effective network assessment, advanced security mechanisms, and spectrum adaptation. Most of the existing research focuses on enabling technologies like spectrum sensing and adaption, and the remaining areas are not well researched. Further, the current development is still in its early stages and demands further investigation. To support diverse mission requirements and needs, all five aspects should be fully leveraged and equally emphasized. To address this critical need, IAI has been awarded a contract to develop a dynamic Network Sensing, Assessment, and Intrusion Detection (NetSAID) system on portable SDR platforms. This work will enable dismounted and Special Forces personnel to rapidly adapt to hostile environments and acquire relevant operational information. The proposed approach will significantly improve reliable and secure access to battlefield networks, as well as provide enhanced support for situation awareness. Both military and civilian first responders who use SDR technology will benefit from adaptable and re-configurable SDRs. This effort will also fulfill the demand for better security strategies and intrusion detection software for SDR technology.
November 2012: Army awards IAI a new contract to develop a Sensitive Mental Workload Assessment Tool enhanced with Multi-Task Learning.
Mental workload contributes significantly to human performance. Considerable research exists on workload assessment using methods like subjective measurement and performance measurement. Physiological parameters like Electroencephalography (EEG) and Electrocardiography (ECG) have been recently used for automatic objective workload assessment. A few challenges remain including high performance assessment and workload assessment in multiple dimensions like visual, cognitive, and fine motor. To address this, IAI and its collaborators, Old Dominion University and the University of Iowa, have been awarded a contract entitled, “SMOLT: Sensitive Mental Workload Assessment Enhanced with Multi-Task Learning” A key innovation of the SMOLT software tool for multi-dimensional workload assessment model is incorporating advanced Multi-Task Learning (MTL) theory and multimodal deep learning, which models the relatedness among the output tasks or workload in different dimensions, and among input signals or multimodal deep learning for better feature representations. Physiological signals, like EEG and ECG are preprocessed, and a library of features extracted and the most prominent selected. The features are classified with a basic deep learning model based on unlabeled data and limited labeled data. Multimodal deep learning helps learn shared feature representation among different sensing modalities. SMOLT uses prior research by IAI and its collaborators in cognitive state assessment using advanced learning techniques in multi-dimensions. A series of signal processing techniques, including pre-processing, wavelet neural networks-based EEG artifact removal, a feature library for EEG/ECG signals, advanced feature selection algorithms and machine learning algorithms for cognitive state classifications have been developed and implemented. These existing algorithms will be incorporated into SMOLT software for more accurate workload assessment.
November 2012: Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop SecureVisor for protecting Weapon Systems against Cyber Threats.
Current cyber threats analysis and detection techniques, which are based on intrusion prevention and detection, and anti-virus and spam filters, often offer unsatisfactory security properties and are not very useful for securing Weapon Systems. They cannot detect new attacks, have high false negative rates and often identify attacks only after they have happened. Ensuring confidentiality, integrity, availability, non-repudiation, and authentication of Weapon Systems is essential for establishing and maintaining trusted platforms, which may operate in networked on non-networked environments. The solution for system assurance in Weapon Systems IT assets must also support the mission of the target system without adding burdensome overhead to mission-critical devices. To address this, IAI and its collaborator, Lockheed Martin, have been awarded a follow-on contract entitled, “SecureVisor: Efficiently Protect Weapon Systems Against Cyber Threats.” A lightweight whitelist-based cyber threat detection and prevention framework for Weapon Systems, called SecureVisor, will be developed. SecureVisor is composed of three major components including a whitelisting tool to identify allowed safe programs, a security enhanced hypervisor, and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to provide the root of trust. In all, the proposed SecureVisor is a combined hardware-software security solution to detect and prevent cyber threats to Weapon Systems. This solution will not only provide a high level of security, but will also minimize impact on the platform in terms of power, processing cycles and operation performance. It could also be used eventually for the security of commercial information and infrastructure systems.
November 2012: Navy awards IAI follow-on contract for using Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) for wire fault detection in the Electrostatically Supported Gyro Navigator (ESGN).
Slip ring assemblies are crucial components for many gimbaled platforms and are used for transferring digital, analog and clock signals, and power between the gimbals. Slip rings are very reliable, but can also cause operational and maintenance problems due to wearing out of mechanical parts, and cross-coupling caused by moisture. This causes signal glitches, resulting in intermittent electrical problems. Locating the problem sites is difficult on the stable platform of the Electrostatically Supported Gyro Navigator (ESGN), which is planned to be operational until at least 2024 and is experiencing age and wear related electrical problems. The large number of interconnections requires hours of installation, inspection and maintenance and increases the probability of failures. To address this, IAI and its collaborator, the Boeing Corporation, will evaluate the use Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) to detect and locate hard-to-isolate and intermittent faults in the ESGN. The evaluation will be performed with WireCheckTM, IAI’s high performance TDR instrument. WireCheck has the potential to quickly and precisely detect and locate the most troublesome wiring faults for slip-rings, wiring, connectors, motors, and inductosyns. WireCheck will allow technicians to accurately locate faults with sub-inch accuracy without accessing the stable platform. This will decreasing the chance of secondary damage, reduce the unnecessary replacement of parts, and increase the chance of mission successs.
October 2012: Army awards IAI a new contract to develop a Numerical Model for Variable Surface Roughness Distributions to Estimate Parasitic Drag.
Surface roughness can contribute significantly to the drag on an aircraft. Several materials, paints and protective coatings used in Army aircraft have different surface compositions, textures and roughness characteristics. The roughness also changes over time due to weathering and environment. The resulting differences in roughness height can change parasite drag, which affects the performance and operational capability of the aircraft through the engine power required for flight. Current computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methodologies cannot geometrically simulate surface roughness within the time and computational resources typically available for engineering drag estimation of complex shapes. Existing roughness models also assume a single characteristic surface roughness over the entire body, resulting in an over-prediction or under-prediction of the aircraft’s true aerodynamic drag. To address this issue, IAI and its collaborator, University of Maryland, have been awarded a new contract entitled, “Variable Surface Roughness Transition and Turbulence Modeling for Rotor Parasitic Drag.” A numerical model will be developed for variable surface roughness distributions of materials such as glass, metal, paints and protective coatings that can be used in CFD simulations for accurate estimation of the parasite drag of an aircraft. The end product will be a surface roughness numerical model based on efficient engineering algorithms that can be implemented into government and industry production-level CFD codes to estimate parasite drag of an Army aircraft within its design envelope.
October 2012: Army/DARPA awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop High Fidelity Synthesis of Dynamic Social Networks.
Social network research requires access to realistic graph datasets for testing theories and developing network algorithms. However, available social network data are either small, static or cannot be collected or shared due to privacy issues. Synthetic social network data must capture multi-dimensional network analytical functions and support diverse sets of network applications. To address these challenges, IAI has been awarded a contract entitled, “High Fidelity Synthesis of Dynamic Social Networks using Measurement-based Calibration.” A systematic approach will synthetically generate diverse types of large-scale, dynamic and high fidelity online social network data via dynamic measurement calibration. Scalable algorithms will be designed and implemented along with methods and software tools to generate realistic social network data with respect to multi-dimensional network analytical functions. These will be validated with a comprehensive set of statistical, temporal, and topological metrics, and application-level benchmarks. The key innovation is capturing visible as well as latent or hidden dynamic interactions, patterns and anomalies, information flows and cascades along with the coupled dynamics of network structure and data content like topics, sentiments, and memes, to synthesize social media. This approach does not need input data and can synthesize fully anonymous social network data with target characteristics given as input. By leveraging advanced tools from graph-theoretic, statistical, topological and time-series analysis, this Synthesis of High Fidelity Social Network Data (SHIELD) system will provide an integrated architecture and technology base to support diversity of emerging social media types and to deploy strategic social network applications for high fidelity social network synthesis. This work also facilitates understanding of complex social network behavior and has defense applications in cyberspace including threat detection, deception and counter messaging, as well as several commercial applications.
September 2012: Navy awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a Distributed and Standard Based Data Warehouse and Mining System for Large-Scale, Multi-Modal Sensor Data.
Highly scalable and efficient data warehousing and mining methods are needed to handle the large amounts of sensor data collected due to advances in sensor, wireless and computer technologies. This sensor data has complex features and may be multi-modal, time stamped, geospatially referenced, from multiple sources, in different formats, and associated with semantic tags. A solid but extendable architecture is required to store data for integrated exploitation and analysis, for fast information access in bandwidth disadvantaged and distributed environments, and for developing efficient and effective information and knowledge querying services. To address this, IAI has been awarded a follow-on contract entitled, “A Distributed and Standard Based Data Warehouse and Mining System for Large-Scale Sensor Data.” This system, called SensorCube, can handle large amounts of geospatial sensor data and consists of three layers: data integration, data cubing and mining, and semantic search. To achieve scalability, all three layers have distributed server architecture and software agent technology. The data integration layer, which enables real-time monitoring and incorporation of sensor data, has an XML driven ETL (Extraction, Transformation, and Loading) process to integrate complex sensor data. The data cubing and mining layer has a powerful distributed computational engine to model multi-dimensional sensor data. In the semantic search layer, the search and query capability connects the meta data and information summarized in data cubes and mining models. Furthermore, the semantic search and cubing visualization can be accessed across different computational platforms such as smart phones and tablets. Open source tools are applied to the three layers to achieve flexibility in customizing and extending the software.
September 2012: Army awards IAI a new contract to develop a Virtual Laboratory to Study Collective Behavior and Inter-Group Conflict.
The increase of asymmetric situations in warfare requires further research on collective behavior and inter-group conflict in dynamic networks. Studying both large human groups and large numbers of groups is limited by the difficulty of bringing participants to a physical laboratory. Building advanced technologies for an online experimental laboratory would help with this problem. To address this, IAI and its collaborator, Cornell University, were awarded a contract entitled, “Empires of Fortune: A Virtual Laboratory for Investigation of Collective Behavior and Inter-Group Conflict.” An engaging and scalable online multiplayer game, Empires of Fortune (EOF), will be developed along with a platform for multi-level research on inter-group conflict using controlled experiments. The game will involve political, economic, and military cooperation and competition among players at both the individual and group levels as they allocate resources to build and operate a spatially embedded system, like a farm, city or nation. EOF incorporates economic competition and cooperation as well as military conflict, with the aim of economic growth and territorial expansion. EOF addresses both theoretical and empirical limitations. It includes key manipulations for both incentive-theoretic and identity-theoretic models, and is playable and scalable for any number of players, from two to two million. EOF extends IAI’s distributed game engine architecture that allows for rapid creation of computer clusters using a distributed, agent-based programming philosophy. Data generated on player behavior can be explored using IAI’s distributed processing, data mining framework, called ABMiner (Agent-Based data Miner) that has over 400 data mining algorithms for both supervised and unsupervised learning. EOF can model group social dynamics in various social contexts including social dilemmas, social mobilization, social network formation, market behavior and crisis response.
September 2012: DOT awards IAI a new contract to develop Next Generation Ground Penetrating Radar Technology.
Industrial societies are dependent on services delivered by infrastructure buried underground, principally in roadways and at intersections. Knowledge of sub grade and soil conditions, and locating and 3D mapping of underground features and infrastructure is essential when new infrastructure is added or roadways constructed. Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) can accurately locate both metallic and non-metallic buried objects without prior knowledge of their position. Current GPR systems are limited in range and resolution and by human data interpretation. To address these challenges, IAI and its collaborator, IDS North America, have been awarded a contract entitled “GeoRad - Next Generation High Resolution, Long Range, Flexible and Modular Ground Penetrating Radar.” IDS’s existing state-of-the-art dual-frequency dual-polarized massive array GPR, called Subsurface Tomographic Radar Equipment for Assets Mapping (STREAM), will be leveraged. STREAM’s large array allows for rapid scanning of an entire intersection and its accuracy will be improved to map wires and pipes. This will be combined with IAI’s high-accuracy RF positioning, high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging, and innovative model-based inverse scattering target recognition technologies to achieve sub-foot accuracy and improve image quality. Use of low cost/high resolution point-to-point ranging capability of Ultra-wideband (UWB) radio will improve GPR’s positioning. With accurate positioning, the SAR imaging algorithm will coherently process over a large travel distance. The large aperture will provide high-resolution SAR images even for low-frequency signals, which can penetrate deeper into the soil. GeoRad is independent, highly reconfigurable and transportable and has high acquisition speed, accuracy, modular design, long range, high resolution, high feasibility and low technical risk. It can also be extended to other areas like mine detection, Improvised Explosive Device (IED) detection, archaeology and environmental studies.
September 2012: Army awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop an Open-Architecture Agent-Based Intelligent Control Framework for Robotic Counter-IED Operations.
Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are very effective weapons in asymmetric warfare and represent a major threat in current and future conflicts. Effective IED Defeat (IEDD) tools must be adaptive and flexible to counter IEDs. Unmanned ground robots are effective IEDD tools and have proved their effectiveness in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mobile robots help human operators in diagnosing, rendering safe and disposing off suspected IEDs from a safe distance. However, they are too expensive, lack truly reliable sensors to speedily and reliably identify IEDs, and do not support practical intelligent behaviors to expedite IEDD operations. To address these technological challenges, IAI and its collaborators, Geophex Ltd and Black-I Robotics Inc. have been awarded a follow-on contract entitled “Open-Architecture Agent-Based Intelligent Control Framework for Simulation and Executive of Robotic Counter-IED Operations.” A low-cost robotic IED defeat package called the SNIP (Sensing-and-Neutralizing-IEDs Package) will be developed to help small dismounted units to expedite their operations. The proposed SNIP system includes an Intelligent Behavior Engine with an integrated software framework that supports the development, simulation and control of intelligent behaviors. It has a mid-sized mobile robot platform equipped with various onboard navigation sensors and cameras, together with an OCU designed to provide efficient operator situational awareness. It also incorporates a state-of-the-art IED detection sensor, which will be enhanced during the current effort. Lastly, SNIP has an effective, low cost defeat mechanism and is envisioned to provide a high performance solution for IED detection and neutralization in a cost effective package.
September 2012: NIH awards IAI a new contract to develop a personalized, game-based, immersive cessation program for addiction treatment.
Illegal drugs, alcohol and tobacco negatively impact both the user and those around them. Pharmacological treatment of substance use can address physical dependence, but cannot address behavioral associations, often leading to a relapse. Recent research on abstinence self-efficacy indicates that addiction treatment can be improved by combining personalized treatment with immersive, virtual environments utilizing substance aversion gestures. IAI and its collaborators, Duke University and the University of Central Florida propose the development of an active, immersive, game-based cessation program – called PERSEVERE, which stands for Personalized Self-Efficacy Virtual Environment Recovery Experience. PERSEVERE integrates abstinence self-efficacy research into an immersive, mission-based game progression system. Game missions require the user to practice aversion gestures, thereby increasing abstinence self-efficacy. Support for personalization exists through avatar customization and mission selection, as users can select missions most relevant to their situation. Finally, PERSEVERE incorporates active-gaming mechanics through the Microsoft Kinect peripheral to create immersive experiences with substance aversion. This has the added benefit of promoting exercise, which may support a transition to a healthier lifestyle while contributing to a decrease in user stress. A pilot study on the effectiveness of PERSEVERE will be performed through a game for nicotine addicts, tentatively titled Kicking Butts.
October 2012: Visit IAI at MILCOM 2012 – Booth 1310.
IAI will be participating and exhibiting at the 2012 Military Communications Conference, being held from Oct 29th – Nov 1st in Orlando Florida. Visit us in Booth 1310 to see a demonstration of RF NEST D3116, a wireless network simulation tool, designed to allow the evaluation of networks of real wireless devices in controllable channel conditions with real effects including interference, multipath, and delay. Other products being demonstrated include ARGUS™, an RF-based unmanned ground sensor for perimeter protection. IAI researchers will also be chairing session in Application Service Security (Wednesday 9:30–11:50 am. at Sarasota 1 room), Security Testbed and Tools (Thursday 2:30–3:50 pm at Sarasota 1 room), MANET Security (Wednesday 9:30–11:50 am at Sarasota 2) and Drs. Shi, Sagduyu and Li will present a paper on their research in Low Complexity Multi-Layer Optimization for Multihop Wireless Network (Paper # NNP4-2).
August 2012: Navy awards IAI a new contract to develop a Multi-Arm Robot Control System.
Next-generation Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) robots will utilize dual arms with many degrees of freedom, more closely approximating the dexterity of human EOD technicians. This will increase the effectiveness of unmanned systems in counter-IED operations. Current operator control units cannot handle the many challenges of coordinated control of multiple arms. To address these issues, IAI has been awarded a Navy Rapid Innovation Fund (RIF) contract entitled “Dual-Arm Robot Control System.” A Multi-Arm Robot Control System (MARCS) will be developed for AEODRS, the NAVSEA Advanced Explosive Ordnance Disposal Robotic System Program. MARCS provides three key elements for effective remote control of multi-arm robots: enhanced situational awareness, intuitive control and semi-autonomous behavior. It was originally applied to IAI’s Multi-Arm Unmanned Ground Vehicle (MA-UGV). The current MA-UGV prototype has three arms, three cameras and 29 degrees of freedom. Using MARCS, the MA-UGV is able to inspect backpacks, handle tools, manipulate shovels, breach doors, tie knots and perform counter-IED tasks. Operational benefits of MARCS technology include increased manipulation capability, reduced operator workload and shorter mission times. MARCS is platform independent, applicable to a wide range of mobile manipulation systems, and will help EOD technicians maximize the utility of AEODRS.
August 2012: NIH awards IAI a new contract to promote cardiovascular healthy by delivering computer-generated reminders for diet and exercise via desktop and mobile apps.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the USA. Approximately 37% of adults have at least two risk factors including inactivity, obesity, high blood pressure, smoking, high cholesterol, and diabetes. Though daily exercise and a healthy diet will improve cardiovascular health, 78% of Americans exercise only occasionally or not at all and lack of motivation is a significant barrier. IAI has been awarded a contract to develop Healthy Eating and Active Lifestyle Tips for Heart health (HEALTHe) that delivers personalized reminders on a user’s desktop PC and smart phone. IAI’s ongoing SBIR effort to develop a 3D affective avatar or virtual coach for physical rehabilitation of soldiers with traumatic brain injury will be leveraged. Health tips like “let’s take a break and stretch for a minute” can be provided in the workplace. In the morning, a health tip can be provided at home like “Packing an apple as an afternoon snack is a good alternative to visiting the vending machine. And it’s high in fiber and vitamins!” Additional reminders to eat healthy snacks could be delivered to both the desktop and mobile devices. HEALTHe can be personalized using its 3D motivational avatar with text-to-speech capabilities, configurable reminders and integrated usability/usage metrics that allow users to rate reminders. Further, HEALTHe uses cloud synchronization to synchronize user preferences between an online database and the user’s PC and phones, to update user’s devices with new reminders and to synchronize user preferences between all devices. Lastly, crowd sourcing allows users to add new content and share it with others. In combination with the usability/usage metrics, popular and useful content is propagated amongst all users.
October 2012: IAI researchers’ publications to be presented at the 2012 IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC).
At the 2012 IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), IAI researchers will be presenting two papers. The first, authored by Research Engineer Ankit Tyagi, discusses the combined performance and environmental benefits of “Q-routes” in the National Airspace System, with two specific examples. (Q-routes are direct routes between two points in the National Airspace System, allowing shorter, more direct flights than have traditionally been flown). The second paper, authored by Senior Research Scientist Michel Santos, discusses the question about whether flight management system (FMS) settings aboard aircraft, which tend to differ among different models of aircraft, affect the overall performance of the airspace system.
October 2012: IAI researchers are to be awarded the Best Paper for ITC 2012.
Two IAI researchers, Dr. Satya Prakash Ponnaluri and Dr. Babak Azimi-Sadjadi will be awarded the Best Paper Award at the 2012 ITC, for their paper entitled, “QUASI-ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLE-ACCESS FOR SERIAL STREAMING TELEMETRY.” The award will be presented in the heavily-attended Opening Session on Tuesday morning 10/23/12 which begins at 8AM. For more information, please visit:
August 2012: Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a novel method for Network Application Security using Policy Guided Isolation and Strategically Shielded Exposure.
Securing modern computer systems is challenging since applications share resources and information and are open to outside networks. To address the conflict between application isolation and information sharing, IAI and its collaborator, Purdue University, have been awarded a follow-on contract entitled “Policy Guided Isolation and Strategically Shielded Exposure: A Novel Approach to Secure Applications.” This methodology regulates information sharing mechanisms by combining a Policy Machine (PM) technique with virtualization technology. In the first phase, the security-enhanced virtual machine monitor (VMM) was implemented. The application programs and their operating system (OS), called the guest OS, were run inside a virtual machine (VM). A modified VMM architecture with a hypervisor running directly on top of the hardware platform is used to create VMs outfitted with individual VM Managers. The hypervisor intercepts hardware access requests and system calls from a VM and forwards to the VM Manager, which uses semantics mapping, data/process coloring, and kernel code protection to collect information and monitor the execution of the VM. This security-enhanced VMM was effective in preventing information leakage caused by accidents or malware. In the next phase, a lightweight kernel-compatible PM and efficient kernel code protection mechanisms will be integrated with the VMM to automatically reason over security policies used to regulate information sharing mechanisms in the VM. This policy programmable security-enhanced VMM will enable the system administrator to dynamically update security policies without interrupting the VM’s execution. A configuration interface will allow the system administrator to configure the VMM’s functions and capabilities based on application requirements. The effectiveness of this VMM, which can also protect the guest OS against kernel rootkits, will be demonstrated using real application scenarios.
September 2012: IAI’s Private Cloud Computing Capabilities.
IAI has built and constantly been improving an OpenStack-based private cloud, named DRACO (Distributed Robust Agile Cloud Operandi). Current hardware specifications include (i) 16 nodes server cluster with Intel XEON Chips, with a total of 192 cores, (ii) aggregate 512 GB DRAM, (iii) 16 x 64 GB for data storage, (iv) 500G for Virtual Machine image storage, (v) 1 Gbps Ethernet. As Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), DRACO provides scalable compute and store services via Nova, Swift and Glance with a multi-user resource sharing framework. As Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), DRACO deploys configurable Hadoop ecosystem as a stand-alone virtual machine, namely Elastic LOCOMOTIVE, and provides capabilities to ingest heterogeneous data (including, but not limited to social media, ISR, communication network) with an easy-to-use Hadoop Management framework. Currently, Elastic LOCOMOTIVE provides services including HDFS (a distributed file system), MapReduce framework (to support data intensive parallel processing), Zookeeper (to provide centralized coordination services such as distributed synchronization, group management, and configuration maintainance), HBase (a NoSQL database), Hive (a data warehouse system), and Oozie (a workflow system to manage Hadoop jobs). DRACO is a flexible system with a unified user interface. It can easily admit new service deployment, and allow users to easily configure/re-configure the services. DRACO is also supported by 6 HP OpenFlow switches to enable Software Defined Networking.
September 2012: IAI exhibits at the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus 2012 Science and Technology Fair.
As part of the unmanned systems community, IAI exhibited at the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus (CUSC) 2012 Science and Technology Fair. This event was hosted by Congressmen Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (CA) and Henry Cuellar (TX), Chairmen of the CUSC, to highlight some of the ongoing work in the area of unmanned systems, and to help encourage Congress’s continued support for unmanned systems activities. IAI showcased its research in several robotics-related areas, including the Multi-Arm Unmanned Ground Vehicle (MA-UGV) and the Multi-Arm Robotic Control System (MARCS), as well as some of our work in distributed robot teams (ARTeMUS) and bipedal robot control.
September 2012: Intelligent Automation, Inc.’s ARGUSTM Perimeter Security System Completes Army Tactical Evaluation.
IAI recently completed an extensive tactical evaluation of ARGUSTM at the Deployable Force Protection/Adaptive Red Team (DFP/ART) Technical Support and Operational Analysis (TSOA) event at Camp Roberts, California, sponsored by the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology (ASAALT). ARGUSTM is an easy to use, highly portable, re-configurable, and low-power “trip wire” perimeter security and asset protection product developed under SBIR and IAI IR&D funding. During the TSOA 12-4 event, key interoperability features for integration with situational awareness processes and improved set-up and configuration were evaluated. IAI is working closely with manufacturing partners for immediate transition of ARGUSTM to commercial and Defense markets. For more information, contact: Dr. Peter Chen, Senior Director Advanced Technology; pchen@i-a-i.com; (301) 795-4463.
September 2012: IAI makes available for free download a beta release of its desktop GISTe application.
Geo-spatial information is increasingly utilized across diverse fields, ranging from land use planning, government services planning and environmental studies to marketing. Geo-spatial information is also relevant to substance abuse researchers as they explore various hypotheses that involve spatial elements. GISTe is a GIS tool developed by Intelligent Automation Inc. (IAI) under NIDA support that is specialized for use by substance abuse epidemiologists to perform geo-spatial visualization and analysis on data with geo-spatial attributes. It can be used to study novel spatial context of data including geo-temporal trends, clustering, and multivariate models, without requiring elaborate set up and network connectivity. GISTe incorporates the use of the industry standard shapefile format and is powered by IAI’s QuickMaps©. IAI is making a beta release of GISTe available for free download. We encourage researchers to download the application and use it to perform your research. GISTe may be download from http://www.i-a-i.com/giste/.
July 2012: OSD/Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a Real-Time Cognitive Readiness Assessment Tool.
Military planners use cognitive readiness assessment to judge the ability of troops to adapt to mission needs as a mission evolves. There is a critical need for real-time cognitive readiness assessment tools for Special Forces “quick-strike” missions. To address this, IAI and its collaborator, Lockheed Martin, are developing an integrated, extensible and real-time cognitive readiness assessment tool for mission planning, named ICR. This tool is being developed using advanced data warehousing, data mining, and data visualization technology. ICR has three software components in three layers. The information source layer includes software components for data integration and model incorporation to integrate cognitive readiness related data and models from multiple sources. The model and process layer includes the integrated data and model fusion component that combines a unified data mining and fusion abstraction model with comprehensive model composition. The presentation layer includes software components for research and data visualization, and an interactive user interface. GIS integration incorporates location and map information into the cognitive readiness assessment process, providing real-time, intuitive and content rich data representation. ICR leverages existing data sources and software tools, including IAI’s distributed data mining tool, ABMiner, and JNI (Java Native Interface) and web service integration. A robust interactive user experience is provided with advanced RCP, Web 2.0 technology and the powerful visualization tool of ABMiner. ICR will be useful to researchers in the laboratory and decision makers in the field. It also has commercial applications in determining operator readiness in areas like air traffic control, ship piloting, commercial and private aircraft, and other public transportation involving the use of potentially dangerous equipment.
July 2012: NIH awards IAI a new contract to develop an Early Alert System for Emergency Vehicle Proximity.
Private driver situational awareness can help avoid vehicle crashes and related injuries and deaths associated with emergency vehicles transiting to or from emergency incident locations. Developing technologies to enhance private driver situational awareness will improve driver safety and the effectiveness of emergency vehicle operations. Emergency vehicles can send out early alerts to wireless devices like GPS and smart phones of private drivers in the immediate vicinity of the first responder. To address this, IAI will develop a novel Early AleRt System for Emergency Vehicle Proximity (EARS4EVP). This system will incorporate efficient database processing and advanced communication technology to provide an integrated solution that alerts drivers of the proximity of emergency vehicles, via their personal wireless devices. A smart-phone based context-aware application will be developed to serve as a near-term solution. First responders and emergency vehicles will use it to send out early alerts to the smart phones of private drivers, from the emergency vehicle dispatch center’s real-time database server. This solution uses available technologies but users will have to register for this smart-phone based application. Further, the DOT’s Connected Vehicles (CV) technology development effort will be leveraged to develop a long-term solution. Through the dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) network, mutual wireless communication is enabled between vehicles and Road Side Equipment (RSE). This solution will allow direct inter-communication between emergency vehicles and nearby private vehicles. Nearby private vehicles with DSRC radio devices will relay messages though the RSE and other private vehicles to a certain range. No pre-registration is required and all private vehicle drivers in the proximity of emergency vehicles will be alerted.
September 2012: IAI researchers publications to be included in the AIAA Conference in Indianapolis.
IAI researchers have authored five different papers for the AIAA Air Traffic, Integration, and Operations Conference, which takes place September 17-19 in Indianapolis, IN. IAI’s Air Traffic Management (ATM) Director, Dr. Fred Wieland, has authored a research paper outlining steps involved in projecting future UAS operations in civilian airspace. Another IAI researcher, Mr. Ankit Tyagi, has authored a paper describing the benefits of a fully integrated arrival-departure scheduler for airports. Three other papers, co-authored by IAI researchers, involve generating performance data for UAS aircraft, trade space modeling for electric aircraft, and agent-based modeling for future supply and demand for air transportation in the United States. AIAA Conference Website:
September 2012: IAI will be participating in the 2012 ATCA Conference at National Harbor.
IAI will be participating in the 57th Annual ATCA Conference and Exposition at National Harbor, Maryland October 1- 3. We will be presenting our latest modeling techniques and results in Booth # 829 at the conference vendor exposition. Attendance at the vendor exhibition is free; please stop by our booth to discuss our latest technologies. ATCA Conference Website: http://
July 2012: Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop Routing Protocols for Small Unmanned Aerial Systems Networks.
The increasing availability of small, unmanned aerial systems (SUAS) makes it possible to form temporary mission-centric SUAS networks using multiple SUASs. These networks increase the range with which SUAS can operate and improve communications capabilities. However, the dynamic nature of SUAS topologies and limited bandwidth availability create an inhospitable environment for traditional routing approaches. Routing techniques that allow SUAS networks to opportunistically take advantage of available connectivity are needed. To address these challenges, IAI and its collaborator, Boeing, have been awarded a follow-on contract entitled, “Routing Protocols for Highly Dynamic SUAS Network Topologies.” A prototype of Small UAS Routing Enhanced Networks (SURENET), including SUAS-compatible link metrics and topology dissemination techniques, has been designed and implemented in the project’s first phase. SURENET’s objective is to create routing techniques to efficiently use available but elusive network capacity. Methods of route selection, link weighting, route discovery, topology management, and queuing are used to focus the routing protocol toward the most useful routes, allowing temporary interruptions to remain seamless to the end user. Using IAI’s RFnest wireless network emulation hardware, the prototype was evaluated on wireless radios using both replayed CUNE field test data and a representative scenario. The results showed that significant improvement in throughput and route availability was provided by SURENET. Next, further enhancements to the link metrics and topology management will be made, and queuing behaviors and techniques will be implemented to use additional information available to the network. A set of detailed, representative evaluation scenarios that are more closely derived from CUNE data sets will be created and two incremental development and evaluation spirals will be conducted.
Fall 2012: IAI continues its support of the Colloquia Series at ISR for the Fall 2012 semester.
IAI is continuing its support of the IAI Colloquia Series at ISR. This series is a monthly showcase of ISR faculty research for students, post-docs, faculty and staff. Each talk features a high-level overview of a research area, followed by a more in-depth discussion and plenty of time for questions and answers. The presentations take place at 4 p.m. in 1146 A.V. Williams Building at the University of Maryland. A full schedule, list of presenters and abstracts can be found at: http://www.isr.umd.edu/events/ISR_Colloquia_Series/index.htm
July 2012: Navy awards IAI a new contract to develop a Diversity Rank-Based Summarization Tool for Stream Texts.
A tool to automatically summarize meaningful information from large collections of unstructured text would be extremely useful to researchers and analysts. Challenges include updating topic-focused summaries from vast amounts of text-based streaming data like newscasts, tweets, chats and blogs, that are noisy, short, and use non-standard language. Further, exploiting the time attribute associated with document summaries would help increase the speed and effectiveness of the analysis. In addition, the methodology developed should be compatible with existing text analytic and natural language processing techniques and tools. To address this, IAI has been awarded a contract entitled, “Diversity Rank-Based Summarization of Stream Texts.” A novel Diversity rank-based Summarization Tool (DST) will be developed for extracting and updating succinct summary from streaming text. DST is a large-scale, dynamic and fast approach to assist intelligence analysts to analyze text-based communication to assess the ever-changing content and trend. With DST, the evolution of the target topic is tracked in real-time. The text network is constructed and updated very efficiently to enhance real-time summary updating. The importance, diversity and novelty of content in the summary are balanced and optimized through a principled graph-regularization framework. DST would also be useful in the commercial arena, providing relevant information to researchers and analysts in the law, journalism, medicine, business and economics.
July 2012: Air Force awards IAI a new contract to develop a Text Mining System for Modeling Social Dynamics in Groups.
Text-based communication and linguistic traces can reveal information about people’s thoughts, motives, and relationships, and predict their emotional state and interpersonal and group dynamics. This is useful in assessing current belief states and intent, and for forecasting future behaviors; however, developing tools to do this remains a significant challenge. To address this, IAI has been awarded a new contract entitled, “A Text Mining System for Modeling Social Dynamics in Groups.” A novel Group Forecast Analysis (GFA) framework will be developed for extracting metrics of group dynamics from discourses, and producing predictive models of social processes among individuals and organizations. The framework has three layers. First, the data collection and preparation layer will collect textual communication data for a given group, using in-situ socio-cultural data from unstructured information like social media statuses and online speeches. It will access the dynamic warehouse system with large-scale, real-time social media and online data, developed in IAI’s Human Social Cultural Behavior (HSCB) data collection project. Then the linguistic and discourse analysis layer will identify and extract linguistic features related to group intent and action forecasting using social language processing, and analyze them at the individual and group level. Finally the group forecast layer will utilize a prediction engine to correlate individual and group level language metrics with different types of group dynamics, and also the strength of the link between intent and action. The prediction engine incorporates a set of learning algorithms from IAI’s Agent-Based data Miner (ABMiner) platform, which has more than 400 algorithms for both supervised and un-supervised learning, and can optimally identify underlying group dynamics using data mining techniques.
July 2012: Air Force awards IAI a new contract to develop an Inlet and Exhaust Damage Registration Sensor for Aircraft.
The US Air Force is interested in improving methods to quickly and effectively assess aircraft damage that occurs during routine training, combat and maintenance activities. Demanding operational tempos require near real time assessment of aircraft operational status. Though partially automated health assessment systems have been integrated into daily maintenance routines, many inspections are still conducted manually. Current methods for inspecting aircraft engine inlet and exhaust cavities are labor intensive and error prone. Airmen crawl into ducts looking for defects, trace suspected sites on Mylar sheets, note their position relative to cavity features, and manually enter the data into an aircraft assessment system. Technology that can reduce inspection times and eliminate sources of human error will benefit the Air Force by significantly increasing aircraft reliability and availability while reducing lifecycle maintenance costs. To address this critical need, IAI and its collaborator, EDGE Product Development have been awarded a new contract entitled, “AUTO-SCAN: Inlet and Exhaust Damage Registration Sensor.” AUTO-SCAN will automatically detect, characterize and register defects in the inlet and exhaust coating. It will capture the defect characteristics, orientation and location relative to the aircraft coordinate system. First, the feasibility of the AUTO-SCAN concept will be demonstrated through the design, development and testing of a prototype. Next, the AUTO-SCAN system will be developed to TRL/MRL 7 maturity and integrated with current aircraft health assessment systems. AUTO-SCAN will be portable, quick and easy to set up and tear down and suitable for flight-line environment. It can be used in legacy and emerging fighter aircraft as well as in private and commercial aerospace sectors.
July 2012: Navy awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop Topological Robust Agent-based Algorithms for Massive Data Sets.
The analysis of structured or unstructured Massive Data Sets in scientific and engineering disciplines is a problem with potential applications to Intelligence Analysis. Traditional statistics and geometry-based analysis methods are inadequate. Algorithms that make minimal assumptions on the data model and the processes that generate data are required. Further, they must handle uncertain, incomplete and noisy data and be inherently parallelizable. To address these issues, IAI has been awarded a follow-on contract entitled “Topological Robust Algorithms for Massive Data Sets via Agent-based Modular Infrastructure (TA-DA) Supporting Decentralized and Parallel Processing.” A modular component will be built that can be part of a future end-to-end system. It will distill, analyze, discover, structure and interpret relevant information hidden in massive data that is stored in distributed multi-INT databases, including but not limited to social network data, ISR sensor data, and Internet traffic data. A Topological Data Analysis (TDA) approach will be used, which recovers the topology of noisy and incomplete data points, sampled from an unknown space and embedded in a high-dimensional space. Combinatorial representations of point sets will be constructed, and algorithms will be developed for effective computation of robust topological invariants. Decentralized and parallel processing will be supported to deploy the modular system on clusters of computers. Efficient data structures will be developed, tested and validated on anonymized real-world data sets including Online Social Network (OSN) and communication networks. Cluster and cloud-based computing approaches like MapReduce in a Hadoop-based ecosystem will be used to wrap the algorithms and for implementation using open-source software. Applications include finding anomalies in social, socio-technological and communication networks and using it to deliver actionable intelligence.
August 2012: IAI makes a beta release of our desktop client Proteus available for free download.
Proteus is a sensor management desktop client that Intelligent Automation Inc. (IAI) is developing for NASA Ames Research Center. In recent years, the sensor community has been envisioning the next steps in sensor deployment and discovery: the Sensor Web. The core idea of the Sensor Web is to enable sensors to be connected to the internet and serve sensor data to users and tools via Web Services. Much of the standardization effort is driven through the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), where standards such as Sensor Observation Services (SOS), SensorML and Observation & Measurement (O&M) are developed and refined. Proteus is designed to be easy to use in order to discover sensor offerings available through Sensor Observation Services (SOSs). Intuitive discovery concepts, such as facets, are integrated to allow users to quickly narrow down the sensor offerings that match their requirements. IAI is now making a beta release of Proteus that is available for free download. We encourage users to download the client and see what it can do for you. We welcome any feedback to this beta release. http://i-a-i.com/proteus/
August 2012: IAI Distinguished Lecture Series welcomes Prof. Davis and Prof. Milner from the University of Maryland on August 28th at 10:00am.
As part of the ongoing Distinguished Lecture Series, IAI welcomes Prof. Davis and Prof. Milner from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland. This seminar will begin with an overview of research activities at the Maryland Optics Group by Minta Martin Professor Christopher Davis. Active research efforts to be highlighted include: optical and RF directional wireless, real-time advanced surveillance systems with “event” detection, the optical properties of nanostructures where surface plasmons can be excited, near-field scanning optical microscopy, laser interferometry, dielectrometry, fiber sensors and biosensors, magneto-optics, optical trace detection, atmospheric turbulence, optical communication systems and devices, and biophysics. The second part of the presentation will be by Research Professor Dr. Stuart Milner, and will focus on programs at the Center for Networking of Infrastructure Sensors. Topics will include: interdisciplinary systems research in wireless optical and RF networking; specifically, scalability of dynamic wireless RF and optical networks, topology control of wireless networks, Next Generation broadband wireless networks, and optical wireless transceiver development.
July 2012: NIH awards IAI a new contract to develop a Medication Ingestion Compliance and Adherence Monitoring System.
The success of clinical trials to assess pharmacotherapy treatment for drug abuse depends upon the patient’s adherence to medication schedule and dosage. Traditional compliance monitoring procedures like bioassays and supervised ingestion are time-consuming and expensive. Adherence monitoring is currently aided by commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) electronic pill dispensers with reminders, like MedSmart from e-pills. However, no compliance system exists that can assure researchers, clinical trial investigators or caretakers that the patient has orally ingested the medicine. To address this, IAI has been awarded a new contract entitled, “MEDICAM: Medication Ingestion Compliance and Adherence Monitoring System.” A Smartphone based Medication Ingestion Compliance and Adherence Monitoring (MEDICAM) System will be developed to offer an accurate, affordable, and portable solution for compliance monitoring of pharmacotherapy treatment by medical professionals or caretakers. MEDICAM is enhanced with secured pill dispensing technology that can be integrated with compatible secured pill dispensers. It innovatively uses three technologies, including analysis of Smartphone video and audio data and external psychophysiological sensor data, to provide various degrees of compliance behavior. One or more of them can be applied depending on the medical treatment procedure and compliance requirements. Video analysis techniques can track pill and drinking water glass tracking, to obtain the first level of compliance check. Speech analysis is used for higher levels of compliance check. Finally, the last level of compliance assurance uses physiological sensors to detect significant deviations from the norm, which could indicate possible non-compliance. MEDICAM records and stores non-compliance data and events and reports them unobtrusively using email and text.
June 2012: OSD/Navy awards IAI a new contract for developing an Adaptive, Biologically-Inspired Framework for Identifying Salient Data.
People and machines are being inundated with ever-increasing amounts of data that include sensor readings, video, text and audio. It would be useful to reduce these large data sets by identifying elements that are salient, within the context of a mission or goal. Current approaches to automating the identification of salient information cannot adapt to different data types, domains and goals. To address these issues, IAI and its collaborator, University of Maryland (UMD), have been awarded a new contract entitled, “An Adaptive, Biologically-Inspired Framework for Identifying Salience in Data.” A framework that can automatically adapt to a given context will be developed, drawing from human perceptual processing and recent artificial neural network models that can control internal information flow. The framework will leverage UMD’s expertise in gated neural network architectures, which are highly general and adaptive representations. These can be automatically generated through learning and evolutionary computation, by providing either sample labels from human experts and/or performance feedback. This methodology can adapt to different data modalities, domains, contexts and goals through a process of offline training, including supervised learning, reinforcement learning and even unsupervised learning, along with evolutionary computation. Distributed computation will be used to handle the computationally intensive learning techniques. IAI’s approaches to processing video data and IAI’s in-house infrastructure for distributed computation and capabilities for large-scale data processing, particularly within the context of machine learning, will be leveraged in this effort. The decision support systems developed using these trained networks can be deployed to support analysts.
June 2012: NASA awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop an Exercise Sensing and Pose Recovery Inference Tool.
Astronauts exercise during long space flights to stay fit and prevent adverse health problems bone density loss. Monitoring their exercise sessions by camera and doing kinematic analysis will provide valuable insights. However, current bulky multi-camera systems are unsuited to spacecraft requirements, and single video camera systems present challenges of lack of depth information, and partial occlusion of parts of the body. To address this, IAI and its collaborator, C-Motion, have been awarded a follow-on contract entitled “ESPRIT: Exercise Sensing and Pose Recovery Inference Tool.” A preliminary design of ESPRIT, which is a stereo camera system with a small footprint in terms of size, weight, power consumption and setup time, has been completed. ESPRIT detects markers placed on the body or clothing and other image features and recovers 3D kinematic information of the body pose. ESPRIT innovatively handles partial occlusion issues by relying on multiple feature cues, strong prior knowledge and modeling of the human body, pose, dynamics, and appearance, and on advanced machine learning and statistical inference techniques to achieve robust and accurate pose estimation. ESPRIT uses the statistical sampling-based Markov chain Monte Carlo method to compute a global optimization of the human pose trajectory. Motion capture of several exercises, including walking, curling and dead lifting, have already been demonstrated. Algorithms for marker detection and tracking, feature extraction, stereo matching of features, marker labeling and pose estimation have also been developed. Future work will focus on enhancement of the algorithms, development of an ESPRIT prototype, detailed performance evaluation, and delivery of the prototype for testing and demonstration.
May 2012: DOT awards IAI a new contract to develop an Automated Trailer VIN Identification and Sequencing System.
The commercial motor vehicle freight movement in North America uses powered units like tractors, trucks and buses to haul trailers in changing configurations. Tractors work with many types and ages of trailers, since the lifetime of a trailer is usually longer than that of a tractor. Transmitting the trailer’s VIN to the tractor can support optimization of the tractor’s on-board safety systems, wireless roadside inspection, wirelessly streamlining border crossing processes and Smart-Park initiatives. Existing solutions are costly, cannot determine the sequence of the hauled trailers and often do not work with legacy trailers. IAI proposes to develop and test an automated TRailer Vin number Identification and Sequencing system (TRAVIS) using Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) RF transceivers, microcontrollers, and intelligent algorithms to identify and sort the order of trailers attached to the power unit. The key innovation of this system is an extremely low cost, easily deployable and rugged system that consists of two types of units: a trailer-based VIN transmitter and a tractor-based VIN receiver and interpreter connected through a wireless radio. The trailer-based transmitter and tractor-based receiver construct a mesh network to guarantee reliable and low-latency VIN delivery. Along with VINs, trailer wiring status like left/right turn or stop signal are transmitted to prevent cross talk between surrounding units. After collecting the VINs of all the trailers, the tractor-based VIN receiver sorts the order of the trailers based on received signal strength of each packet from the trailers. TRAVIS can be deployed on both modern and legacy trailers. Its feasibility will be demonstrated and a prototype will be developed and field-tested using real tractor and trailers scenarios.
May 2012: DOT awards IAI a new contract to develop a Robust Anti-Texting Law Enforcement System.
“Texting while driving” includes composing, reading or sending text messages or emails on a mobile device while operating a vehicle. Studies show that the risk factor of being involved in a safety critical event by “texting while driving” is at least 20-fold higher than during normal attentive driving. However, objective methods to enforce new anti-texting laws for commercial motor vehicle (CMV) drivers do not exist. To address this, IAI has been awarded a new contract entitled, “Robust Anti-Texting Law Enforcement System (RATLES).” The proposed system detects and records texting while driving for later enforcement. A fusion-based approach combining three measurements is used due to limitations of individual technologies. First, cell phone use is detected, classified and located by leveraging IAI’s proven cell phone detection and location technology based on Radio Frequency (RF) emissions. Second, a vision-based approach analyzes arm, hand and head movement by Microsoft’s Kinect 3 D imaging sensor, and develops algorithms to classify driver posture dynamics and cell phone use likelihood. Third, driving style modifications are analyzed based on GPS and Electronic On-Board Recorder (EOBR) information. The three measurements are used to create a probability metric associated with a texting event. When this metric crosses a threshold, the camera system records violation images for enforcement officers, which can be transmitted to a remote server or to field enforcement officers. The most robust combination of all three technologies or a smaller subset will be determined, and the feasibility of incorporating them in a single, compact and low-cost device will be demonstrated. The multiple sensing modalities makes it difficult to beat RATLES and decreases false alarms while offering indisputable evidence for enforcement.
June 2012: OSD/Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a novel Dynamic Cross-Layer Cognitive Radio Networking Architecture.
Improving information flows over high-data-rate, highly mobile and highly dynamic links, both in-theater and at the edge of air, ground and space networks, is necessary for creating an operationally responsive network with seamless connectivity. A cognitive cross-layer protocol framework for wireless networks, where primary users and cognitive radio (CR) users can autonomously cooperate, will be useful. To address this, OSD/Air Force has awarded IAI and its collaborator, State University of New York at Buffalo, a follow-on contract entitled “Dynamic Cross-Layer Design for Robust Cognitive Networking with Physical Channel and Delay Awareness.” A dynamic cross-layer Cognitive Radio nEtworking ArchiTecturE (CREATE) solution will be developed. CREATE will adapt the network protocol stack for spectrum dominance and interoperability of heterogeneous communications systems across terrestrial, aerial and space domains. A cross-layer design of spectrum allocation, routing, cooperative relaying, scheduling and power control will optimize network performance, while exploring the tradeoffs to balance among throughput, delay, security and energy objectives. A distributed control capability helps with autonomously adapting to network dynamics. The solutions will be validated via experimentation and software-defined-radio prototyping within an emulated Airborne Network (AN) environment. Realistic physical channel effects will be generated in a Network Emulation Simulation Testbed (NEST), which is based on IAI’s Radio Frequency Network Emulator Simulator Tool, RF-NEST. CREATE NEST will adaptively reconfigure the physical-layer and routing parameter space to increase the overall spectrum efficiency and utilization in heterogeneous communications with diverse traffic demands. It will support integrated air, ground and space networking by providing the AF Warfighter Network with seamless connectivity, transparent to the user.
May 2012: Navy awards IAI a new contract to develop a Highly Available and Securely Coded Data Storage System for Wireless Mesh Networks.
It is challenging to securely store and efficiently retrieve data in the military’s wireless network environment. Current distributed storage technologies must be improved to facilitate distributing the storage without vulnerability to single points of failure. Further, it would be preferable to scale the protocol and not rely on external infrastructure or pre-shared keys or complete replication. To address these issues, IAI has been awarded a contract entitled, “HAS: A Highly Available and Securely Coded Data Storage System for Wireless Mesh Networks.” HAS is a distributed data storage system that can recover the data stored in the network when a minimum number of wireless nodes are accessible. It will be secure under eavesdropping and Byzantine attacks. HAS will use erasure coding scheme, Shamir’s threshold based secret sharing algorithm and crypto primitives to securely distribute sensitive data files among network nodes and to improve the availability of data files. A secure end-to-end delivery protocol will be designed to protect the data in motion. Efficient techniques will be adopted to efficiently implement these coding schemes, crypto primitives and secure end-to-end delivery protocol. Proof of the security of integration of these schemes and protocols will be provided under the model of universal composability. Finally, these proposed techniques and concepts will be integrated in a workable data storage prototype. HAS will also have commercial applications in providing a mechanism to increase the storage capacity and reduce the security vulnerabilities of mobile devices.
May 2012: Air Force awards IAI a new contract to develop a Mesh Enhanced Tactical Airborne Link (METAL).
The effectiveness of current and future tactical aircraft increasingly depends on their ability to exchange information. A more fully connected airborne network is hence desirable. Waveforms such as the Multifunction Advanced Data Link (MADL) and Common Data Link (CDL) must be enhanced with mesh networking capabilities to meet desired efficiency, flexibility, and reliability requirements. Backward-compatibility is required from upgraded waveforms since budget constraints and other processes create the potential for some platforms to be upgraded after significant delays or not at all. This technology will greatly improve the communications of tactical aircraft during and after the upgrade process, and should be validated in high-fidelity, hardware-based testing during development with early radio vendor cooperation. To address this critical need, IAI and its collaborator, Harris Corporation, propose to develop a Mesh Enhanced Tactical Airborne Link (METAL) that is designed as a minimally intrusive enhancement to existing non-mesh topology waveforms such as MADL and CDL. Routing, topology management, and channel access methods are automatically and incrementally activated in METAL to improve network performance. This is done in part by allowing the legacy nodes to exist at arbitrary locations in the network instead of only at the network edge or communicating via special gateways. In addition to improving existing airborne networking technologies, this work can also be applied to cellular telephone and data networks, vehicular networks, and Wi-Fi networking technologies.
May 2012: Air Force awards IAI a new contract to develop Hyperspeed Mobility and Security Capabilities for Next Generation Airborne Networks.
Emerging advanced airborne nodes like sixth generation fighters pose new challenges to the airborne network. Sixth generation fighters and bombers are envisioned to be capable of traveling at Mach 3 or higher speeds. Thus the duration of contact between neighboring airborne nodes may be extremely short, even as short as a few seconds. Such hyperspeed mobility will be combined with complex operational environments like contested Radio Frequency (RF) communication and cyber intrusions including smart jamming. This may cause existing mobile ad hoc routing protocols to fail in providing secure and reliable connectivity due to the overhead and delay of the authentication and route discovery processes. A solution is needed which implements the Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) construct while minimizing network overhead for small to medium sized operational networks of 10-100 participants. To address these issues, IAI and its collaborator, Harris Corporation, have been awarded a contract to develop Hyperspeed mobile and security capabilities (HyperMSC) that are suitable for next generation airborne networks. HyperMSC will provide proactive handover, expedited authentication, and DoS mitigation while reducing the network overhead, delay, and pre-planning requirements of next generation networks. This research could find commercial application in improving robustness, bandwidth requirement, and network formation times for commercial aircraft MANETs.
May 2012: Air Force awards IAI a new contract to develop a Long-term Sustainable Net-centric Framework for Space Surveillance Networks.
The United States Space Surveillance Network (SSN) is a critical part of the United States Strategic Command's (USSTRATCOM) mission. SSN detects, tracks, catalogues and identifies artificial objects orbiting the Earth, including active and inactive satellites, spent rocket bodies, or fragmentation debris. Modernization of the SSN faces the challenge of seamlessly upgrading SSN with modern COTS hardware without software porting. Further, the accuracy of tracking targets has to be improved by collaborating geographically spread sensors. In addition, tasks have to be dynamically scheduled to respond to unexpected space events. To address these issues, IAI has been awarded a contract entitled, “Long-term Sustainable Net-centric Framework for Space Surveillance Networks (LOSSLESS).” LOSSLESS can run both legacy and new software on top of modern commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware by leveraging state-of-the-art Virtual Machine (VM) technologies. A distributed net-centric data fusion algorithm will be used to significantly improve the tracking accuracy of current SSN. LOSSLESS can also respond to unexpected dynamic space events based on an innovative dynamic tasking algorithm. The proposed LOSSLESS framework can meet the future requirement of space target tracking for the SSN. Possible commercial applications include upgrading legacy systems, especially for radar or electro-optical (EO) sensor sites.
April 2012: OSD/Navy awards IAI a new contract to develop a Discovery and Information Retrieval System from Distributed Multi-INT Data Sources in a Cloud Environment.
Conducting real-time searches of large distributed data stores to quickly answer a Warfighter’s tactical question would be very useful. Data intensive processing cannot be done currently by a single machine and requires clusters. Thus handling massive data problems requires organizing computations on dozens, hundreds or even thousands of machines, which can be done by MapReduce. To address the challenges in using MapReduce to bring information to the Warfighter, IAI has been awarded a contract entitled, “Discovery and Information Retrieval from Distributed Multi-INT Data Sources in a Cloud Environment.” A multi-layer intelligent workflow is proposed, initiated by a Warfighter’s questions submitted via a PDA and combining it with metadata. This invokes other services, implemented as MapReduce processes in a Hadoop-based ecosystem. The query and metadata are translated into MapReduce jobs using two components, the Translator and IAI’s SensorCube. Translator uses a dictionary to convert questions into lexical frames and SensorCube uses ontologies to convert the keywords into native cloud computing queries. Existing distributed data querying and massive data analytics tools like Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive and Katta are used along with solutions from data management, cloud computing, data mining, data fusion and anomaly detection. The workflow ends back at the Warfighter’s PDA, where ranked meaningful information is presented after a data fusion process. Improvements to the Hadoop kernel are proposed, including dealing with bottleneck Map jobs, improvements for iterative tasks and tandem parallel databases-Hadoop operations. The resultant framework, which focuses on accuracy and speed, can run on heterogeneous platforms, incorporates dynamic and evolving workflows and leverages open-source software implementations.
April 2012: NASA awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a Security-Enhanced Autonomous Network Management System (SEANM) for Space Networks.
NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program is integrating three agency networks - Space Network (SN), Deep Space Network (DSN), and Near Earth Network (NEN) - to provide comprehensive, robust and cost effective space communications services. An integrated network management function, security management mechanisms and reliable autonomous satellite operations must be developed for integrated space SCaN networks. In addition, several issues related to Bundle Protocol must be investigated to enhance performance of bundle delivery in delay-tolerant networks (DTN). To address this, IAI and its collaborator, General Dynamics, have been awarded a follow-on contract entitled, “Security-Enhanced Autonomous Network Management for Space Networking.” SEANM’s key innovation is an integrated cross-layer information sharing architecture to expedite information exchange between different network layers and for necessary inter-layer interactions. A preliminary prototype has been developed and tested. Studies have been conducted on the necessary information to be shared, information sharing mechanisms and how to integrate them with the cross-layer information sharing architecture. A set of reconfigurable parameters has been identified in each layer and a robust security scheme has been designed to fight against dynamic network topology and disrupted infrastructure service. Future work will focus on autonomous bundle-based store-and-forward DTN networking. An intelligent DTN routing scheme will be designed while considering QoS and underlying resource metrics. Bundle aggregation and fragmentation schemes will enhance the end-to-end bundle delivery in the DTN environment. A DTN network management tool will enable autonomy in space networking, and provide better display of network problem and performance evaluation. SEANM also has applications in undersea networking, tactical military networks, wireless networks, vehicle networks and satellite communications.
April 2012: MDA awards IAI a new contract to develop a Waveform Agile Telemetry Transmitter (WATT).
Existing telemetry bands are heavily sought after by non-aerospace industries for personal communication and entertainment uses. This has reduced the already limited radio Frequency (RF) spectrum available for aeronautical telemetry. Improvement in the spectral efficiency of tactical telemetry signals is therefore critical. Developing a waveform agile telemetry transmitter in which waveform parameters can be reconfigured to make efficient use of the available spectrum is useful. To address this, IAI and its collaborators from Purdue University have been awarded a new contract entitled, “Dual S & C-Band Telemetry Transmitter System for Missile Testing.” A Waveform Agile Telemetry Transmitter (WATT) will be designed to support simultaneous dual-band S-C band operation (S-band, 2200-2400 MHz and C-band selectable between 4400-4950 MHz and 5091-5250 MHz). The proposed architecture will employ state of the art, highly integrated, wideband Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMIC) and reconfigurable digital processor to achieve desired miniaturization and multi-band capability. A Xilinx Spartan-6Q Defense Grade FPGA will be used for improved security, power reduction and integration. Low power, wideband Phase Lock Loops (PLL) and I-Q modulators will manage the dual band RF up-conversion. Purdue University will develop the wideband RF power combiner and power amplifier that will simultaneously work in S-C bands. The low-risk, reconfigurable WATT module will be a 3-stack PCB design that conforms to the MDA’s volume requirement of 2 in. x 3 in. x 1 in.
April 2012: Navy awards IAI a new contract to develop an advanced Channel Simulator using Physics-based models.
Simulations of battle operations in complex environments have improved in fidelity in recent years. However, current communications simulations are not very realistic because they use simplified Radio Frequency (RF) propagation modeling that lacks advanced phenomenological effects. To address this, IAI has been awarded a contract entitled, “Combined Channel Simulator-Emulator Using Ray Tracing And Radiative Transfer Methods and Hardware Emulation.” An innovative approach for on-the-fly (OTF), physics-based RF propagation modeling that interacts with complex synthetic natural environments like terrain, cultural features, atmosphere and weather will be used for developing more realistic communication systems and radar sensor simulations. An advanced channel simulator will be built by combining an efficient ray-tracing algorithm with radiative transfer methods. The simulations will accurately and rapidly predict channel conditions between arbitrary transmitter-receiver pairs as they move through the complex environment. The proposed software can quickly model outdoor channels, including weather conditions, buildings, forests and complex manmade objects. It can find potential high-order multipath links among hilly terrain and various terrain objects. Wideband hardware emulation of the simulated link characteristics will allow for incorporation of hardware radios in the simulation and interferers, improving fidelity. The channel simulator developed in this project will be incorporated into IAI’s Radio Frequency Network Emulator Simulator Tool (RF-NEST). Commercially, this innovation has applications in the gaming industry and test routines for communications device manufacturers.
March 2012: OSD/Army awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a Hand-Free Kinetic System for Medical Simulation.
In recent years, many human-computer interaction and virtual environment systems have incorporated haptic devices that interface with the user through the sense of touch. However, the range of environment properties and types of interactions enabled by current interfaces are limited by feedback from artificial materials or resolved forces in virtual reality simulators. Medical simulators that integrate the cutaneous sensations of direct interaction with kinesthetic feedback can provide a complete haptic experience. To address this, IAI and collaborators at Stanford University and Tangible Haptics have been awarded a follow-on contract entitled, “Hand-Free Kinetic System for Medical Simulation (KineSys MedSim).” The KineSys MedSim interface includes a six degree-of freedom (6-DOF) cable-based kinesthetic robot with interchangeable tactile displays, a 3D stereo camera for hand tracking, and a stereoscopic 3D display. Several components including the robot, air jet lump display, and variable friction surface display have been successfully demonstrated in the first phase of the project. An encountered-type display has been implemented, using the 6-DOF robot and stereo camera. This operates in two modes, a tracking mode and a kinesthetic interaction mode. Simulations of cutaneous display have been conducted using a lump of varying size with an air jet display and of a variable friction surface using a piezo-electric actuated glass surface. The next phase will improve the ergonomics and control software of the kinesthetic robot, enhance the haptic lump display and develop an electrostatic variable friction display. Finally, the components will be integrated as a fully-functional platform for haptic medical simulation and the performance of the KineSys MedSim will be evaluated.
March 2012: DHS awards IAI a follow-on contract for developing a Portable High-Resolution Imaging System for Concealed Currency Detection.
Portable technology to quickly and accurately detect concealed cash on moving objects will be useful to address the billions of dollars smuggled across the US-Mexico border every year. IAI and its collaborator, Auburn University, have been awarded a follow-on contract entitled, “Portable Ultra High-Resolution Millimeter-Wave Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar for Close-Range Detection of Concealed Objects.” A high-resolution imaging system based on frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) millimeter-wave (MMW) radar will be developed. The proposed portable technology has 3D ultra high-resolution imaging (3 cm-0.5 cm) to identify the geometric signature of bulk cash. Secondly, fully polarimetric sensing enables detection of the unique electromagnetic signature of bulk cash. Further, RF spectrometry will be used as an auxiliary modality to enhance detection performance by catching the dipole resonance induced under certain frequencies by the security thread embedded in most US bank notes. The system will be built from commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components, have extremely low RF-emission, be easy to set up and have a high detection probability and low false alarm rate. It can operate at a stand-off distance of 5-10 meters to detect concealed objects on people or in luggage moving at walking speed. This approach leverages years of investment by NASA and DoD into IAI’s reconfigurable imaging radar projects for remote sensing applications through wall imaging radar, target tracking, video-based security system and signal processing. This technology also has applications in commercial ventures like banks and casinos and in detection of concealed weapons and dangerous objects in moving people from a stand-off distance.
March 2012: Air Force awards IAI a new contract to develop a Trusted Computing Framework for Embedded Systems.
Advances in embedded systems have enabled many new network-centric applications in defense and commercial domains. The complexity and public accessibility of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) embedded platforms make them vulnerable to sophisticated security breaches. A trusted computing framework for embedded systems will ensure the trustworthiness and security of missions running with COTS platforms in highly distributed embedded systems. To address this, IAI and its collaborators from North Carolina State University (NCSU) propose to develop an effective Trusted Computing Framework for Embedded Systems (TCES). The key innovation of the proposed effort is establishing a hybrid hardware/software approach to provide both high security assurance and high flexibility for an end-to-end trusted embedded system. TCES ensures the integrity of both static system image and dynamic software execution of embedded systems. It integrates ARM TrustZone technology, the security extension of ARM processors and architecture for embedded systems, to provide hardware-based security assurance against malicious attacks. This cannot be achieved by any pure software-based solution. It establishes a secure boot loader to check the static integrity of software binary. It leverages Hypervisor-based Integrity Measurement Agent (HIMA), developed by NCSU for distributed systems, to ensure the integrity of dynamic software execution. TCES provides an efficient, flexible and secure computing environment for embedded systems by utilizing the benefits of all the trustful components. TCES leverages existing IAI efforts on secure network communication to ensure a trusted communication path between distributed embedded nodes and trusted and reliable communication for remote attestation.
March 2012: IAI's Multi-Arm Unmanned Ground Vehicle Shaves Head for Charity.
Every year volunteers shave their heads for St. Baldrick's Foundation to raise money to help in the search for cures for childhood cancer. And every year IAI employees participate in the event. This year, however, there was a twist for one of our employees; Tim was not shaved by a human... he was shaved by a robot. Tim bravely sat while IAI's Multi-Arm UGV shaved his head. Watch the video here:
The event was quickly featured in Gizmodo,
For more information on the Multi-Arm UGV please visit www.i-a-i.com/r/mobile-manipulation. More information on the St. Baldrick's Foundation can be found at www.stbaldricks.org.
February 2012: NASA awards IAI a new contract for developing a Demand Generation System for Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Studying its Airspace Impact Prediction.
Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) can perform important missions in national security and defense, emergency management and in scientific and commercial applications. Currently UAS cannot routinely access the National Airspace System (NAS) due to a lack of automated separation assurance integrated with collision avoidance systems, robust communication technologies, robust human systems integration and standardized safety and certification. Technologies and procedures for enabling seamless operation and integration of UAS in the NAS will be useful in the future when tens of thousands of military UAS deployed abroad are brought back. To address this, IAI and its collaborator Virginia Tech University, have been awarded a contract entitled “UAS Demand Generation and Airspace Performance Impact Prediction.” The key innovation is developing a technology with three parts, to generate credible future demand for UAS vehicles. The first is a mission profile system for identifying and specifying civilian UAS trips given their missions. It is an activity-based modeling system that translates inchoate mission profile information into overall demand between city pairs and counties for UAS aircraft. The second part is a demand generation system that translates the overall demand into specific flight data sets, specifying origin, destination, scheduled departure and arrival times and type of aircraft. The final part is a data warehouse that will store flight data sets, and which can be accessed by aviation researchers worldwide for conducting custom studies of UAS impact on the NAS.
February 2012: NASA awards IAI a new contract to develop technologies for Cognitive State Assessment of Crew Members for Improving Aviation Safety.
Many crew-related errors in aviation are caused by hazardous cognitive states of the crew including overstress, disengagement, high fatigue and ineffective crew coordination. Aviation safety can be improved by monitoring and predicting these cognitive states in a non-intrusive manner and designing mitigation strategies. In Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) flight deck, there will be a transition from ground based navigation infrastructure to satellite based navigation and some control of separation of traffic will be delegated to the cockpit from Air Traffic Control (ATC). This will increase responsibilities of pilots, making hazardous cognitive state assessment more critical. To address this, IAI and its collaborators, the University of Iowa and Old Dominion University have been awarded a contract entitled, “Crew Systems Technologies for Improved Aviation Safety.” A real-time hazardous pilot Cognitive State Assessment system, called CSA-Deep, will be built for Integrated Crew-System Interaction (ICSI) in all phases of flight. The key innovation here is the modeling and adaptive updating of hazardous cognitive states using a large amount of unlabeled and limited labeled data through semi-supervised deep learning. A unified multiple cognitive states assessment framework will be built based on multiple non-intrusive sensing modalities including eye tracking information, voice, heart and respiration rates, body temperature and posture. Hazardous labels for each cognitive state will be output by an Integrated Alerting and Notification (IAN) system. This research will leverage ongoing flight deck studies being conducted by this team, including operator functional state assessment under NASA SBIR Phase II, OSD/Army voice-based stress analysis Phase II, and NextGen work under the NRA.
February 2012: Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop a Secure Content Distribution System for Military Operations.
Successful commercial Content Distribution Systems (CDS) use a group of replica servers over the Internet to copy and effectively distribute content from origin servers. However, success in military applications requires addressing two critical concerns of survivability and security. The CDS must be available on DoD’s secure, segregated networks and meet the verifiable trusted source access mechanisms and Quality of Service (QoS) needs unique to military Command and Control (C2) planning and execution. It must be deployable on forward operating C2 node infrastructures that ride on the Global Information Grid (GIG), the globally interconnected, end-to-end set of information capabilities for collecting, processing, storing, disseminating, and managing information on demand. To address this, IAI and its collaborators, Securboration, Inc. and Mike Freedman, propose to develop a Survivable and Secure Content Distribution System (SS-CDS) for robust, secure and flexible content distribution over complex and dynamic tactical networks. One advantage of SS-CDS is the high survivability achieved by minimizing the dependence on central servers. It has a layered Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model for content distribution and security services. Further, SS-CDS has a security framework that accommodates standard security solutions as well as computational and communicational lightweight security mechanisms. It also has a robust handling mechanism to support node dynamics. Another advantage is its semantic model for service description situational awareness with respect to the operational environment, mission, and supporting network infrastructure. The system architecture has been designed and feasibility studies conducted. The current work will include implementation of a system prototype and testing the system for efficiency, scalability and robustness.
February 2012: Air Force awards IAI a follow-on contract to develop Intelligent Optimization Solutions for Virtual Networks.
Network virtualization splits up available bandwidth into channels, each independent of the others and which can be assigned or reassigned to a particular network resource, server, or device in real time. Network virtualization which used to be about deploying network services, now also includes deploying multiple distinct networks over the same physical infrastructure. It optimizes throughput, reliability, flexibility, scalability and security. IAI has been awarded a follow-on contract by the Air Force entitled “Intelligent Optimization Solutions for Virtual Networks.” The key innovation is the development of a powerful virtualization solution that supports agile mission assurance by facilitating automated management of virtual networks and underlying shared substrate. IAI’s comprehensive solution provides virtual networks with the capability to rapidly adapt to new conditions using information such as link metrics, ongoing traffic flows and incoming traffic constraints. This design can be applied to a wide range of environments, including dynamic mobile wireless environments such as Tactical Edge. Flow management mechanisms like dynamic performance-aware channel splitting and migration will support selection of links that best suit the preference of incoming and currently active flows. Additional mechanisms like intelligent virtual router migration facilitate deployment of new virtual routers for maintenance and horizontal network growth. The proposed solution relies on simple yet powerful control applications that leverage IAI’s enhanced virtual routing tables containing status information about the underlying substrate. Flow management applications will use this information to support the dynamic performance-aware and preference-aware management of traffic flows. In concert, these mechanisms will provide a comprehensive management solution that will support secure, reliable, mission-oriented communications over virtual networks including connectivity with nodes at the tactical edge.
January 2012: Air Force awards IAI a new contract to develop a Reconfigurable Digital Transceiver for Space Applications.
The frequency allocation and approval process for satellite radio transceivers can take over 36 months, and is often not completed prior to procurement and integration of crystal-based transponders (transceivers). Spectrum management now relies more on off-channel assignments within the Space-Ground Link System (SGLS) band and is converting satellite services to Unified S-Band. Satellite manufacturers cannot anticipate a frequency assignment conforming to availability of off-the-shelf crystals. Hence, it will be useful to have programmable transceivers that can lock to an assigned frequency within the SGLS band or the Unified S-Band a month before launch or even while on-orbit. This will allow space programs to continue space vehicle integration and testing in parallel with the frequency approval process. To address this, IAI has been awarded a contract to design a Reconfigurable Digital Transceiver (RDT) for Space Applications. The proposed design will be initially prototyped on a custom Multi-Channel Digital Synthesizer and Processor (MCDSP) platform that has been designed and field-tested by IAI for digital transceiver applications. IAI’s innovation lies in integrating fixed crystal oscillator based transceivers with wideband digital frequency synthesis capability to cover SGLS and the Unified-S band. This approach proposes the use of a single 2.4 GHz oscillator and also of augmenting wideband direct digital synthesizers to cover the entire SGLS/ Unified S-band spectrum. The proposed RDT design will use space grade components and conservative design strategies, in order to be space-qualifiable in the future.
