Scruff: A Deep Probabilistic Cognitive Architecture for Predictive Processing
Pfeffer, A. and Lynn, S. Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures 2018 The theory of predictive processing encompasses several elements that make it attractive as the underlying computational approach for a cognitive architecture. We introduce a new cognitive architecture, Scruff, capable of implementing predictive processing models by incorporating key properties of neural networks into the Bayesian probabilistic […]
Causal Learning and Explanation of Deep Neural Networks via Autoencoded Activations
Harradon, M., Druce, J., and Ruttenberg, B. arXiv:1802.00541v1 (February 2018) Deep neural networks are complex and opaque. As they enter application in a variety of important and safety critical domains, users seek methods to explain their output predictions. We develop an approach to explaining deep neural networks by constructing causal models on salient concepts contained […]
Complex Causality: Computational Formalisms, Mental Models, and Objective Truth
Dalal, M., Sliva, A., and Blumstein, D. Presented at the 7th International Conference on Cross-Cultural Decision Making at the International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics, Los Angeles, CA (July 2017). There is a broad consensus that understanding causality is important for comprehending the world and making decisions. However, causality is notoriously difficult to understand […]
Testing the Usability of a Decision-Support System for Increasing Environmental Awareness
Danczyk, J., Jacobs, P., Montgomery, O., Jenkins, M., and Farry, M. Presented at the 2017 IEEE Conference on Cognitive and Computational Aspects of Situation Management (CogSIMA), Savannah, GA (March 2017) Military facility managers must track repeated contaminant release that occurs from scheduled training exercises to mitigate the effects of those releases before negative effects occur. Training […]
Automatic Differentiation Equipped Variable Elimination for Sensitivity Analysis on Probabilistic Inference Queries
Druce, J.1, Ruttenberg, B.1, Blumstein, D.1, and Scofield, D.2 Presented at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), Long Beach, CA (December 2017) Probabilistic Models are a natural framework for describing the stochastic relationships between variables in a system to perform inference tasks, such as estimating the probability of a specific set of conditions or […]
Designing a Pragmatic Graphical Grammar
Eusebi, L., and Guarino, S. Presented at the 2017 IEEE Conference on Cognitive and Computational Aspects of Situation Management (CogSIMA), Savannah, GA (March 2017) Modern adversaries have become more proficient in conducting cyberattacks against our military’s command and control (C2) infrastructure. To maintain security against these threats, operators perform a range of high-fidelity security assessments of […]
Probabilistic Model-Based Programming Techniques for Prediction, Analysis, and Control (PROMPT)
Harrison, S., Takata, G., Wu, C., and Pfeffer, A. Presented at the 15th Annual Conference on Systems Engineering Research Disciplinary Convergence: Implications for Systems Engineering Research, Redondo Beach, CA (March 2017) Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) frameworks such as SysML provide declarative descriptions of the structure, processes, functions, and context of a system. However, these frameworks do not […]
A Mission Library for Mission Plan Management
Kane, S., and von Kelsch, E. Presented at the 8th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE 2017), Los Angeles, CA (July 2017) When Navy pilots create a new mission plan, they frequently build off of prior missions. Specifically, they duplicate a “master” mission plan that contains official settings, operational specifications, and other information […]
Scratchpad: Lightweight Data Capture Tools to Support Mission Planning
Kane, S., von Kelsch, E., Muller, C., and Hogan, C. Presented at the 19th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCII 2017), Vancouver, Canada (July 2017) Powerful tools are available to support the mission planning process. Although these tools provide support to multiple components, they do not support the dynamic nature of the process over time. Pilots […]
Long-Range Forecasting Using COMPASS Machine Learning
O’Connor, A.1, Bell, R.2, Kirtman, B.2, and Gorman, J.1 Presented at the 7th International Workshop of Climate Informatics hosted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO (September 2017) The Climatological Observations for Maritime Prediction and Analysis Support Service (COMPASS) uses machine learning to create long-range forecasts of the probability that future conditions will differ from […]
Probabilistic Modeling of Insider Threat Detection Systems
Ruttenberg, B.1, Blumstein, D.1, Druce, J.1, Howard, M.1, Reed, F.1, Wilfong, L.2, Lister, C.2, Gaskin, S.3, Foley, M.4, and Scofield, D.4 Presented at The Fourth International Workshop on Graphical Models for Security (GraMSec 2017), Santa Barbara, CA (August 2017) Due to the high consequences of poorly performing automated insider threat detection systems (ITDSs), it is advantageous […]
Combining Data-Driven and Theory-Driven Models for Causality Analysis in Sociocultural Systems
Sliva, A. Presented at the Current Challenges in Computing (CCubed) Conference, Napa, CA (September 2017) To better understand and describe sociocultural systems, it is critical that we can create, analyze, and validate social, political, and economic models that capture causal and predictive dynamics. Causality is, however, notoriously difficult to analyze, a challenge amplified by the complexity of […]
A Probabilistic Approach to Improve Offensive and Defensive Space Control Course of Action Effectiveness
Stouch, D., Gorman, J., and Ruttenberg, B. Air Force Research Laboratory Space Situational Awareness Conference, Kihei, HI (September 2017) Satellites are continually at risk of collision and subject to malicious activity. We must understand the nature (i.e., severity, location, source, timing) of these threats to protect our space assets and respond effectively. A rapid, comprehensive […]
Techniques for Managing Stale Mission Information through Card-Based Interfaces
von Kelsch, E., Kane, S., and Muller, C. Presented at the 8th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE 2017), Los Angeles, CA (July 2017) Powerful tools exist to support mission planning with complex decision making demands. However, these tools are unable to update missions with updated data or provide support for data […]
Using Temporal Representations for Understanding Complex Interrelationships for Mission Planning
Danczyk, J., Kane, S., Housten, D., Voshell, M., Kilgore, R., and Hogan, C. Presented at the 7th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE 2016), Orlando, FL (July 2016) The ability to analyze, recognize, and plan for operational events – i.e., patterns of change over time—is a critical component of effective situation assessment […]
Are Behavioral Measures Useful for Detecting Cognitive Workload During Human-Computer Interaction?
Elkin-Frankston, S., Bracken, B., Irvin, S., and Jenkins, M. Presented at the 4th International Conference on Human Side of Service Engineering, taking place at the 7th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE 2016), Orlando, FL (July 2016) Commonly used techniques for measuring cognitive workload during human-computer interaction are cumbersome or intrusive to task performance. Physiological […]
SPIDER: New Technology for Constructing Sociometric Networks from Personal Network Data
Hopkins, C.1, Young, A.2,and Borgatti, S.2 Presented at the XXXVI Sunbelt Conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA), Newport Beach, CA (April 2016) During the past two decades, there has been a surge in the number of studies applying social network analysis (SNA) to the study of infectious disease transmission. The mapping of […]
Decision-making and Opinion Formation in Simple Networks
Leibovich1, M., Zuckerman2, I., Pfeffer3, A., and Gal4, Y. Knowledge and Information Systems, an International Journal (September 2016) In many networked decision-making settings, information about the world is distributed across multiple agents and agents’ success depends on their ability to aggregate and reason about their local information over time. This paper presents a computational model of […]
Modular Analytics Management Architecture for Interoperability and Decision Support
Marotta, S., Metzger, M., Gorman, J., and Sliva, A. Presented at SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing, Baltimore Convention Center, Baltimore, MD (April 2016) The Dual Node Decision Wheels (DNDW) architecture is a new approach to information fusion and decision-support systems. By combining cognitive systems engineering organizational analysis tools, such as decision trees, with the Dual Node […]
Practical Probabilistic Programming
Pfeffer, A. Practical Probabilistic Programming, Manning Publications, Cherry Hill, NJ (2016) Practical Probabilistic Programming introduces the working programmer to probabilistic programming. In it, you’ll learn how to use the PP paradigm to model application domains and then express those probabilistic models in code. Although PP can seem abstract, in this book you’ll immediately work on practical examples, […]
Modeling Causality in Sociocultural Systems using Ensemble Methods
Sliva, A., Neal Reilly, S., Blumstein, D., Hookway, S., and Chamberlain, J. Presented at the 7th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE 2016), Orlando, FL (July 2016) Awarded Best Paper at AHFE’s Cross-Cultural Decision-Making Conference When planning operations or designing policy interventions, military decision-makers and policy experts must have an understanding of the world […]
CAML: Machine Learning-based Predictable, System-Level Anomaly Detection
Song1, J., Fry2, G., Wu2, C., and Parmer1, G. 1st Workshop on Security and Dependability of Critical Embedded Real-Time Systems, in conjunction with IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium, Porto, Portugal (November 2016). Security challenges are increasing in distributed cyber-physical systems (CPSs), which integrate computation and physical processes. System security is complicated by both the temporal and safety […]
Laser Vibrometry Target Recognition Enhancement Using an Analytical Researcher’s Workbench
Stouch, D. In Proceedings of the 2017 Military Sensing Symposium (MSS) Active Electro-Optical Systems Symposium, Gaithersberg, MD (September 2016). For More Information To learn more or request a copy of a paper (if available), contact Daniel Stouch. (Please include your name, address, organization, and the paper reference. Requests without this information will not be […]
Enhanced SSA Threat Analytics based on Probabilistic Reasoning
Stouch, D., Freedman, S., Ruttenberg, B., and Gorman, J. AFRL Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Conference, Kihei, Hawaii (September 2016). For More Information To learn more or request a copy of a paper (if available), contact Daniel Stouch. (Please include your name, address, organization, and the paper reference. Requests without this information will not be honored.)
Applications and Considerations of Augmented Reality Capabilities for Next Generation Human-Computer Interaction to Support Military Shared Mission Command
Wollocko, A., and Jenkins, M. Presented at Human-Computer Interaction International 2016, Toronto, Canada (July 2016) Augmented reality (AR) technology is quickly evolving and providing the capabilities needed to lead the next generation of human-computer interaction, and can be particularly useful in military situations, like Shared Mission Command (MC) and Collaborative Cockpit Displays. To enable traditional software […]
Composable Event Frames for the Integrated Analysis of Sensor Data and Natural Language
Thomsen, E. Keynote Address at the Ontological Approaches to Sensor Data Analysis, Buffalo, NY (May 2016) Sensors exist as parts of larger systems that have the ability to reason about sensor outputs, to decide upon courses of action to be taken, and to engage control processes that will initiate these courses of action. We will describe […]
Combining Cognitive Engineering and Information Fusion Architectures to Build Effective Joint Systems
Sliva1, A., Gorman1, J., Voshell1, M., Tittle1, J., and Bowman2, C. Presented at SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing, Baltimore Convention Center, Baltimore, MD (April 2016) For effective decision making, military Command and Control (C2) requires robust situational understanding produced by translating multi-INT intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) into actionable intelligence. These information products must be delivered […]
Operational Planning using Climatological Observations for Maritime Prediction and Analysis Support Service (COMPASS)
O’Connor1, A., Kirtman2, B., Harrison1, S., and Gorman1, J. Presented at SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing, Baltimore Convention Center, Baltimore, MD (April 2016) The US Navy faces several limitations when planning operations in regard to forecasting environmental conditions. Currently, mission analysis and planning tools rely heavily on short-term (less than a week) forecasts or long-term statistical […]
Towards Card-based User Interfaces Workspaces for Group Mission Planning
Kane, S., von Kelsch, E., Voshell, M., and Kilgore, R. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Supporting Group Work, Sanibel Island, FL (November 2016) Current mission planning interfaces are difficult to understand, cumbersome to use, and do not support the collaborative aspect of group mission planning. To address this critical shortfall, we describe in […]
Investigating Performance Variability in Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination using a Socio-technical Systems Analysis Approach
Danczyk, J., Wollocko, A., Farry, M., and Voshell, M. Presented at SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing, Baltimore Convention Center, Baltimore, MD (April 2016) Data collection processes supporting intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions have recently undergone a technological transition accomplished by investment in sensor platforms. Various agencies have made these investments to increase the resolution, duration, […]
Demonstration of an Adaptable Toolkit for the Assessment and Augmentation of Performance by Teams in Real Time (ADAPTER)
Bracken1, B., Palmon1, N., Elkin-Frankston1, E., and Cooke2, N. Presented at the Global Health and Performance Summit, Columbus, OH (May 2016) Teams of individuals must multitask to perform their own work while maintaining shared attention across their teammates. Experimenters who study teams use advanced methods to understand physiological, neurophysiological, and behavioral correlates of individual and team performance, […]
