Year Published: 2013

Sex, Age, and Progression of Drug Use in Adolescents Admitted for Treatment to a Northeastern United States Addiction Hospital: Comparison with a National Survey

B. Bracken1,2,3,*, J. Rodolico1,2,4, and K. Hill2,3,4 Substance Abuse, Volume 34, Issue 3 (2013) Background: National adolescent drug use surveys are distributed in United States schools. Survey results determine trends in drug use and inform research and prevention efforts, however, students who have dropped out of school or were truant the day of the survey are […]

T2 Relaxation Effects on Apparent N-acetylaspartate Concentration in Proton Magnetic Resonance Studies of Schizophrenia

Bracken2,3,*, B., Rouse2,**, E.,Renshaw2,3, P., and Olson3,, D. Psychiatry Research, 213(2) (2013) Over the past two decades, many magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) studies reported lower N-acetylaspartate (NAA) in key brain regions of patients with schizophrenia (SZ) compared to healthy subjects. A smaller number of studies report no difference in NAA. Many sources of variance may […]

Generating Anonymous Social Networks for Analysis Tool Development

C. Lofdahl Proceedings of the 81.2 Military Operations Research Society (MORS) Symposium, Alexandria, VA, (June 2013) Social media use has exploded over the past decade and with it the availability of data that can provide insight into a range of behavioral questions. Social media data however is so voluminous, complex, and hard to interpet that it […]

A Precision Information Environment (PIE) for Emergency Responders Providing Collaborative Manipulation, Role-Tailored Visualization, and Integrated Access to Heterogeneous Data

Davis, A., Hogan, C., Godwin, J., and Kilgore, R. IEEE Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security, Greater Boston, MA (November 2013) During a crisis, emergency responders must rapidly integrate information from many separate sources to satisfy their role-specific needs and to make time-sensitive decisions. Responders currently receive this information through numerous software applications and face […]

Eyes in the Sky: New Technology Gives UAVs a Way to Process High-resolution Video

R. Eaton and L. Cordeiro Defense Tech Briefs, Supplement to NASA Tech Briefs, Volume 7, Number 4 (August 2013) Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are critical to today’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions, supplying valuable aerial imagery to ground forces. Small UAV systems are a highly flexible ISR solution since they can be quickly deployed […]

Reliable ISR Algorithms for a Very Low Power Approximate Computer

R. Eaton1, J. McBride1, and J. Bates2 Presented at the 2013 SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing Conference, Baltimore, MD, (29 April – 3 May 2013)   The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is looking for methods to perform higher levels of sensor processing onboard UAVs to alleviate the need to transmit full motion video to ground stations […]

Graphical Models as Boundary Objects for Collaborative Operations Research

Farry, M.1, Stark, R.2, and Roth, E.3 Presented at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), San Diego, California, (October 2013) To address issues in enterprise-level systems, operations research (OR) analysts need to be able to understand, codify, and communicate various aspects of problems, such as relevant operating conditions and their […]

FuncTracker: Discovering Shared Code to Aid Malware Forensics

LeDoux, C., Lakhotia, A., Miles, C., Notani, V., and Pfeffer, A. The 6th USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET), Washington, DC (August 2013) Malware code has forensic value, as evident from recent studies drawing relationships between creators of Duqu and Stuxnet through similarity of their code. We present FuncTracker, a system developed […]

Nicotine Content and Abstinence State Have Different Effects on Subjective Ratings of Positive Versus Negative Reinforcement from Smoking

Lindsey1,2,3, K., Bracken1,2,3,*, B., MacLean1, R., Ryan1, E., Lukas1,2,3, S., and Frederick2,3, B. Pharmacology, Biochemistry, and Behavior, 103(4) (February 2013) Despite the well-known adverse health consequences of smoking, approximately 20% of US adults smoke tobacco cigarettes. Much of the research on smoking reinforcement and the maintenance of tobacco smoking behavior has focused on nicotine; however, […]

Generating Anonymous Social Networks for Analysis Tool Development

Lofdahl, C. Proceedings of the 81.2 Military Operations Research Society (MORS) Symposium, Alexandria, VA, (June 2013) Social media use has exploded over the past decade and with it the availability of data that can provide insight into a range of behavioral questions. Social media data however is so voluminous, complex, and hard to interpet that it […]

Graphical Models as Boundary Objects for Collaborative Operations Research

Farry, M.1, Stark, R.2, and Roth, E.3 Presented at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), San Diego, California, (October 2013) To address issues in enterprise-level systems, operations research (OR) analysts need to be able to understand, codify, and communicate various aspects of problems, such as relevant operating conditions and their relationships. […]

Strategies for Training Technical and Non-technical Surgical Skills

Miller1, A., Sun2, T., Brewer2, J., Ganapathy2, S., Weyhrauch3, P., Niehaus3, J., and Cao2, C. Presented at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), San Diego, California, (October 2013) Even though laparoscopic surgery has become the preferred technique for many surgeons, the methods of training are not standardized. Most simulators and […]

Robust Leader Tracking from an Unmanned Ground Vehicle

Monnier, C., German, S., and Ost, A. Presented at the 2013 SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing Conference, Baltimore, MD (29 April – 3 May 2013) While many leader-follower technologies for robotic mules have been developed in recent years, the problem of reliably tracking and re-acquiring a human leader through cluttered environments continues to pose a challenge […]

Affect-Inspired Resource Management in Dynamic, Real-Time Environments

Neal Reilly, S., Fry, G., and Reposa, M. In A. Chella, R. Pirrone, R. Sorbello, and K. R. Johannsdottir (Eds.) Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, Volume 196. 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. (2013) We describe a novel affect-inspired mechanism to improve the performance of computational systems operating in dynamic environments. In particular, we designed a mechanism […]

Evaluating the Potential for Using Affect-Inspired Techniques to Manage Real-Time Systems

Neal Reilly, S., Fry, G., Guarino, S., Reposa, M., West, R., Costantini, R., and Johnston, J. International Journal of Machine Consciousness, Volume 05, Issue 02 (December 2013) We describe a novel affect-inspired mechanism to improve the performance of computational systems operating in dynamic environments. In particular, we designed a mechanism that is based on aspects […]

Towards Evaluating Computational Models of Intuitive Decision Making with fMRI Data

Niehaus, J., Romero, V., and Pfeffer, A. 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Las Vegas, NV (July 2013) A vast array of everyday tasks require individuals to use intuition to make decisions and act effectively, including civilian and military professional tasks such as those undertaken by firefighters, police, search and rescue, small unit leaders, and […]

Countering Malware Evolution Using Cloud-Based Learning

Ouellette, J., Pfeffer, A., and Lakhotia, A. Proceedings of Malware 2013: the 8th International Conference on Malicious and Unwanted Software, Fajardo, Puerto Rico, (October 2013) Recent years have seen an explosion in the number and sophistication of malware attacks. The sheer volume of novel malware has made purely manual signature development impractical and has led to […]

A Temporal Database Forecasting Algebra

Parisi1, F., Sliva2, A., and Subrahmanian3, V. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, vol. 54, no. 7. (September 2013) Though forecasting methods are used in numerous fields, we have seen no work on providing a general theoretical framework to build forecast operators into temporal databases, producing an algebra that extends the relational algebra. In this paper, […]

Prevention of Surgical Skill Decay

Perez1, R., Skinner2, A., Weyhrauch3, P., Niehaus3, J., Lathan2, C., Schwaitzberg4, S., and Cao5, C. Designing and Using Computer Simulations in Medical Education and Training, supplement in Military Medicine, Vol. 178 (October 2013) The US military medical community spends a great deal of time and resources training its personnel to provide them with the knowledge and […]

Functional Probabilistic Programming

Pfeffer, A. Presented at the Commercial Users of Functional Programming workshop, affiliated with the International Conference on Functional Programming, Boston, MA. (September 2013) Probabilistic modeling is one of the most widely used approaches to machine learning (ML). In recent years, the number and variety of probabilistic models has increased dramatically. Currently, developing a new probabilistic […]

Declarative to Procedural Tutors: A Family of Cognitive Architecture-based Tutors

Ritter1, F., Yeh, K.1, Cohen, M.2, Weyhrauch, P.3, Kim, J.4, and Cao, C.5 Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference on Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (BRiMS), Ottawa, Canada (July 2013) We have created a tutoring architecture, D2P (Declarative to Procedural), based on ACT-R’s theory of knowledge and learning for declarative and procedural memory. D2P […]

Probabilistic Programming and the Democratization of AI

Ruttenberg, B. Presentation to the New England Artificial Intelligence Group, Cambridge, MA (September 2013) Probabilistic models form the foundation of modern machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). However, building and reasoning on models that represent large and complex scenarios is a daunting task for even the most expert and experienced programmers. As a result, […]

Democratizing Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence: Probabilistic Programming with Scala

Ruttenberg, B. Introduction to Figaro, Presentation to Boston Area Scala Group, Cambridge, MA, (26 February, 2013) Probabilistic models form the foundation of modern ML and AI. However, building and using models that represent large and complex scenarios is a daunting task for even the most expert and experienced programmers. As a result, there has been significant effort […]

Threats to Peace: Threat Perception and the Persistence or Desistence of Violent Conflict

Sliva1, A., Malyutov2, M., Pierce2, G., and Li2, X. Proceedings of the European Intelligence and Security Informatics Conference, Uppsala, Sweden (August 2013) In international security, there are many cases of inter-group conflict where violence persists and conflict-oriented policies dominate at the expense of a more mutually beneficial allocation of societal goods. What are the barriers to […]

First-Order Open-Universe POMDPs: Formulation and Algorithms

Srivastava, S., Cheng, X., Russell, S., and Pfeffer, A. Techical Report UCB/EECS-2013-243, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA (December 2013) Interest in relational and first-order languages for probability models has grown rapidly in recent years, and with it the possibility of extending such languages to handle decision processes—both fully and partially observable. We examine […]

Trust Metrics and Results for Social Media Analysis

Stickgold, E., Lofdahl, C., and Farry, M. Presented at the The 2013 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction (SBP 2013), Washington, DC (April 2013) Social media has changed the information landscape for a variety of events including natural disasters, demonstrations, and violent crises. During these events, people use a variety of social media, […]

Trust Definitions and Metrics for Social Media Analysis

Stickgold, E., Lofdahl, C., and Farry, M. Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference on Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (BRiMS), Ottawa, Canada (July 2013) Social media has changed the information landscape for a variety of events including natural disasters, demonstrations, and violent crises. During these events, people use a variety of social media, such […]

Modeling Trust in Multi-Agent Systems

Stickgold, E., Mahoney, S., Pfautz, J., Campolongo, J., and Thomsen, E. Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference on Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (BRiMS), Ottawa, Canada (July 2013) In order to extract information from a complex, multi-agent situation, where hard facts are not readily known, it is necessary to determine how much trust a […]

An Analytical Signal Processing Workbench for Managing Mechanical System Health

Stouch, D., Ramesh, M., and Moore, T. Technology demonstration to be presented at the 2013 Annual Conference of the Prognostics and Health Management Society, New Orleans, LA (October 2013) Vehicles such as aircraft and submarines, and large facility hardware systems such as compressors, generators, and transformers, are comprised of thousands of complex and tightly integrated […]

Understanding Optimality in Multi-Objective ISR Mission Planning for Tactical UAVs

Stouch1, D., Johnson2, J., and Tweddale2,, S. Proceedings of the 81.2 Military Operations Research Society (MORS) Symposium, Alexandria, VA, (June 2013) The dependability, persistence, and versatility of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) have made them indispensable assets for providing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) over the battlefield. As larger constellations of heterogeneous, multi-purpose UAS are tasked […]

Supporting Tactical Intelligence Using Collaborative Environments and Social Networking

Wollocko, A., Farry, M., and R. Stark, R. Presented at the 2013 SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing, Baltimore, MD (May 2013) Modern military environments place an increased emphasis on the collection and analysis of intelligence at the tactical level. The deployment of analytical tools at the tactical level helps support the warfighter’s need for rapid collection, […]

Framework for Assessing Cloud Trustworthiness

Wu, C. and Marotta, S. IEEE 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing, Santa Clara, CA, (July 2013) When applications or data reside in a public cloud, trustworthiness can be compromised due to lack of control over the underlying infrastructure. Most public cloud infrastructures cannot be instrumented or modified to independently verify data integrity. To support […]