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QUEST Discussion TopicsOct 15, 2010The main discussion point will be a talk Capt Amerika will be giving (on behalf of the quest group) next week ‘ quest for flexible autonomy’.?Autonomy paradox - autonomous systems designed to reduce the human operator footprint are requiring increased manpower support requirements.?Premise of our presentation:?–????? Premise: current approaches to 'automate' fail to consider the important issue of fundamental science and math of integrating?multiple 'agents' (some human some electronic) to solve the wicked driver problems in areas like??????? ISR / RPVs (layered sensing)??????? ISHM (Integrated Systems Health Management)??????? CyberMedicineThere is a large ppt file put together for this topic, please email me if you would like a copy of it before tomorrow’s discussion.Secondary topic for tomorrow is the summary presentation on designing conscious systems – come excerpts from the 3 papers we had used in discussing ongoing efforts – and then into a discussion on implications of the papers to our 4 current driver problems – cyber, ishm, virtual world learning, layered sensing (WAAS and/or blue devil exploitation)Again, please just let me know if you would like the slides accompanying this topic.News Articles Oct 15, 2010Taliban Commander killed airstrike and a raid by ground troops killed eight insurgents, including a senior Taliban leader who spearheaded attacks against Afghan security forces…Maulawi Jawadullah — accused of organizing deadly ambushes, roadside bomb attacks, and abductions of Afghan police and soldiers in northern Afghanistan — was killed in the airstrike Wednesday in Takhar province…Jawadullah was linked to the recent deaths of 10 Afghan National Police officers…Taliban issued a statement marking the invasion anniversary, claiming 75 percent of Afghanistan was now under its control…"While statistics show that insurgents are responsible for most civilian casualties, many we interviewed accused international forces of directly stoking the conflict and causing as many, if not more, civilian casualties than the insurgents," researchers said in the report. "Many Afghan communities drew these conclusions only after they suffered from civilian casualties, night raids, detention operations, and saw few signs of progress in their country."…Doubling the number of RPA’s Force expects to nearly double the size of its unmanned aircraft fleet over the next several years, said Chief of Staff Gen. Norton A. Schwartz…rom a current inventory of 250, the goal is to expand to 450 or possibly more…Schwartz also confirmed that there are no plans to allow enlisted airmen to operate RPAs. “For the time being, pilots will be officers,”… Further fueling the inter-service friction have been complaints by Army commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan that there are not enough Air Force RPAs to meet the needs of tactical units. As a result, the Army has embarked on separate efforts to build its own RPA arsenal….The Army, he said, “operates RPA platforms in a tactical mode: close in, with relatively small platforms.”… Schwartz noted that the Air Force has surged its RPA capacity nearly tenfold over the past decade. More than 4,000 airmen have been reassigned from other occupations to operate and support these aircraft. Running RPA operations is so labor intensive that each “orbit” of aircraft requires 120 personnel per 24-hour shift. “We have adapted to this fight pretty spectacularly,” said Schwartz….Cyber war games Air Force Base in Bossier City, La., provided the perfect setting for the Pentagon's latest cyber challenge — a public- and private-sector exchange focused on leveraging “the art of the possible” in a cyber war game setting…these war games are about the real effects of a cyberwar…is about clever bad guys using bits and bytes to confuse, dissuade or shut-down people and systems, on the battlefield and across America…also about making planes fall from the sky, ships sink or drift at sea, and cutting off forward deployed troops from their lifelines…These cyber war games are in place to ensure that we consider everything, get awareness to what capabilities exist and prepare for it in the event it's ever used against us…Location based ads engines already use positioning information from smart phones to deliver search results--and search ads--that are more relevant to a person's location. And location-based games, such as Foursquare and SCVNGR, which let users "check in" or perform other activities at locations to earn points or rewards, could enable new ways of reaching customers. These companies can make deals with local businesses to show users special offers when they are nearby….Some early results suggest that location-based marketing could be every bit as effective as the industry dreams. A survey conducted in May 2010 by Placecast, a location-based advertising company based in San Francisco, found that 80 percent of consumers who have opted in to use a location-based service were receptive to being contacted by companies with offers based on their location…Big brands such as Starbucks and Charmin are already exploring location-focused phone apps. Charmin has created an application that locates public bathrooms and lets users rate how clean and well-maintained they are….t's important to find ways to measure the effects of these and other campaigns. Rice says that location-based services have a lot to offer small local businesses, which can make sure their ads are going to customers who are close enough to actually act on them. However, he says big brands are needed for the industry to take off…small businesses can watch for changes in foot traffic, but large businesses might have more trouble measuring how a campaign is affecting sales. Products such as Coca-Cola or Pringles are already being purchased by many consumers in many locations, and location-based services will need to find ways to demonstrate the value of adding the element of location to the companies' national marketing campaigns….Google cars drive themselves is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver…With someone behind the wheel to take control if something goes awry and a technician in the passenger seat to monitor the navigation system, seven test cars have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control…Robot drivers react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated, the engineers argue. They speak in terms of lives saved and injuries avoided — more than 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2008. The engineers say the technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together. Because the robot cars would eventually be less likely to crash, they could be built lighter, reducing fuel consumption. But of course, to be truly safer, the cars must be far more reliable than, say, today’s personal computers, which crash on occasion and are frequently infected…During a half-hour drive beginning on Google’s campus 35 miles south of San Francisco last Wednesday, a Prius equipped with a variety of sensors and following a route programmed into the GPS navigation system nimbly accelerated in the entrance lane and merged into fast-moving traffic on Highway 101, the freeway through Silicon Valley…It drove at the speed limit, which it knew because the limit for every road is included in its database, and left the freeway several exits later. The device atop the car produced a detailed map of the environment….The car then drove in city traffic through Mountain View, stopping for lights and stop signs, as well as making announcements like “approaching a crosswalk” (to warn the human at the wheel) or “turn ahead” in a pleasant female voice…To gain control of the car he has to do one of three things: hit a red button near his right hand, touch the brake or turn the steering wheel. He did so twice, once when a bicyclist ran a red light and again when a car in front stopped and began to back into a parking space. But the car seemed likely to have prevented an accident itself….project is the brainchild of Sebastian Thrun, the 43-year-old director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Google engineer and the co-inventor of the Street View mapping service…he led a team of Stanford students and faculty members in designing the Stanley robot car, winning the second Grand Challenge of the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, a $2 million Pentagon prize for driving autonomously over 132 miles in the California desert…One way Google might be able to profit is to provide information and navigation services for makers of autonomous vehicles. Or, it might sell or give away the navigation technology itself, much as it offers its Android smart phone system to cellphone companies…And in the event of an accident, who would be liable — the person behind the wheel or the maker of the software?... Scientists and engineers have been designing autonomous vehicles since the mid-1960s, but crucial innovation happened in 2004 when the Pentagon’s research arm began its Grand Challenge….Mining for brand sentiment typically pay big money for research into what people are thinking about--to gauge success, identify threats, ferret out misinformation, and pick up on themes that resonate with consumers…ample clues to the future direction that products should take are hidden in the fields and streams of the Web…Tens of millions of new blog entries, status updates, and tweets appear online every day--so information is out there for the taking, on everything from tech product launches to new movies to soft drinks to brands of soap. "Consumers know what they want and are giving their opinions in an unconstrained fashion,"… far too much data for any team of human readers to get through…Machines can help, but peering into human emotion is a more complicated task than traditional search and analytics. After all, feelings often come in the form of abbreviated, slang-ridden tweets that computers cannot translate into anything meaningful. Marketers today aren't mining simply for information on click-throughs and page views--they want to mine the secrets of the human heart and come up with hard data on soft concepts such as "mood" and "passion."… Coca-Cola has been testing Netbase's platform at its corporate headquarters since September, using it to watch the response to a new advertising campaign--and to monitor the discussion around artificial sweeteners. Sthanunathan says Coca-Cola plans to roll out the platform within the company globally starting in November. Netbase has impressed him, he says, with "its ability to understand the context as opposed to just the content."… Spier explains how Netbase works by citing a sample tweet: "The iPhone has never been this good." Some systems that purport to tease out users' moods search for keywords, such as "iPhone," "never," and "good." Most of these would be fooled by the sample sentence, interpreting its sentiment as negative because of the word "never." The simple word "this," however, alters not only the mood of the sentence but also its intensity. "The iPhone has never been good" is a negative statement, Spier explains, while "The iPhone has never been this good" is strongly positive…company has eight patents pending, some from its early work building a platform to identify and understand patterns in English sentences. More recently, Netbase has added statistical learning capabilities that allow the system to improve as it encounters more and more text…NetBase has a major partnership with publisher Reed Elsevier, for example, to crawl and categorize its archives of journal articles in order to make them easy to search from a variety of angles…Spier believes companies can satisfy their customers by putting data in context. "What's needed are systems that can view the world through many lenses, with the kind of accuracy businesses really need to make decisions,"… Netbase's dashboard provides context by automatically surfacing terms that make for interesting comparisons. For example, Spier says, it may not be all that interesting to know that response to the iPhone 4 is positive. More interesting is whether it's positive when compared with the Motorola Droid, the HTC Evo, or the Samsung Epic…."For forty years now, the tech industry has been digitizing everything in sight," Spier says. "The next forty years, businesses will be focused on how to make sense of all that information."…Online learning gap facing the nation’s work force is evident in the numbers…Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and four nonprofit education organizations are beginning an ambitious initiative to address that challenge by accelerating the development and use of online learning tools…Just how effective technology can be in improving education — by making students more effective, more engaged learners — is a subject of debate. To date, education research shows that good teachers matter a lot, class size may be less important than once thought and nothing improves student performance as much as one-on-one human tutoring…If technology is well designed, experts say, it can help tailor the learning experience to individual students, facilitate student-teacher collaboration, and assist teachers in monitoring student performance each day and in quickly fine-tuning lessons….potential benefits of technology are greater as students become older, more independent learners. Making that point, Mr. Gates said in an interview that for children from kindergarten to about fifth grade “the idea that you stick them in front of a computer is ludicrous.”… new initiative, Next Generation Learning Challenges, focuses on the college years. It is looking for innovative tools that can be developed and shared across networks of colleges. The grants, for $250,000 to $750,000 each, are intended to scale up such efforts, so they become self-sustaining…“Innovation is your only hope,” Bill Gates said. “And the only new game in town is technology.”… Among the projects that have successfully used online technology is the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, which has adopted hybrid models of digital and classroom teaching to accelerate learning. In one project, a college statistics course was taught in two different ways using comparable groups of students: a traditional class lasted 15 weeks, with four class meetings a week, whereas a hybrid one of online course material held two classroom sessions a week….hybrid class lasted half as long — seven-and-a-half weeks — as the traditional setting. Yet the students’ test scores and retained learning, measured later in the year, were as high as or higher than those of the conventional lecture class, said Candace M. Thille, director of the initiative…hybrid approach doubled the productivity of education in that program. The course materials, which have been modified for community colleges, have been introduced at 25 two-year colleges this fall…online tools, they say, can help open up educational pathways to skills, especially for low-income young adults….Smartphone for body monitoring technology has become smaller, lighter and more powerful. At the same time, more attention is being paid to preventive health and personal fitness as an answer to the nation’s rising medical bills…result, for sensor companies like BodyMedia, is an opportunity to marry body sensors to smartphones to create full-body monitors. Last week, BodyMedia announced that its armband sensors would be able to communicate with smartphones, wirelessly, using Bluetooth…ompany has been working closely with Apple and Google, to develop its smartphone application. It opens the door to allowing a person to monitor a collection of the 9,000 variables — physical activity, calories burned, body heat, sleep efficiency and others — collected by the sensors in a BodyMedia armband in real-time, as the day goes on….n the past, BodyMedia users had to consult personal data downloaded to a Web site or observe a few measurements on special watchband display, sold for $100….BodyMedia was a darling at health and technology conferences, held up as a glimpse of the future. But it struggled as a business, since its offerings seemed a bit too big and a bit too costly for the mainstream consumer….Bluetooth-enabled armband costs $249 and the BodyMedia data service costs $7 a month, when purchased in an annual subscription. The new offerings go on sale next month, at the company’s Web site, and at Amazon…Potential new markets, analysts say, include diabetes management and corporate wellness programs, where a number of health service companies have sprung up…n health care, that means using data to make “better personal and policy choices,”…Indoor maps phone maps have guided people through streets and alleys around the globe. But when those people step into a sprawling building, they can get lost…number of start-up companies are charting the interiors of shopping malls, convention centers and airports to keep mobile phone users from getting lost as they walk from the food court to the restroom. Some of their maps might even be able to locate cans of sardines in a sprawling grocery store…FastMall has a search engine to help users find stores on its maps. Enter “Banana Republic” and the service places a pin on the map to show the store’s location. Tap the “take me there” button and the service plots a route to the destination. To find the nearest restroom, all users have to do is shake their phone…Most of the indoor mapping apps are free, like PointInside, FastMall and Micello…Because mobile Internet connections are sometimes difficult to make indoors, some of the services download their maps onto users’ phones when they first check in on the service. If the connection later fails, the user still has access to the map…various mapping services differ in how they obtain their maps. Some get them from mall management companies or mall developers. Others use maps that are already available online or they copy ones posted on mall directories…said his team could recreate a mall floor plan in a couple of hours, based on originals that they find in the public domain….Inevitably, maps become outdated as stores close and new ones replace them. Since the mapmakers cannot possibly keep visiting each one, they rely on users to tell them that a map needs to be updated…shopping malls are getting the most attention from indoor mapmakers, although many of them hope to add casinos, stadiums, universities and hospitals — anything big enough to get lost in and that draws big crowds. They are also interested in outdoor destinations like theme parks, zoos and urban shopping districts….Aisle411, a mobile service that is set to start next month, is hoping to take the detail even further by allowing users to find individual products inside stores. Shoppers in a grocery store can search for “capers,” for instance, and then get a map to the appropriate aisle….Given the early stages of indoor mapping, its business model is still a work in progress. Location-based advertising and coupons are one possibility, as is charging malls to create their floor plans. Some companies have tried licensing maps to other companies…Mobile marketing, the most common idea for making money, has yet to prove itself…Google, with its dominant Google Maps, worries some in the industry. Google could crush the tiny indoor mapmakers by creating its own competing service…Chemo fog may be cancer fog survivors often complain about “chemo brain,” a mental fog and inability to concentrate that persist long after treatment. But the problem may not be limited to cancer patients who undergo chemotherapy…Participants answered questions including “Are you limited in any way because of difficulty remembering or because you experience periods of confusion?”… While 8 percent of the respondents who had never had cancer reported impairment, 14 percent of those with a history of cancer reported problems….After controlling for differences between the groups, like age, education and overall health, researchers concluded that people with a history of cancer were 40 percent more likely to report memory impairment….“These problems may be related to treatment, such as chemotherapy, radiation or hormonal therapy, or to something about the disease itself which can change brain chemistry, or to psychological distress,”… Promising treatments might include behavioral interventions and medications…Brain Freeze, also known as ice cream headache, occurs when a very cold substance touches the back of the palate, causing the rapid constriction and dilation of blood vessels in the head. According to some studies, this causes pain receptors to stimulate the trigeminal nerve, the major carrier of sensory information from the face to the brain, resulting in a stabbing pain in the face or head….Researchers have found that only about a third of people experience it, and despite one common misconception stemming from early studies, it does not occur only on warm days…Demoralizing the bad guys commander from the Haqqani network and three other militants were killed in a firefight with NATO and Afghan forces in eastern Afghanistan…Ansari Khan, accused of conducting attacks on coalition forces, died in a clash in Khost province's Spera district in an overnight operation Tuesday…As the security force moved in on a compound, two insurgents threw a grenade and opened fire. Retaliatory fire killed four militants…Haqqani network is a Pakistan-based faction of the Taliban with close ties to al-Qaida….Coalition forces captured a senior Taliban leader operating in southern Kandahar city on Tuesday, NATO said. The unidentified person distributed bomb components to Taliban fighters and facilitated attacks on Afghan and coalition forces,… embattled south is the scene of Operation Dragon Strike, launched last month by NATO and Afghan forces in areas around Kandahar province to flush out entrenched Taliban fighters and destroy their strongholds…In the north -- where violence has surged in recent weeks -- Taliban commander Shirin Agha and another militant were killed in a coalition airstrike in Kunduz province on Monday…"Afghan and coalition forces have significantly reduced the insurgents' capability to effectively execute terrorist operations (and) will continue targeting those who stand in the way of peace and stability,"… Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi has accused NATO of engaging in a propaganda campaign to demoralize the insurgents by inventing Taliban leaders and alleging they were killed or captured….In the west, a joint force operation in Herat province killed "several" militants in a raid targeting an unidentified Taliban leader allegedly responsible for a recent ambush that killed two Spanish soldiers… ................
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