Potential Paper Topics for 2011 Conferences
With suggested conferences - sessions and authors
(Many suggested authors have not been contacted yet.)
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Officer Education: A New Milieu via HPCC
Distrib Simul & Real Time Aps
The DoD has called for a new era in the education of our Officer Corps. Critics are vocal as to current shortcomings. Pedagogical improvements are putatively an answer to both. Many of the revolutionary ideas, and even some of the evolutionary concepts, could potentially be implemented faster and more effectively utilizing the tools and techniques developed at JFCOM for training, analysis and evaluation. While Education is a significantly different instructional discipline, many of the major technologies would be directly applicable, e.g. GPU accelerated computation, improved feedback monitoring, and sophisticated data structures. The authors review several major goals of officer education, remark briefly on current successes and shortcomings, and then lay out how the extant technologies would be applicable and implementable to serve education. Both emerging pedagogies and major technologies will be covered, including meta-cognitive awareness, collaborative learning environments, low latency/high bandwidth communications, real-time performance-based evaluation, use of avatars to provide environmental richness, risk-free learning environments, distributed data management, opportunities for conflict, internalization, and self-explanation. The authors also assess the potential drawbacks for education in the DoD, based on their experience. Education is considered at the professional level (officer education), the collegiate level and in K-12 schools. These positions are augmented and validated by a survey of and reference to the pedagogical and organizational literature from all areas of education. Then the potential benefits of the technologies are analyzed, focusing on issues of concern to the DoD and on responding to some of challenges coming from the pens of the DoD's most insightful commentators. A defensible development and test timetable is laid out and justified. The paper concludes with several suggestions on how the M&S community might conduct a series of workshops to identify issues, catalog capabilities, cultivate coalitions and seek warfighter support.
A “Real Human?”: A/I’s New Assault on Alan Touring’s Old Challenge
Distrib Simul & Real Time Aps
Since the inception of the computer age, the dream of being able to interact with a computer that is indistinguishable from humans has both intrigued and challenged scientists. The issue is no longer moot for two reasons: increasingly imperative objectives demand more human-like computer interfaces and technical capabilities now provide sufficient compute power to serve the needs of burgeoning sophistication in the behavioral characterizations of humans. The authors, one of whom has been working on this issue since the early 1970s, review the history, survey the discipline, identify a sample of needs, outline the opportunities and justify their analysis. Naturally, they first review Dr. Touring and discuss his conception of the challenge. They discuss their own research on Phase I of the Deep Green project, as an exemplar of current advances. Both the contributions of the gaming industry and the changes that the machine sophistication of this "game obsessed" generation has wrought upon the gamers is reviewed at length. This is the societal segment for which a computer avatar is sought that would be perceived to be indistinguishable from humans. They proceed by setting forth a plan for an extensive system in which any lack of human participants would be detrimental to the social dynamic being envisioned. Any such shortcomings could be overcome by the substitution of a computer-generated participant. They argue that the presence of the computer would best be randomly instantiated, so the "live" participants would never be certain of the non-humanness of their communicative partner and they would not lose focus on the object of the effort. The authors present survey data on current attitudes concerning this issue. They conclude with an outline of future research requirements and possible ethical concerns.
Leadership, Strategy and Officer Selection:
History’s Lessons Applied to Today’s Technology
Joint Forces Quarterly
Leadership has made the difference in military outcomes and national survival for the entire span of history. Strategic innovation and truly effective implementation of new technologies has been a hall mark of victorious forces since biblical times. Identifying, selecting, empowering and supporting leaders who can provide such innovation and efficacy is an unending task. Technology is now available to facilitate this task and this can represent a revolutionary force in defense management. Advances in High Performance Computing (HPC) technology provide a welcome opportunity to engage learners in real-time authentic contexts most relevant to their desired training outcomes. The authors outline research in cognitive science and education that indicates meaningful learning occurs when education is integrated with frequent opportunities for the participants to 1) apply otherwise abstract knowledge in germane contexts, 2) receive feedback on the success of those applications, and 3) re-engage in the instructional process, having refined the targets for learning. The authors observe that, due to constraints in time, budget, training and material, most learners currently work passively from a textbook or strive to learn in a setting of diminished rigor. They rarely engage in the content at the depth described above, which is necessary for the critical understanding that will enable them to perform well in the varied contexts facing a 21st Century military officer. It is asserted that the DoD could accelerate the learning curve and raise the higher-level cognitive capabilities of its leadership by providing immediate, repeated and user- or variable-influenced simulation experiences. In these, the learners would have to synthesize and apply their developing content knowledge. Further, evidence is presented that the use of HPC would also provide an infrastructure for incorporating the newly honed knowledge of service members who had been in the field and had returned to the instructional setting, thereby informing the training process further. In conclusion, additional research objectives are set forth
The Expanding Role of Computer Generated Forces in
Resolving Jointness Issues
Joint Forces Quarterly
The pace of defense structure evolution is now so dizzying that the leisurely approach to developing cross-organizational cohesion is prohibitively expensive in wasted resources, missed opportunities and loss of human life. New leaders are held to need to be proficient in applying operational art to joint warfighting and the joint planning processes. The need to prepare leaders who are uniformly competent in planning operations that integrate and leverage all military and non-military capabilities and who are strategically-minded leaders capable of critical thinking is seen as a daunting task. They must be skilled in aligning and maximizing capabilities across components, services, and agencies, including international forces, as well as imbued with a joint perspective. Their fluency in joint concepts, doctrine, systems, languages and processes are a sine qua non.of success. The sand table/map table exercises of WWII have been replaced by more sophisticated and dynamic representations of the battlespace provided by computers. The authors lay out their experience in providing High Performance Computing capabilities to the Joint Forces Command's Joint Experimentation Directorate (J9), as this activity better defines current advances in computer simulation environments. They then survey the discipline of joint forces management and leadership. The various conundra appearing in that review are identified and the hurdles for resolving them are discussed. Each, in turn, is then analyzed within the context of how large-scale Computer Generated Forces (CGF), simulating operations on virtually limitless synthetic battlespace environments, can better address these issues. Further, the authors present accepted pedagogical approaches to justify their contention that the insights garnered from such computer analyses can best be inculcated in joint force leaders through such a system itself. They adduce practical experience in the Joint Urban Operations (JUO) experiments at J9 to support their theses. They further outline the potential issues that may arise in the future and suggest how such issues may also be most amenable to the approach set forth in this paper. They conclude by identifying the needs for future research and a cost benefit analysis of the application of this approach.
A Behavioral Science Approach to Evaluating Simulations
Distrib Simul & Real Time Aps
Based on decades of experience in the discipline of agent-based battlespace simulation, the authors assert that the failure of interdisciplinary understanding between the physical science and the behavioral science communities is identifiable as one of the real impediments to more effective utilization of Computer Generated Forces (CGF) by the DoD. They review both the history of this field and their observations of where the lack of real communication between the participating professional communities from independent disciplines has impeded the production of insights that could have made real differences to the warfighter on the battlefield. The dichotomy is exemplified by the differences in the physical scientists' focus on Schrödinger and Heisenberg when discussing the "Observer Effect," while their behavioral scientist colleagues are thinking of the Hawthorne Effect. This exemplar is examined at length and that analysis is augmented by anecdotal evidence from the authors of persistent failures to recognize valuable insights due to interdisciplinary friction and poor communication. Further, the dearth of behavioral scientist in analytical groups is documented by research surveys conducted by the authors. This paucity of pertinent professionals is manifestly injurious when, either otherwise efficacious approaches are ignored or when insufficient understanding of behavioral science perspectives and techniques precludes the adoption of needed analysis. Evidence is advanced that this is injuriously exacerbated when research teams are completely devoid of sophisticated behavioral scientists. Suggestions for overcoming this deficiency in research team composition and enhancing the application of all germane technologies are advanced. Future studies are recommended and alternative paths to DoD research goals are outlined. The DoD researcher reading this article should receive further illumination as to the problem, its impact and practical responses to it.
Organizing to Best Exploit Academic Excellence in
Practical Defense Research
Simulation Interoperability Workshop
Some issues are precluding the optimal use of available research capabilities. A general lack of understanding by both Academia and by the DoD research consumers is causing the U.S. warfighters to go without capabilities that they would otherwise have available to them. The authors, both on duty in the U.S. Military and in various positions within academia, have recognized the barriers that have been erected and have experienced the sequestration due to "silo-ing" or "stove piping" of academic disciplines. This article takes a very pragmatic approach to delineating the current problem, identifying the hurdles to improvement, describing successful interventions to reduce these problematic issues, defining conditions necessary for success, and discussing future potentially amenable areas that warrant investigation and application. Well recognized management analytical techniques are described and the reports of their application are presented with an eye toward allowing the research manager to make rational decisions as to whether these approaches will bear fruit in their own environments. Included in the discussion is the Heilmeier Catechism approach to problem identification and definition, Logan's "Tribal" Leadership viewpoint, Fred Brooks Mythical Man-Month insights, and Norm Augustine's Laws and other theoretical approaches to these issues. The authors then lay out a set of their own insight-driven rules for enhancing DoD research. They conclude with an analysis of future trends in the defense sector and suggestions for responding to up-coming problems.
Instantiating MG Robert Scale’s Jedi:
Using Appropriate Technology
Armed Forces Journal
Being fully in accord with MG Robert Scales' concept for the changes needed to provide for the enhanced education of officers in the United States armed forces, the authors note that several of his concepts may require innovative implementation approaches and several could be greatly enhanced by the use of existing technologies that are not currently being fully exploited. They review the key concepts in the General's seminal article from the Armed Forces Journal (Scales, 2009) and they set forth a series of issues to be addressed, review their previous work that is applicable to this problem and then lay out a series of steps that are desirable in achieving the end-results identified in the referenced paper. The following paper presents the case that education in the 21st Century can only measure up to defense needs if technologies developed in the simulation community, further enhanced by the power of high performance computing, are harnessed to supplant traditional didactic instruction. The authors cite their military credentials and their professional experiences in simulation, high performance computing and pedagogical studies to support their thesis that this implementation is not only required, it is feasible, supportable and affordable. Surveying and reporting on work in computer-aided education, this paper will discuss the pedagogical imperatives for group learning, risk management and surrogates for military mentors who are too often absented by virtue of military operations. All of this can be optimally delivered with the use of current computer technologies. Further, experience and research is adduced to support the thesis that effective implementation of this level of computer aided education is enabled only by, and is largely dependent upon, high performance computing. This is made especially practical and affordable by the ready utility and acceptable costs of Linux clusters.
Evolving Simulations:
How Soon Can Humans be Excused From the Battlefield?
Sim Interoperability Workshop
Early in the days of his involvement with agent-based modeling and battlefield simulations, one of the authors got into a heated, but civil, discussion with a retired Major General and a Colonel who had commanded a tank unit. The discussion was sparked by the comment that, as the agent-based model behavior algorithms became more sophisticated, the less needed would become the humans in combat vehicles. Now more than a decade has passed and the authors feel it is time to resurrect that question. New computing power is now available, new control algorithms have been implemented, new social science has refined behaviors, new sensor have extended our view of the work and new acceptance of remotely controlled vehicles has lessened the romantic affinity for the chivalrous ideal of the warrior physically present on the battlefield. Yet, issues remain that inhibit or prevent such a course of action. The authors believe engaging in a discussion of the possibilities and merits of remotely controlled or automatically driven vehicles will have the salutary effect of directing future research and facilitating the adoption of technologies that otherwise might be hindered by old prejudices and new reactionary responses. Current abilities will re surveyed, germane hurdles will be identified and appropriate paths for research will be justified. Alternative outcomes for the various research paths will be analyzed and rigorously evaluated. Failures to accomplish that which had been previously predicted will be strictly presented, to prevent any overly-optimistic view of the imminence of this technology's being fielded. In each case where the future is in any way foreseen, the authors will carefully document their assumptions and comprehensively lay out a range of possibilities.
Requirements Flowing Down or Technology Opportunities Flowing Up:
Does History Hold Lessons for Today?
Naval Proceedings
Current policy seems focused on restricting DoD research to only those areas in which Combat Commanders have a stated and documented interest. While this responds well to the ostensible need to preclude un-focused research from further shrinking and critically depleting already challenged budgets, it may not be optimal for the warfighter it purports to support. A historical analysis may be illuminating and this paper will present some historical anecdotes, track the trends in defense research and apply an analytical approach as to how best to evaluate research emphases and to direct new research. The history of DARPA will be set down in some detail, as it represents one of the most visible and, by its own charter, the most forward-looking of all DoD research establishments. The potential outcomes of several research paths will be offered and a general outline of the alternative futures under each will be advanced. A brief discussion of the impact of academic disciplines and their own inbred peculiarities will be given. The authors will conclude with their suggested blue-print for use by the next DDR&E.
Dwindling Technical Personnel Assets:
Designing Responses that Work
Simulation Interoperability Workshop
Despite a widely accepted understanding that there is a decline in technical personnel who are available to the United States defense effort, few responses result in programs that get beyond stage of being content with the appearance of participation. The lack of rigorous evaluation methods hampers the objective analysis of many attempts to attract students to technical work and to facilitate their actual development into technical assets available for used by the defense organizations. The authors rely on decades of experience in the military and intelligence communities, as well as similar periods of time in academia and in defense research to both describe and analyze the problems and survey many of the attempted solutions to these problems. They then lay out programs with a different approach with which they have been associated and recount the hurdles and successes observed in these efforts. They focus on the bases for and the outcomes of attempts to attract more U.S. citizens to technical training, the efforts to keep those students in technical fields and the final effort to steer them into defense work, be it military service or defense research. They review both their own experiences and that of other educators in adducing the evidence of the need of significant changes of policy and approaches, at both national and local levels. Their thesis is that this problem is not any single factor such as education, ethnic isolation, teacher training, recruitment, societal attitudes, retention, or security clearance restrictions; it is an amalgam of all of these and more. They discuss how their current program addresses each of these issues in order. They conclude with the identification of a series of policy issues they see as critical to these problems and project futures likely depending on the adoption of these changes.
Accelerated HPC Implementations used in the Analysis and Training for
Systems Engineering using Mixed Stochastic and Deterministic Simulations
Conference on Systems Engineering Research
Systems Engineering is an increasingly vital cross-disciplinary approach to ensuring effective delivery of the performance that is sought from large and sophisticated projects. While deeply dependent on models that must interact with each other, the interfaces between these models, as well as those between the models and the systems engineer, are often problematical. Recent advances in the use of accelerators, such as General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs), Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), Processor In Memory (PIM) and the STI Cell chip, have brought hitherto unavailable computational power to the student and to the analyst. This power is both effective and affordable. This paper sets forth the authors' experiences with accelerated Linux clusters in DoD environments and relate these capabilities to their experience as Naval Officers and in managing technical programs. Along with presenting data on the instantiation of the demonstrably successful GPGPU-enhanced cluster at the U.S. Joint Forces Command, they present the impact that this class of computer could have on hybrid models of stochastic and deterministic simulations used in Systems Engineering. They introduce new concepts in the employment of novel analytic techniques for establishing the relative sensitivity of varying parameters within the stochastic simulations, allowing the Systems Engineer to extract useful insights out of reduced data sets. These non-deterministic runs are made up of literally millions of randomly derived inputs. These results can be optimally integrated with the equation-based deterministic models to give the most valid and verifiable results. Comments on the potential impact on training and education are advanced based on the authors' experiences in academia.
Meeting the Challenge of Educating Globally Dispersed Naval Officers using
Systems Engineering as a Core Curriculum
I/ITSEC Education
The selfsame rolling geopolitical and technical environments that make the continuing educational advancement of today’s U.S. Naval officer vital, make it extremely difficult. Operational requirements mandate remote assignments, impose time constraints, disrupt personal relationships and debilitate with stress and fatigue. Based on their observations as Naval Officers and as practicing academics, the authors present their case for the efficacy of using Systems Engineering as a core curriculum for post graduate officer education and for using new implementations of distance education as a partial remedy for the challenges of educating a dispersed student body. They first outline the major characteristics of Systems Engineering and of Naval Officer performance. They then assess the extent to which Systems Engineering and Naval leadership correspond. The benefits of a “whole person” education in addition to the continuing need for specific sensor and weapons systems training is analyzed and specific examples are adduced to support the paper’s thesis. Then, the problems facing the educator and student in the Navy milieu are examined and categorized. This analysis leads to the need for new methodologies for providing an educational opportunity to the deployed officers, one that they can use and that will motivate them, prepare them for advancement, and create the officer corps the nation needs. A brief comparison with other disciplines and their applicability to the Naval environment is advanced. The authors rely on their experiences at the Naval Postgraduate School and the University of Southern California , as well as their own educational histories to enhance this analysis. They close with a survey of purported futures for the Navy and the needs these futures will impose on its officers. They will explicate how the new technologies from NPS and USC , e.g. DREN, HPC , Interactive Computer Aided Education, and Remote Collaborative Learning, can be incorporated to meet these challenges.
Education Technology to Enable Advanced Pedagogy:
Implementation with Enhanced Computing Platforms
I/ITSEC Education
This paper focuses on one DoD requirement and two disciplines that are very germane to accomplishing the Warfighter's goals. The authors have hands-on experience with that growing need and are actively engaged in two emerging disciplines that could respond to that need. The need that is addressed here is the requirement to train and educate a widely displaced and manifestly diverse population of service personnel; the technologies are those of nascent pedagogical methods and of education or instructional technology. The areas addressed by this paper are those of the identification of pedagogical techniques and research results that are particularly amenable to a technological implementation and the new technologies, largely in the computer sciences, that are not yet commonly incorporated into the educators' technology toolbox. The authors eschew and decry the tendency of education technology to be limited to recreating the classroom and digitizing the written material. They focus, both in their work and in this paper, on new pedagogical insights as yet not implemented with consistency and old pedagogical insights not implemented because of human limitations, e.g. one teacher and ~30 individual students precludes much individuation in the approach to the material. In technology they focus on systems and applications that are genuinely instructor-friendly, based on their own classroom experience and observation of others in both academic and DoD training environments. The technology assessment is based on the experience of the ISI team with the fiscally and operationally sensible acceleration of both compute and communication systems. They use technologies that have recently been developed and operationally proven to enable large-scale simulation and interactive evaluation events and experimentation. The paper concludes with an analytical look at the future that the thoughtful syntheses of all of these insights and advances might have for both training and education in the military.
Fostering an Enhanced Technical Dialog between
Civilian Researchers and the Uniformed Officer Community
I/ITSEC Education
The authors have long been familiar with the close and cordial working relationship between civilian researchers and the military officers with whom they interface, either as Warfighters or as research program managers. However, they also have observed a consistent set of hurdles hampering communications between these two groups. These hurdles are usually overcome by a dint of assiduous application of the communications skills and the intellectual openness of the two communities, but that is not achieved without costs. In this paper, the authors survey and review some of the situations in which they have participated or observed and the costs they have recognized, including delays, missed opportunities, program cancellations, and reduced capabilities. The intention is to be constructively critical and the authors follow their survey by recounting their personal experience with two types of technical personnel exchanges: civilian technical students acting as interns on classified projects at DoD laboratories and military graduate students doing their master's thesis research in a civilian academic setting. After that, the paper focuses on an analysis of what this portends for the future and how it may impact the issues set forth above. The paper closes with a discussion of the road ahead, laying out the steps that may be necessary to foster the sought after enhancement in real communications and identifying the "stake holders" with whom such a program would have to be initiated. All of this is supported by both personal experiences and theoretical foundations from the organizational behavior and communications management disciplines with the goal of better bridging the "what do they want . what can they do for us" communications gap.
Advances in High Performance Computing
of Significance to the T&E Community
ITEA Annual Tech Review
As the need for more Test and Evaluation is countered by the constraints of reduced testing budgets and increasing pressure to shorten testing schedules, the alternative of doing T&E in a simulation environment becomes more attractive. Experience has shown that this can reduce costs and accelerate schedules. The authors use their experience with high performance computing (HPC), much of it in the field of military simulations research, and to analyze HPC's current and projected ability to meet the needs of the T&E community. They have been practitioners in the HPC community for decades and sit on various boards, panels and organizational leadership committees. The paper begins by surveying some of the well established needs of the T&E community and setting out some of the newly emerging constraints on budgets and recounting many of the consistently increasing pressures for accelerated test completion schedules. They discuss current HPC capabilities, including analyses of power, costs, availability, programming ease, limitations and security. Then, the immediate future is outlined in a way that will allow the reader to understand what capabilities will be available to the Test and Evaluation community and when that hard-pressed community can anticipate using those capabilities. The paper concludes with a discussion of the intersection of the growing HPC capabilities and the developing needs of the T&E community. It identifies those T&E projects where the new capabilities will enable new approaches to Test and Evaluation. A set of resources that will be useful to the T&E practitioner are listed along with suggestions on how to make use of existing capabilities, especially those in the High Performance Computing Modernization Program centers and academic High Performance Computing centers. The difficulties to be anticipated in administration, scheduling and security are reviewed. The goal of the paper is to leave the reader in a better position to make sound judgments as to the practicality of utilizing advanced computing and to avoid the pitfalls that will trap the unwary. The paper briefly recounts the authors experience in a number of different projects to highlight and explicate the benefits and dangers of the HPC-enabled simulations This analysis will include VV&T issues, serial codes resistant to parallelization, programmer training requirements, and similar important issues.
Data to Decisions:
Implementing an Efficacious T&E Approach
ITEA Annual Tech Review
This paper addresses the very novel challenges presented by the emerging series of projects that are collectively being called "Data to Decisions." This area of research and development includes the areas of information management, data structures, architectures, analytic tools and human-machine interfaces. The Test and Evaluation (T&E) community will be tasked with a series of evaluations that may find their basic analytical tools more in the behavioral sciences than the physical sciences. The paper will relate the author's experience as part of the Joint Experimentation on Scalable Parallel Processors which the US Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) used to evaluate systems that could become enabling technologies in Data to Decision systems. The paper also will outline the experience that was gained during DARPA's Deep Green project, one of the early precursor for or genesis of Data to Decisions concepts. Issues reviewed will be the setting of T&E goals, the quantification of success in Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) environments, data requirements, and validating the insights gained. Some of the capabilities that will be discussed will be those of: distributed HPC simulations, distributed data management, analytical capabilities, results visualization, and advanced data mining and analyses. The paper concludes with suggestions for the areas of research that remain critical and the areas of existing capabilities that are being underutilized.
Test and Evaluation Simulations:
Implementing Optimal Standards
SISO Fall SIW
This paper outlines the increasing need for simulations in the Test and Evaluation (T&E) environment and the necessities of optimizing the selection of and the implementation of various standards in many different areas of the computational systems used for T&E. Experience in many projects is outlined to show the applicability of standards to these tasks. A preliminary list of germane standards is advanced, including but not limited to DIS, HLA-RTI, MPI, MIL-SPEC, LT2-FTS, LTF/OTF and others. Then the authors relate their experience in using some of these standards in evaluations performed on behalf of the US Joint Forces Command (JFCOM). This focuses on applicability, programmer training, compatibility with legacy programs, and the spawning of heretical or divergent standards, e.g. RTI, RTI-s, and RTI-n. Then the paper turns to the task of assessing the state of the standards for this community as the authors have experienced it. They note the benefits from following the standards, the impetus to diverge from them and the consequences observed from both compliance and divergence. From this, the paper suggests the complexity of the standards efforts. The paper strives to give the various constituencies a fair representation of their goals, positions, experience and future paths. The conclusions of the paper are designed to encourage the careful analysis of existing standards, the consideration of new ones, the necessity for taking into account all of the stake-holders and how the T&E community may have slightly different needs from the analysis, training and education communities.
Distributed Computing:
The Enabling Technology for "Data to Decisions"
DS-RT
The Department of Defense has a new series of in initiatives grouped under the concept title of "Data to Decisions." These concepts are intended to produce a “decision-advantage” by implementing effective methods to extract actionable information from the large morasses of data that are generated by modern intelligence and data systems. To be useful, all of this data must be fused with appropriate collateral information and conveyed in such a way that produces a cogent image of dangers, opportunities and potential outcomes. It also must be accomplished in operationally useful time, which will surely require much faster execution than the speed with which such work is done today. This paper sets forth the authors' experience in distributed computing, largely at the U.S. Joint Forces Command's Joint Experimentation and Concept Development Directorate. Further, they rely on their experience in the DARPA program Deep Green, an early Data to Decisions precursor. Outlining their insights from those activities, they then look at the needs for effective Data to Decisions and assert that its development should be firmly under the aegis of distributed computing. They adduce evidence of unique ability of distributed computing to supply data, computational power and analytical capabilities to the warfighters, wherever they are and whenever they need it. They conclude with an outline for future research and required development.