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All MITRE Projects (with summaries and presentations where available)
Listing of project titles in alphabetical order
Pages: 1234567891011121314151617
Managing Attention to Multimodal Information
Primary Investigator:Goodman, Bradley A.
Problems:
Operators in command centers communicate using many information sources and modalities that are not well integrated (checklists, workflow tools, text chat, voice chat, etc.). This results in misdirected attention and overload, ultimately causing missed information, delayed decisions, and potential mission failure. Our in depth observations and interviews of experienced operators in an experimental Combined Air Operations Center documented how warfighters struggle to manage multiple systems. To accomplish their missions, they often develop their own ad hoc methods for coordinating and cross-cueing across text, voice and workflow information streams. This project will help operators integrate and allocate their attention appropriately across multiple information sources. Addressing this challenge requires a Systems Engineering (SE) perspective and approach to integrate mission thread information across diverse modalities into one coherent “view”.
Objectives:
This project will provide a structure that both integrates multimodal information and helps cue operator attention appropriately across modalities for improved situational awareness and decisions.
We will develop technology that brings ambient, implicit priorities andrelationships to the foreground.
Activities:
• Analysis of operational data, guided by a structured Attention Management (AM) methodology to diagnose problem areas, building on recent experiences at the CAOC at Nellis Air Force Base.
• Design and development of a tailored prototype based on the needs of operators at Air Operation Centers and for airborne C2 assets.
• Evaluation of the impact of our prototype both with an existing fully-instrumented experimental environment for team decision-making and with military personnel at CAOC-N or other military sites.
Impact:
The challenge of attention management spans domains and presents increasing risks -- time wasted, information missed, operator overload -- to our government sponsors. An innovative, systems engineering approach to managing the broad information space across modalities as one coherent whole will use attention management to infer ambient priorities based on historical patterns and relationships and bring them to the attention of operators. The enhancements will promote better-shared situational awareness and understanding for improved decision-making.
Public Release No:09-0755
[Presentation]
Exhibit Date(s):May 5
Mapping Epidemic Growth (MEG)
Primary Investigator:Hitzeman, Janet M.
Mathematics for Pathogenomics
Primary Investigator:Brodzik, Andrzej K.
Problems:
Anthrax attack is considered the second most important (after nuclear detonation) homeland security threat by DHS. The main research problem in this domain is to identify B. anthracis strains. B. anthracis is estimated to occur in at least 89 strains, most of which are highly monomorphic. Similarity of B. anthracis strains significantly obstructs strain identification, which in effect has to rely on subtle, difficult to detect, differences between genomes. Current methods are expensive, heuristic, and only partly effective at this task. The problem is compounded as new strains are discovered and sequenced, and as design of engineered pathogenic DNA sequences becomes possible. Preliminary results produced by the exploratory investigation suggest that this problem can be overcome byapplying new, state-of-the-art mathematical approaches to tandem repeat detection.
Objectives:
The advantage of tandem repeats over other biomarkers is in their high allelic diversity, resolving power, and mutation rates. These properties make tandem repeats wellsuited for analyzing highly homologous and evolutionary young genomes such as Bacillus anthracis. The goal of this research is to produce a complete mathematical characterization (a list of variable number tandem repeats and algebraically random strings) of the Bacillus anthracis genome. This list will lead to the development of an increased resolution Bacillus anthracis strain marker set for rapid sequence homology assessment.
Activities:
Previously developed algorithms for DNA sequence interrogation will be refined and encoded in MATLAB/C. Genomes of selected bacillus anthracis strains will be investigated, and all relevant tandem repeats and algebraically random strings will be identified and cataloged. Lists of markers of distinct Bacillus anthracis strains will be compared and the best strain markers will be identified.
Impact:
A more efficacious forensic approach towards Bacillus anthracis strain ID will be developed. This approach will be particularly useful when applied to new sequence data with as yet undetermined mathematical characteristics and to an incomplete sequence data. Apart from Homeland Defense applications, the analysis and the approaches developed can be easily adapted for certain key molecular biology tasks, such as: phylogenetic studies of genomes, ab novo gene finding, synthetic biology applications (e.g., monitoring synthetic sequence requests), and personalized medicine (detection of predisposition to genetic diseases).
Public Release No:09-0687
[Presentation]
Measuring and Guiding Influence for Smart Power
Primary Investigator:Maybury, Mark
[Presentation]
Exhibit Date(s):May 5
Measuring the Environmental Impact of Green IT
Primary Investigator:Holdener, James F.
Problems:
The research will seek to identify measures for the "greeness" of IT products. The results will provide a holistic measurement mechanism that meets these criteria:
-- minimally disruptive to IT operations
-- allows comparison across disparate operations
-- repeatable
-- accurate
-- precise
-- provides the ability to compare disparate components with a “single” rating.
The project team will review the life cycle of several IT components from idea inception to disposal and examine the effect on the environment. The investigation will be informed by work done by Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, academia, and the private sector.
The initial premise of the work is that a single metric or a very small set of metrics can be used to adequately describe the green characteristics of an IT effort. This research would expand the current focus on energy use to a fuller measurement of environmental impact.
Objectives:
Develop a simple measurement mechanism that can be used to plan, monitor and control the environmental impact of green IT initiatives.
Activities:
1. Select IT components to evaluate
2. Define material stream for components
3. Evaluate environmental value of material stream
4. Evaluate environmental value of component operation
5. Consider end-of-life options for components and actual behavior.
6. Analyze relationships between different metrics
7. Propose set of metrics
8. Publish results.
Impact:
Once completed, the metric would give the government a unified method of comparing approaches to IT acquisitions and operations and allow managers to make informed decisions about the greenness of alternatives based on a common scheme. Government leaders and managers will be assured that their decisions are having the desired impact on the environment. This will in turn allow the government to play a leadership role by setting strategic goals and standards for vendors and the business community.
Once government and public acceptance of the metric is commonplace it would be used as a guide to consumers to gauge purchases of all products much like mpg is used for vehicle purchasing decisions.
An additional impact of this research is the creation of a repeatable method for defining these types of simple measurement mechanisms. As noted above, this method could then be applied to other types of products and services, increasing the impact significantly.
Public Release No:09-1130
[Presentation]
Megachange
Primary Investigator:Piescik, John
Public Release No:09-1132
[Presentation]
Exhibit Date(s):May 6, May 7
Method for Prioritizing Suspicious Behavior
Primary Investigator:Jianping, Zhang
Exhibit Date(s):May 5
Micro Situational Awareness
Primary Investigator:Smith, Chad R.
Millimeter-Scale Robotic Systems
Primary Investigator:Taczak, Mark D.
Problems:
The smallest robots demonstrated to date are on the order of 10 millimeters in size, but have been limited to operation in highly constrained and controlled environments. Many larger (100s of millimeters in size) highly mobile robots with locomotion inspired by nature also have been demonstrated, but these robots often are developed with the intent of demonstrating abstracted biological principles instead of enabling mission-ready systems. This project seeks to explore the intersection of this space by developing small robots that are both highly mobile and designed to achieve specific operational goals. Such distributed, autonomous, robotic platforms could act as intelligent, mobile sensing platforms and could be built quickly, inexpensively, and in large numbers to enable novel capabilities and CONOPS for the dismounted warfighter.
Objectives:
A 2008 exploratory investigation sought to determine the potential performance and capabilities of ground-based robotic systems 30 – 60 millimeters in size constructed primarily from commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components. This effort concluded that such systems were indeed possible to fabricate, and thus the current effort was initiated. The current multi-year MSR began in January 2009 and will build and demonstrate mobile, autonomous robotic systems on the size scale of 30 – 60 millimeters using a combination of physical prototyping and modeling approaches. The first year of effort will result in a functional prototype at twice the final intended size of 30 mm, and will implement many of the basic functions required to complete a simple task such as following a wall and avoiding obstacles. Out-year efforts will focus on reducing the size of the system as well as improving its mobility and increasing its functionality through the addition of communications devices and additional sensors.
Activities:
Activities related to this task have to date focused on acquiring necessary parts, equipment, and facilities, and have progressed to include the construction and testing of some of the robot’s core components such as motors, batteries, sensors, and logic elements. Software models also are being developed to predict and optimize the motion of the system over different terrain types, and construction of prototype chassis will begin soon.
Impact:
Small robots such as the one being developed in this project could enable a number of operational scenarios of interest to MITRE’s client base. These applications could include non-line-of-sight reconnaissance, detection and mapping of buried assets, or wide-area monitoring of chemical/biological/radiological/nuclear/explosive materials. The availability of large numbers of small, inexpensive robots also could make possible physical experimentation in swarm-like coordinated and emergent behaviors.
Public Release No:09-0809
[Presentation]
Mission Assurance Against Cyber Threats
Primary Investigator:Swarup, Vipin
Problems:
Over the past few years, the advanced cyber threat has driven us to evolve our perspective of computer security and information assurance. Advanced cyber adversaries have growing arsenals that include attacks on the global supply chain, insider subversion, physical attacks on supporting infrastructures, social engineering, and slow-moving cyber attacks. Their advanced attack activities are very hard to pre­vent or even detect. Further, they have established a persistent presence on some of our networks. At the same time, DoD missions have become critically reliant on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) information technologies with many components developed in foreign countries. We now have ample evidence that despite significant strides toward building secure, trustworthy systems, advanced cyber adversaries are successfully using other means of attack to compromise our information systems and the missions that rely on those systems. While we must maintain our best efforts at fielding information assurance solutions that assure that Information Technology (IT) systems will resist com­promise, we also need a new set of techniques to ensure that the systems will meet mission needs even when elements are compromised. This is what we mean by “mission assurance.”
Objectives:
Our research strategy for countering advanced cyber threats aims to force adversaries to move more slowly, spend more, and take bigger risks, while enabling us to fight through cyber degradation. Key to our strategy is a tight coupling of information assurance research and operational mission con­texts, and facilitating the rapid technical transition of interim solutions to solve real-world problems. We have adopted a risk management approach, and seek to change the way we manage the risks associated with cyber conflicts by focusing on managing risks to missions. This requires improvements in three areas:
· Reducing advanced cyber threats: Increased ability to expose an advanced cyber adversary’s behavior, motivation, and intent. Increased ability to disrupt adversary cyberspace operations (including ad­versary reconnaissance, attack planning, and execution) via defensive cyber maneuver and deception.
· Reducing mission-observable cyber vulnerabilities: Increased ability to maintain system security goals despite limited adverse cyber effects on system components. This requires hardening critical information technology and data components against advanced cyber threats, and developing new resiliency technologies to minimize or suppress the effects of compromises.
· Reducing mission consequences of adverse cyber effects: Increased ability to recover, reallocate, and reconstitute mission-essential functions on any available IT infrastructure during cyber conflicts. This requires planning and preparing for adverse cyber effects, providing decision makers with cyber situational awareness and decision support in mission contexts, and developing capabilities to fight through cyber attacks.
Public Release No:09-1253
[Presentation]
Exhibit Date(s):May 6, May 7
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