2003-2004 Assessment of the Army Research Laboratory (2005)

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2 Computational and Information Sciences Directorate INTRODUCTION The Computational and Information Sciences Directorate (CISD) was reviewed by the Panel on Digitization and Communications Science. CISD consists of three research divisions: Computer and Communication Sciences, Battlefield Environment, and High Performance Computing. It also includes one infrastructure division, Information Technology, which serves all of ARL through its computing hardware, software, and staff. CISD performs research for the following purposes: to help design a robust, highly mobile battle- field communications network while ensuring that the information provided to commanders is current, authentic, accurate, and protected; to develop high-fidelity “micro” weather forecasts in near time (i.e., to predict weather in 10 minutes or less for the next 0 to 2 hours) in order to support combat intelligence operations and troop engagement decisions; to enhance the decision-making prowess of commanders in the battlefield; and to develop robust, physics-based, high-performance computing models and software for concept evaluation, design, and analysis (usually in support of computational science efforts in other ARL directorates). Tables A.1 and A.2 in Appendix A respectively characterize the funding profile and the staffing profile for CISD. ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND OPPORTUNITIES The Digitization and Communications Science Panel that reviews CISD yearly has continued to see improvements in the quality of the research being performed by CISD researchers and in the demonstra- tion of the relevance of their work to Army needs. CISD has, like much of ARL, undergone significant leadership change in the recent past, with its director retiring in mid-2003 and the subsequent appoint- 9 

10 2003–2004 ASSESSMENT OF THE ARMY RESEARCH LABORATORY ment of an acting director. In addition, several of the division director and branch chief positions in CISD are filled by acting personnel, while the permanent staff have been given the opportunity to serve ARL in acting positions at higher levels. Adding to the staffing milieu is that at least one of the current division directors is due to retire soon. CISD is participating in two large, 5-year projects, both of which started in FY 2003: Horizontal Fusion (HF) and Command and Control in Complex and Urban Terrains (C2CUT). The Department of Defense’s (DOD’s) Horizontal Fusion project is developing network-centric access for the warfighter— access that is “pull-based” rather than dissemination-based. ARL’s participation (totaling about $17.5 million in FY 2004) in Horizontal Fusion is currently in basic language translation services (BLTS), in the development of secure mobile networks, and in the Warrior’s Edge program. CISD’s advancements in BLTS have made available information that is gleaned through the trans- lation of both printed documents and speech from sources captured in the field. For example, BLTS allows soldiers to scan in documents written in a foreign language and to receive an English translation seconds later. The mobile wireless networks being developed as part of Horizontal Fusion will provide the warfighter with secure, robust voice and data communication capabilities to enable collaboration even in highly dynamic and unpredictable environments. The Warrior’s Edge program will develop a dynamic, ad hoc, networked sensing system (of soldiers and robotic sensors) to allow the monitoring of the battlefield environment. Horizontal Fusion holds an annual proof-of-concept demonstration called Quantum Leap, the sec- ond of which was scheduled for August 2004. The goal of C2CUT is to provide commanders with the ability to see and understand the effects of urban terrain on the battlefield environment. Both of these projects have provided CISD researchers with unique opportunities (and the funding needed to perform the necessary research and development) as well as unique challenges. Additionally, CISD researchers continue to pursue basic research in mobile (robotic) network sensing, communication, data fusion, basic language translation systems, optical communications sys- tems, environmental modeling and prediction, and in computational modeling and prediction. CONTRIBUTIONS TO ARMY NEEDS AND THE BROADER COMMUNITY Contributions to Army Needs Through both the HF and C2CUT projects, CISD has had the opportunity to contribute in significant ways to the troops in the field. For example, software developed for BLTS has been employed on handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs) in both Iraq and Afghanistan to scan captured documents for keywords that would indicate whether the documents should be set aside for further scrutiny. Warrior’s Edge also contains several technologies that have aided soldiers in the field. The PacBot robot was first used in combat in July 2002 to remotely examine caves and a building complex in Nasarat, Afghanistan. In Iraq, the PacBot was used to remotely examine equipment left on an airfield before engineers from the 101st Airborne cleared the runway for humanitarian relief operations. The M Gator MULE (Multifunction Utility/Logistics Equipment) vehicle contains a fusion of networked computers that can sense data from soldiers and unmanned aerial vehicles to aid in sniper detection. It was due to be shipped to Iraq sometime in 2004. An acoustic mortar-fire detection system developed jointly with researchers in the Sensors and Electron Devices Directorate (SEDD) was recently deployed and used successfully in the field in Iraq to determine the location of enemy mortars. The Integrated Meteorological System (IMETS) is the meteorological component of Intelligence and Electronic Warfare (IEW) software developed by ARL researchers in the CISD’s Battlefield Envi- 

COMPUTATIONAL AND INFORMATION SCIENCES DIRECTORATE 11 ronment Division (BED). IMETS provides commanders with an automated weather system to receive, process, and disseminate weather observations, forecasts, and weather-effects decision aids. A vehicle- mounted configuration of IMETS was first used in Operation Iraqi Freedom and is now fully operational and routinely used in the field. In addition to providing quick delivery of high-quality weather forecasts to warfighters in Afghanistan and Iraq, BED has quickly deployed research acoustical signal observa- tion and processing systems for special target localization and identification. CISD’s Battlefield Envi- ronment Division has also continued its contribution of special meteorological systems for use in terrorism-related studies of urban-scale meteorological phenomena in national field programs such as those recently conducted in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Oklahoma City. Contributions to the Broader Community The combat deployment of forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has certainly impacted the work of the CISD staff. There is clear and obvious pressure to transition new technology to the field as quickly as possible. There is also noticeable and deserved pride in the successes of the systems that have been or are soon to be deployed, and a new level of energy can be sensed in the directorate. However, ARL must also ensure that the research necessary to guarantee the technological advantages of future U.S. forces is also being pursued. Over the long term, it is this basic research that creates the opportunity for leapfrog- ging technology. ARL and CISD leadership must continually be alert to the need to maintain a balance between the processes of technology development and field transitioning and this longer-term research. Several basic research efforts in CISD deserve mention. First, there is continuous and impressive research in intelligent optics. Free-space lasers can provide high-bandwidth, covert, rapidly deployable, lightweight (i.e., handheld) ground-to-ground and ground-to-air communication systems. CISD has an impressive research program in free-space lasers (e.g., numerous refereed publications and two recent patents) and in 2002 invested in a free-space optical testbed that contributes significant capability to the intelligent optics efforts. Historically, the Army’s view of the environment has been that it consists of manifold obstacles (e.g., inclement weather, fog, and mud) to be battled and conquered. Today it is recognized that the environment is not just a potpourri of problems; properly understood, it can provide a fighting force with both tactical and strategic superiority. It is to that purpose that the Battlefield Environment Division is directing much of its research program at present. Since the onset of conflict and war in Afghanistan and Iraq, BED has, much to its credit, responded immediately to a number of operational needs by deploying several research systems, notably those necessary to provide cutting-edge weather forecasts and special analysis of acoustical signals. The Army’s needs for detailed and current information about and in the terrestrial and atmospheric boundary layers were once nearly unique. Today it is recognized that there is significant overlap between the Army’s long-standing primary interests and the currently expanding demands for environ- mental data relevant to homeland security. To no small extent this overlap exists because urban areas are the theater of both foreign wars and domestic terrorism. It is factors such as the dimensional scale of a battlefield, the character of the underlying terrain and urban structures, and the time required for the wind to blow a natural or artificial cloud across a battlefield or city that define the atmospheric phenom- ena which must be observed, understood, modeled, and forecast. Hence, BED’s research program must address critical and challenging problems in direct and remote atmospheric sensing, model domain size, and the spatial and temporal resolution required in diverse phenomenological, computational models. Implicit are significant challenges for analysis of the relevant inherently turbulent and chaotic phenom- ena of interest. These phenomena are not yet within reach of currently available observational systems, 

12 2003–2004 ASSESSMENT OF THE ARMY RESEARCH LABORATORY nor can the needed computational models be operated, at least on timescales necessary for Army purposes, on the most advanced computer systems available today. The scope of environmental problems needing study far exceeds the reach and resident expertise of BED and ARL. However, BED is effectively addressing several specific problem areas that are of current critical interest. Nationally leading research is being conducted by the division in atmospheric optical sensing and communications systems as well as in analyses of atmospherically propagated acoustical signals that are essential to high-resolution detection, identification, and localization of noise sources. The noises of greatest interest range from those created by stationary sources, such as indi- vidual sniper gunshots or larger ballistic and rocket weapons fire, to noises from complex moving systems such as diverse warfighting and transport vehicles. Developing and testing the very high resolution atmospheric dynamical analysis and forecast mod- els that are of interest to the Army, and now to homeland security as well, constitute an area of extraordinarily wide-ranging national and international need and attention. In the United States alone, agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, the Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Environ- mental Protection Agency, and the other armed forces in addition to the Army are all involved in significant model development work. In this research and development arena, BED cannot and should not attempt to compete. Neither its research resources nor personnel are of critical mass for such efforts. However, BED is so involved in research on the atmosphere’s boundary layer environment that it can and should serve as a national center of excellence in model validation activity. If BED is to rise to this challenge and thereby exploit the technological and leadership opportunities now available, some careful strategic planning and effort will be required to refocus and restructure some of the directorate’s staff and programs. The Board strongly recommends that action to this end be initiated. In the same regard, the Board recommends that special efforts be made to encourage enhanced interdirectorate collaboration among people working on related environmental problems in CISD/BED, SEDD, and the Survivability and Lethality Analysis Directorate (SLAD). Finally, it should be noted that progress in model validation research also will be required when BED is expected to quantify the credibility, performance, and reliability of the observational systems and forecast models that are to be part of the output of large, crosscutting projects such as Warrior’s Edge and C2CUT. RELEVANCE OF CROSSCUTTING ISSUES TO THIS DIRECTORATE CISD’s computational science and engineering activities include scalable algorithms and tools, scientific visualization and immersive technologies, data mining, metacomputing, numerical analysis, and high-performance networking. These activities are clearly important to the Army’s mission. A compelling case can be made that computational science can play an important role in the design and development of future combat systems. However, CISD, and indeed all of ARL, have insufficient staff invested in these activities to make significant advancements in all of the computational science and engineering areas. CISD’s high-performance computing capabilities are available for use by other directorates, and a number of projects within those directorates (e.g., in SEDD, SLAD, and the Weapons and Materials Research Directorate) make extensive use of computation and modeling. However, the little information that the Panel and the Board received on this subject did not convince them that ARL directorates are making effective use of the CISD high-performance computing machinery or that CISD is providing other directorates with support in this area in the form of personnel and expertise (i.e., a computational science capability). Nor were the Panel and the Board convinced that high-performance computing 

COMPUTATIONAL AND INFORMATION SCIENCES DIRECTORATE 13 projects in CISD are developed in a manner that is driven by a plan for building up a persisting base of in-house expertise rather than a series of responses to immediate customer needs. Information assurance and security are areas of concern across ARL directorates. Both CISD and SLAD, for example, have important roles to fulfill in this area. The Board believes that CISD should be taking a larger role in information assurance and security within ARL and that resources (staffing), rather than interest, are preventing it from doing so.