2007-2008 Assessment of the Army Research Laboratory (2009) / Chapter Skim
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2 Computational and Information Sciences Directorate
2 Computational and Information Sciences Directorate
Pages 11-25
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From page 11... ...
To carry out this mission, CISD performs research for the following purposes: • To advance computational sciences and HPC technologies in support of Army systems; • To perform atmospheric dynamics sensing and modeling for use in battlefield applications; 11
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From page 12... ...
The former Computer and Communication Sciences Division was reformulated into the Information Sciences Division, with a charter primarily focused on fusing timely information from all relevant sources for the warfighter in real time. In addition, the remaining assets of the former High Performance Computing Division were reformulated into the Advanced Computing and Computational Sciences Division, with a charter focused on using advanced computational sciences and high-performance computational resources.
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From page 13... ...
The machine translation work continues to demonstrate leadership in ways that directly aid the warfighter on today's battlefields and sets the stage to provide rapid help as needed when new fronts emerge. The advances reported in 2006 were centered on porting text and speech translation engines to laptops and personal digital assistants (PDAs)
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From page 14... ...
Urban environments have grown in importance to many current Army operations, and an understanding of how acoustics are propagated in such environments can provide significant tactical advantages. Since 2006, ARL has continued this work, with growing emphasis not only on new sensor platforms such as very lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
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From page 15... ...
The results should be applicable in the future for a variety of uses with respect to flying small UAVs, to plume dispersion from rotorcraft, to predicting the movement of chemical-biological clouds, and even to wildfires in both urban and wilderness terrains. An example of an outstanding engineering effort is the development of the "Blue Radio," a small, wireless network interface card that is designed from the bottom up by ARL as a demonstration platform for implementing sensor networks, particularly ones that will be placed randomly on the ground and thus must rely heavily on surface wave propagation rather than on free-space propagation.
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From page 16... ...
Perhaps the single most important organizational accomplishment since 2006 in terms of the significant dividends that it should produce for the foreseeable future is the creation of the Network S cience Division and the related Mobile Network Modeling Institute. According to ARL, this institute is an outgrowth of prior Board assessments which had indicated that a variety of issues associated with mobile networks, especially mobile ad hoc networks (called MANETs)
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From page 17... ...
The revised mission of the division is to advance computational sciences and HPC technologies in support of Army systems. Most of the division, however, continues as in the past to support the computational infrastructure for ARL, particularly the DoD Major Shared Resource Center and the Army High Performance Computing Research Center -- both state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities.
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From page 18... ...
for specific Army applications; and beginning to examine the use of such capabilities in basic science projects to explore alternative technologies from the nanoscale or biological realms. A small effort has been started to establish an asymmetric computing center to explore the use of many of these nontraditional computing architectures for specific Army applications.
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From page 19... ...
This would be true particularly if and when packs of multiple robots of this type were to be employed, and tasks such as sweep and survey in mass became important. Some of the start-up efforts within the NSD in conjunction with the Mobile Network Modeling Institute may invoke similar concerns.
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From page 20... ...
However, even the early projects observed during this review cycle before such network sciences programs are fully fleshed out, if continued in relative isolation, may not materially advance ARL's capabilities, especially given the large number of other organizations pursuing similar activities. One suggestion might be to mirror the careful experimental setup and evaluation work done for the prior CISD machine translation work and to focus significant attention on three aspects of the human intelligence problem: understanding what metrics are most valuable to the Army in the field, obtaining or developing realistic but unclassified data sets (such as from gang databases or local police databases)
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From page 21... ...
Related projects in decision aids for warfighters that try to use statistics or fuzzy logic to incorporate weather conditions into command decision tools seem to suffer from similar problems of pushing classical algorithms too far. A paradoxical observation apropos of the highly successful engineering of the Blue Radio, discussed earlier, is that this design effort used state-of-the-art, but largely discrete, components to build a prototype that is clearly acceptable for demonstration purposes but is not at the state of the art in terms of implementation as a single chip that would be needed for a deployable system.
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From page 22... ...
The question is still open on how to leverage systematically both the embedded and the two supercomputer facilities across all activities, including crossovers into nontraditional computing-intensive applications such as signals intelligence. The Mobile Network Modeling Institute is perhaps the first instance in which the use of HPC resources has not just been part of individual projects but has become a unique enabler that is essential to achieving the institute's mission.
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From page 23... ...
OVERALL TECHNICAL QUALITY OF THE WORK One of the assessment criteria applied by the Board asks if the scientific quality of a directorate's research is of comparable technical quality to that executed in leading federal, university, and/or industrial laboratories both nationally and internationally. As in prior years, the answer to this question is that it is generally true for the Computational and Information Sciences Directorate, with exceptional expertise in selected areas such as weather, intelligent optics, and machine translation of foreign languages.
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From page 24... ...
This is particularly true of the White Sands, New Mexico, facilities for BED; the intelligent optics laboratories of ISD; the mobile networking laboratories and institute recently established for NSD; and the supercomputing facilities. The development of new facilities such as the Wireless Emulation Laboratory and the Asymmetric Computing Laboratory indicates that ARL is serious about being agile in the face of new technologies.
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From page 25... ...
Prior ARLTAB assessments have noted the recognized exceptional contributions of the machine translation work. This continues to be the case.
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