News

Dr. Christopher Miller has authored an article in a special issue of the journal Human Robot Interaction based on work conducted with and for the 25 members of the NATO Research and Technology Office Panel 270 on Supervisory Control of Uninhabited Military Vehicles. The panel involved representatives from eight different NATO countries sharing information and sometimes collaborating on the development of 13 different robotic vehicle projects. Dr.

As part of the NASA contract "Automated Detection of Attitudes and States through Transaction Recordings Analysis (AD ASTRA)," SIFT has begun a human subject study that takes place at the Human Test Subject Facility of the Johnson Space Center. The goal of this bed-rest experiment is to explore unobtrusive methods of emotion detection using socio-linguistics.

SIFT researcher Dan Thomsen has been invited to serve as section editor and contributor to a new book "Springer's Handbook on Human Computation."  The book will include a variety of visionaries contributing on what this technology can accomplish and what pitfalls might exist. The book is expected to be published in November 2013.

SIFT researcher Dan Thomsen served as guest editor of the IEEE Security & Privacy special issue on Lost Treasures of computer security. The issue contains reviews of classic papers, key insights on security development projects and an article by Howard Shrobe and Daniel Adams asking the question: What if computer security research got a "do-over"?

At the completion of the SIFT massive collaborative problem solving program, SIFT researcher Dan Thomsen wrote a joint paper with SIFT competitors at MSI. The paper is now available at the open journal Security Informatics: http://www.security-informatics.com/content/1/1/12/abstract

Dr. Christopher Miller was interviewed by Dr. Amy Pritchett, the Editor of the Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making, for a blog associated with that journal. The interview was conducted as a follow on to the article that SIFT researchers had published in that journal earlier this year on the interactions between etiquette usage and team membership in compliance with directives. The article is described in the June 24, 2012 news item below. Dr.

SIFT researchers Jordan Thayer and J. Benton won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2012 Symposium on Combinatorial Search for their paper titled "Better Parameter-free Anytime Search by Minimizing Time Between Solutions." This paper, written with Malte Helmert defines the "ideal" performance of anytime search algorithms and defines a new anytime search algorithm that conforms this. The abstract follows:

 

SIFT researcher J. Benton won the Best Student Paper Award at ICAPS 2012 called "Temporal Planning with Preferences and Time-dependent Costs," also authored by Amanda Coles and Andrew Coles. This paper is about handling temporal planning problems where the quality of a plan has to do with when certain goals are achieved. The paper's abstract is after the break.

SIFT Researcher Michael Boldt will present work by SIFT collegues David Musliner, Timothy Woods, and John Maraist on Identifying Culprits When Probabilistic Verification Fails at the 2012 Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (CIE). This work was done under the probabilistic verification effort funded by the DARPA AVM/META program.

Dr. Ugur Kuter collaborated with University of Maryland graduate students Ron Alford and Vikas Shivashankar and faculty Dr. Dana Nau on "HTN PRoblem Spaces: Structure, Algorithms, Termination" published at the 2012 Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS-12), which can be accessed here: http://www.socs12.org/papers.html

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