Rogue Wolves Home of the Wolfman

Yes I'm still alive. I've just been too busy to blog lately. I have a new found respect for teachers. Daaaamn it's a lot of work. Preparing lectures, teaching, creating homework/tests, and marking...lots and lots of marking.

I'm also working part-time on two different research projects right now too. I'm heading to the 25th Army Science Conference in Orlando Florida at the end of November. It should be interesting. The keynote speaker was originally supposed to be Donald Rumsfeld but given the current political climate he may no longer be employed come time for the conference. Anyways, we are going down to show off a handheld prototype I helped build over the summer. It's a cultural advisor for troops. The device basically is a cultural knowledge base and reasoning engine that asks the user questions and gives them a confidence assessment of the situation. For instance you could be on patrol and see a group of men wearing black clothes chanting in the streets and the advisor device could inform the user that today is a religious holiday where the men of the culture parade in black clothing in the streets chanting prayers for the dead. The device knows about cultural information and using the GPS, date/time and information entered by the user can make predictions on the situation and advise the user on courses of action. The whole point is to give cultural information to troops that probably have little to no knowledge of the cultures they will have to interact with.

Additional uses for the device could be to gather information remotely and relay it on to a central command center that could aggregate all the information into a realtime overview of the battle space. In this scenario the handheld could also facilitate the relaying of information such as video, audio, enemy locations indicated on a map, etc.

The other research project I'm working on is building an information knowledge base and reasoning engine for the intelligence community. This project will be a full time research assistantship for me and has enough funding to keep me funded for several years. It's an exciting project and I'm looking forward to doing it full-time come January. I'll post more details on this project when I have more time but here are some buzzwords of what this project entails: Bayesian Networks, Service Oriented Architecture, Enterprise Service Bus and ATOM

However, in the meantime my goal is to make it out of this semester alive.