Thomas C Eskridge

Florida Institute of Technology · Harris Institute for Assured Information

Although advanced algorithms are needed to enable increasingly autonomous civil aviation applications, there are limitations in assurance technologies, which must be addressed to gain trust in the performance of these algorithms. This gap emphasizes the need to guarantee safety by capturing performance boundaries, as these algorithms are integrated...

Knowledge workers can benefit from tools to support them in performing deep, concentrated work. Research in biofeedback has shown success in training relaxation, but not in directly influencing task performance. One reason for this may be the difficulties users have in contextualizing biofeedback signals for different task situations. This presents...

Secure coding is crucial for the design of secure and efficient software and computing systems. However, many programmers avoid secure coding practices for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons are lack of knowledge of secure coding standards, negligence, and poor performance of and usability issues with existing code analysis tools. Therefor...

What are the key visualization components that can help researchers discover avenues for breakthrough research and pinpoint relevant citations to critical landmark studies? This presentation discussed an interactive visualization of scientific journals to explore the patterns found within bibliometric graphs. The resulting visualization is intended...

Selecting appropriate cyber defense mechanisms for an enterprise network and correctly configuring them is a challenging problem. Identifying the set of defenses and their configurations in a way that maximizes security without exhausting system resources or causing unintended interference (a situation known as cyber friendly-fire) is a multi-crite...

Semantic Technology for Intelligence, Defense, and Security

Dynamic and moving target defenses are generally characterized by their ability to modify their own state, or the state of the protected target. As such, the evolution of these kinds of defenses require specialized experiments that can capture their behavior and effectiveness through time, as well as their broader impacts in the network. While spec...

In this paper we introduce MIRA (Mission-aware Infrastructure for Resilient Agents), an extensible and modular infrastructure designed for the support of coordinated cyber operations. MIRA was originally designed to provide the infrastructure for a cyber-command and control and cyber operations. MIRA provides a core set of services that can be exte...

An integrated flight instrument which provides unambiguous information regarding the motion of a hovering aircraft. The instrument accurately depicts motion in six degrees of freedom (roll, pitch, yaw, forward translation, lateral translation, and vertical translation), as well as aircraft power requirements and utilization.

In this paper, we present a novel interface for teleoperating ground vehicles. Obstacle avoidance with ground vehicles demands a high level of operator attention, typically distracting from the primary mission. The Ambient Obstacle Avoidance (AOA) was designed to allow operators to effectively perform a primary task, such as search, while still eff...

A method for visually depicting complex events. Software agents are preferably employed to assist the human operator by collecting, enriching, selecting, aggregating, and analyzing data so that patterns of interest can be visually flagged or otherwise emphasized in the visual display. Events are depicted as an "event flow" from a source surface to...

A method for visually depicting complex events. Software agents are preferably employed to assist the human operator by collecting, enriching, selecting, aggregating, and analyzing data so that patterns of interest can be visually flagged or otherwise emphasized in the visual display. Events are depicted as an “event flow” from a source surface to...

This article discusses principles underlying the design of human-centered interfaces, using the specific example of the OZ cockpit display, which has no traditional dials or gauges.

In this paper we discuss the need for a new command and control (C2) approach for the practical deployment of Moving Target Defenses (MTDs) enterprise networks. We describe some of the requirements and constraints associated with the combined use of multiple moving target defenses, and introduce a human-agent teamwork approach for the command and c...

In this paper we discuss the need for a command and control (C2) capability for moving target (MT) defenses. We describe some of the requirements and constraints associated with such a capability, and propose a human-agent teamwork approach for MTC2. We further discuss some specific concepts and technologies that could play an important role in the...

In this article, we explain our rationale for the development of Luna, a software agent framework. In particular, we focus on how we use capabilities for comprehensive policy-based governance to ensure that key requirements for security, declarative specification of taskwork, and built-in support for joint activity within mixed teams of humans and...

In this article, we outline the general concept of coactive emergence, an iterative process whereby joint sensemaking and decision-making activities are undertaken by analysts and software agents. Then we explain our rationale for the development of the Luna software agent framework. In particular, we focus on how we use capabilities for comprehens...

This article explores the use of diagramming to support simultaneous sensemaking and ontology development. The authors argue that tools can be developed to support a continuum of knowledge models, from initial free-form diagrams that make it easy to capture anauthorés knowledge and intent but are only interpretable by humans, to propositionally coh...

In this article, we describe how we augment human perception and cognition through Sol, an agent-based framework for distributed sensemaking. We describe how our visualization approach, based on IHMC’s OZ flight display, has been leveraged and extended in our development of the Flow Capacitor, an analyst display for maintaining cyber situation awar...

The macrocognitive workplace is constantly changing, and a work system can never match its environment completely; there are always gaps in fitness because the work is itself a moving target. This article looks at a domain where the workplace is a moving target in three ways: cyberdefense. New technology and work methods are continually being intro...

In this article we describe how we apply the concept of coactive emergence as a phenomenon of complexity that has implications for the design of sensemaking support tools involving a combination of human analysts and software agents. We apply this concept in the design of work methods for distributed sensemaking in cyber operations. Sensemaking is...

Sharing information across diverse teams is increasingly important in military operations, intelligence analysis, emergency response, and multi-institutional scientific studies. Communities of Interest (COIs) are an approach by which such information sharing can be realized. Widespread adoption of COIs has been hampered by a lack of adequate method...

Motivation – The purpose of this article is to reinvigorate debate concerning the nature of analogy and broaden the scope of current conceptions of analogy. Research approach – An analysis of the history of the concept of analogy, case studies on the use of analogy in problem-solving, cognitive research on analogy comprehension, and a naturalistic...

The purpose of this article is to invigorate debate concerning the nature of analogy, and to broaden the scope of current conceptions of analogy. We argue that analogizing is not a single or even a fundamental cognitive process. The argument relies on an analysis of the history of the concept of analogy, case studies on the use of analogy in scient...

As populations age and large numbers of skilled workers progress toward retirement, the importance of preserving and sharing expert knowledge is becoming an increasing concern for organisations worldwide. This article contains descriptions of two case studies involving initiatives to elicit, preserve, and share expert knowledge in the nuclear power...

Coordination is an essential ingredient of a teamwork- centered approach to autonomy. In this paper, we discuss some of the challenges and requirements for successful coordination, and briefly how we have used KAoS HART services framework to support coordination in a multi- team human-robot field exercise.

Concept maps are very good at organizing knowledge about a wide variety of subjects. However, they present some difficulties and opportunities when it comes to the retrieval of concept maps based on individual query terms. In this paper, we review the search architecture of CmapTools and some of the key issues involved in the ranking of concept map...

The CmapTools program, and concept mapping in general, have seen a steady growth in usage in the last few years. With new users come new requirements and needs for the software that we can’t always satisfy. Until now, the CmapTools architecture has been relatively closed to third party developers. In this paper we report on a new open architecture,...

Concept Maps are seen as ways to conceptualize domains that can be comprehended within the human attention span, and are often based on terminologies arising in technical, scientific or engineering domains. We report on a set of related projects that go beyond this tradition in two ways: by connecting CmapTools to the new, machine-processable stand...

The meaningful integration and comprehen-sion of data from many different sources poses a difficult challenge for the Intelligence Com-munity. Establishing the underlying semantics of that data and developing semantics for new or specialized scenarios is a key part of the so-lution to that challenge. The emerging Seman-tic Web technologies address...

This paper describes a new environment, COE, for capturing and formally representing expert knowledge for use in the Semantic Web. COE exploits the ease of use and rapid knowledge construction capabilities of the CmapTools concept mapping system and extends them to support the import and export of formal, machine-interpretable knowledge representat...

Information visualization has been a research topic for many years, leading to a mature field where guidelines and practices are well established. Knowledge visualization, in contrast, is a relatively new area of research that has received more attention recently due to the interest from the business com- munity in Knowledge Management. In this pap...

This article contains a description of work performed in a Pilot Study at a nuclear power plant with an expert, senior-level turbine engineer. The purpose of this work was to preserve the knowledge of the turbine engineer in several areas: planned outage scheduling, overhaul of low-pressure turbines, and issues pertaining to the Electro-Hydraulic C...

Information visualization has been a research topic for many years, leading to a mature field where guidelines and practices are well established. Knowledge visualization, in contrast, is a relatively new area of research that has received more attention recently due to the interest from the business community in Knowledge Management. In this paper...

Concept maps are an effective way of representing a person's understanding of a domain of knowledge. Technology can further help by making it easy to construct and modify that representation, to manage large representations for complex domains, and to allow groups of people to share in the construction of the concept maps. CmapTools is a software e...

Electronic concept mapping tools provide a flexible vehicle for constructing concept maps, linking concept maps to other concept maps and related resources, and distributing concept maps to others. As electronic concept maps are constructed, it is often helpful for users to consult additional resources, in order to jog their memories or to locate r...

A system and method for object inspection that includes an image recognition program stored on a tangible medium for classifying and subclassifying regions of interest on an image. The image recognition program can be used in an image inspection system to determine defects on objects such as printed wiring assemblies. The image recognition program...

Electronic concept mapping tools empower experts to play an active role in the knowledge capture process, and provide a medium for building richly connected multimedia knowledge models -- sets of linked concept maps and resources about a particular domain. Knowledge models are intended to be used as a means for sharing knowledge among humans, not a...

Four key inspection goals cut across all types of manufacturers. Where to place automated optical inspection (AOI) in the line is dependent on what the end goal is. Location also impacts the quality of the process control metrics generated by the inspection equipment. Since inspection goals change as the process changes and matures, AOI equipment m...

Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) technology is an important component in reaching the next level of quality and maintaining the competitive edge in Electronic Assembly. However, to implement this technology in today's rapidly changing environment, AOI system suppliers must greatly simplify the programming process and significantly reduce the fals...

The need for automated populated board inspection stems from the desire to reduce the number of defective board escapes, and to improve the yield of the production line. There are two main goals of populated board inspection: (1) to detect and classify defects, (2) provide process control information. Although at first glance the goals may appear t...

In the last several years, the semiconductor industry has come to the realization that the package into which a die is placed is at least as critical to the performance of the complete electronic system as the die itself. This realization has led to an explosive effort across the entire industry to advance the state-of-the-art in semiconductor pack...

Neural network (NN) architectures provide a thousand-fold speed-up in computational power per watt along with the flexibility to learn/adapt so as to reduce software life-cycle costs. Thus NNs are posed to provide a key supporting role to meet the avionics upgrade challenge for affordable improved mission capability especially near hardware where f...

An asynchronous temporal neural processing element. The processing element is useful in solving problems from the class of temporal signal processing problems and is modeled closely on the sub-cellular biology and electrophysiology of neurons having chemical synapses.

The Milling Assistant (MA) programming system demonstrates the automated development of tool paths for Numerical Control (NC) machine tools. By integrating a Case-Based Reasoning decision processor with a commercial CAD/CAM software, intelligent tool path files for milled and point-to-point features can be created. The operational system is capable...

There are many problems which fall into the class of temporal signal processing. These problems have in common the need to relate the temporal properties of their inputs. Conventional solutions to these problems often have high hardware overhead, complex algorithmic solutions, or loss of information through the transformation of temporal properties...

Simple neural systems based on biologically motivated processing elements with applications to pulse stream filtering are discussed. These few node, moderately connected systems exhibit sensitive filtering capabilities, and complex and emergent information encoding properties. A single filter may operate on frequencies from the sub-hertz range up t...

A real-time parallel retinal processor is currently being developed. The processor is based on a hybrid analog/digital neural processing element. The processor uses spatiotemporal characteristics of its input images to perform feature enhancement and extraction, motion detection and velocity measurements, target tracking, and system focal length ad...

The identification of genes by DNA sequence analysis is a formally unspecified pattern recognition problem. Genes are identified in practice by constructing and evaluating models that represent the spatial relations between a number of components that can be identified by pattern matching. This is currently done interactively, with the aid of a var...

We present current work on the Weather and Doctrinal Information Fusion (WADIF) system for Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB). The task of the WADIF system is to determine the performance of an Army operational asset, such as a tank, taking into account current and projected terrain and weather conditions. This is a task that is curr...