Posts Tagged military

Early February British and French Submarine Collision

Posted by jasonwong in mental map, navigation on February 16th, 2009

Submarines have long been called “The Silent Service.” The goal is to run long, deep, and as quiet as possible. However, sometimes, you can be two quiet.

LONDON — Two nuclear submarines, one French and the other British, collided in mid-Atlantic earlier this month, reports in the British and French news media said on Monday, quoting sources in the two defense ministries.

Both submarines were damaged extensively but have returned to their home ports since the collision on the night of February 3, the reports said.

In some respects, it is good news that the submarine anti-sonar systems were working well. However, at the same time, in close quarters like that (possibly performing some kind of training exercise?), a collision between two nuclear submarines is awfully dangerous.

Sonar displays are incredibly difficult to read. It is an interesting question, though: how do you take auditory information about spatial information and display it visually over time? Sonar is not like using x-rays to develop a CT image; sonar is not meant to provide a spatially mapped picture of what’s going on outside. Instead, the displays look like this:

sonar_display

Of course, Sonar technicians are well-trained to perform their task, but it is still not an easy or natural one. An additional layer of assistance, though, are the computer systems take that Sonar information and transform it into an easier-to-read display for the Fire Control technicians. Nonetheless, Sonar interpretation not an easy task, and someone probably missed something.

I am extremely curious to find out what really happened. Considering it is a matter of British and French national security, however, I doubt it’ll become public knowledge.

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The DoD needs cognitive psychologists!

Posted by jasonwong in attention, perception, robots on July 19th, 2008

SBIR call for “A psychologically inspired object recognition system”

The DoD has put out a call for proposals for the development of an object recognition system for computers that obeys psychological principles. Object recognition is obviously important for humans, and as more robots are being used in place of humans, they should also be able to identify objects to aid in mission success. The project description sounds like a short review of the object recognition literature, in fact (emphasis added by me):

Recognizing and identifying an object from a video input turns out to be a very difficult problem. The problem stems from the fact that a single object can be viewed from an infinite number of ways. By rotating, obscuring, or scaling a single object, one can create multiple representations of an object – which makes the problem of matching the object to a database of objects very difficult. The problem expands exponentially when objects that need to be identified have never been viewed before. Combine these limitations with the wide variety of objects which might be identified, and the problem becomes intractable. One solution is to study and understand how human beings recognize objects in the real world and duplicate that functionality in a series of algorithms. Recent research (Tarr and Bulthoff, 1995) has indicated that humans use not one algorithm, but multiple algorithms for the task of object recognition – depending on the object being recognized and the situation at hand. Specifically, research has shown that people use template based algorithms (i.e. similar to the database matching algorithms described earlier) in addition to Geon based (Beiderman, 1995) algorithms and feature based algorithms.

First of all, 1995 counts as recent research? Sounds like some DoD scientists need to attend the Vision Sciences conference. Secondly, it is satisfying to see that the DoD believes that understanding how the human mind works is a big step in implementing human-like cognition in artificial systems.

This is similar to the field of biorobotics, where the understanding of how natural organisms work (say, a dolphin) can be applied to machines (say, a submarine). This makes a lot of sense, actually. Biological organisms are highly evolved – nature has done the work of choosing what works best. By studying what works best, we can use those principles in designing our own machines. It seems like a new principle in engineering, but it makes a lot of sense.

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Human factors at the Navy; “The ones who win…”

Posted by jasonwong in decision making, eye movements, user testing on June 5th, 2008

I am slowly starting to get integrated into my work at the Navy. I am part of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center’s (NUWC) Combat Systems Division. NUWC is divided into many departments that are divided based on submarine systems. If you think of the submarine as an information processing unit, you have the input in the form of sonar and other sensors, the output of navigation and ordinance, and then you have the “brains” that integrates data and provides output solutions. This is what Combat Systems does.

The motto I see over and over is:

The ones who win get the right amount of the right information to the right people at the right time to help them make the right decision.

From a human factors standpoint, this is a critical mission. Information is needed in a real-time fashion; if a sonar display is 30 seconds old, it could be useless. Additionally, who needs to see what information? Commanding officers does not need the low-level details of how a target was identified. Instead, they need a big picture overview of the battlespace. Similarly, operators do not need the gritty numbers output by the sensors. The data needs to be interpreted for the optimal presentation to the operator. This is the domain of the Data Fusion group, which deals mostly in engineering, algorithms, and mathematics.

My boss put it most succinctly: engineers need to make sure bits flow to the screen. Psychologists need to make sure the information flows into the brain. From the sounds of things, I will help accomplish that task this summer by working with the group’s Applied Science Laboratory eyetracker.

It’s not the one I’m used to, but it’s much better for applied settings versus basic research. I am looking forward to it! More details as I get them.

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