Working Toward A Life

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A Graph-Theoretic Approach to Protect Static and Moving Targets from Adversaries

2010-02-12T14:39:00.002-05:00

A few days ago, I submitted the camera-ready version of our AAMAS-2010 paper. The abstract, provided below, is a slightly edited version of that which was initially submitted back in October.

A Graph-Theoretic Approach to Protect Static and Moving Targets from Adversaries
J.P. Dickerson, G.I. Simari, V.S. Subrahmanian and Sarit Kraus

The static asset protection problem (SAP) in a road network is that of allocating resources to protect vertices, given any possible behavior by an adversary determined to attack those assets. The dynamic asset protection (DAP) problem is a version of SAP where the asset is following a fixed and widely known route (e.g., a parade route) and needs to be protected. We formalize what it means for a given allocation of resources to be "optimal" for protecting a desired set of assets, and show that randomly allocating resources to a single edge cut in the road network solves this problem. Unlike SAP, we show that DAP is not only an NP-complete problem, but that approximating DAP is also NP-hard. We provide the GreedyDAP heuristic algorithm to solve DAP and show experimentally that it works well in practice, using road network data for real cities.

Basically, given some set of targets T and some set of "enemy" source nodes S, we discuss methods to either protect from S a static T or choose an optimally protected path between two target nodes within T. The paper draws heavily from graph theory, game theory, and network interdiction.

A copy of the paper can be found here: PDF Link.

BibTeX citation information is here.

Spatio-Cultural Abductive Reasoning Engine

2009-12-10T19:37:00.004-05:00

Captain Paulo Shakarian, a Ph.D. student in my lab, recently presented a project to which I contributed at the International Conference on Computational Cultural Dynamics (ICCCD 2009). SCARE, the Spatio-Cultural Abductive Reasoning Engine, describes a software system we implemented that analyzes patterns of improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in a war zone in an effort to predict the locations of insurgent-run weapons caches.

The test data used -- publicly available records of IED attacks in Baghdad over the last twenty-one months -- provided a way to test the predictive algorithms. After training on the first seven months of data, the SCARE system accurately predicted (within 0.5km) the locations of real weapons caches found in the region during that time period.

The paper describing this work is located here. The SCARE system is online here. You'll need the Google Earth plugin and an LCCD-provided login.

The video above is provided as a tutorial to those using the SCARE system. For the tutorial, we use publicly available data on a series of church burglaries in the St. Paul, Minnesota area. Please excuse the voice-over!

Popular Science has a nice article on the project here.

Media Coverage
Popular Science, Science Daily, Science Codex, Science Blog, PhysOrg, NewsWise, BioScience Tech, Genetic Engineering & Biotech, and others.

What Can Virtual Worlds do for National Security?

2009-11-27T16:00:00.004-05:00

Recently, Science magazine published an article by my mentor V.S. Subrahmanian and me regarding our work on virtual worlds. In the article, we discuss how virtual worlds and games can be used in conjunction with predictive algorithms to provide an environment in which national security and policy experts can explore the results of hypothetical political or military policy changes across the globe.

Here is the abstract from Science:

Military planners have long used war games to plan for future conflicts. Beginning in the 1950s, defense analysts began to develop computer-based models to predict the outcomes of military battles that incorporated elements of game theory. Such models were often restricted to two opposing forces, and often had a strict win-lose resolution. Today, defense analysts face situations that are more complex, not only in that conflicts may involve several opposing groups within a region, but also in that military actions are only part of an array of options available in trying to foster stable, peaceful conditions. For example, in the current conflict in Afghanistan, analysts must try to estimate how particular actions by their forces—building schools, burning drug crops, or performing massive security sweeps—will affect interactions between the many diverse ethnic groups in the region. We discuss one approach to addressing this prediction problem in which possible outcomes are explored through computer-based virtual-world environments.

If you have a subscription to Science, you can view the full article on their site.

For a nice summary of our work, please see Larry Greenemeier's article in Scientific American here.

Worldwide Media Coverage
Scientific American
The Register
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Supercomputing Online
Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News
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DailyIndia.com
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DNA Magazine
Malaysia Sun
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Sindh Today
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UMD Newsdesk

UMD Secure Wireless with Ubuntu

2009-11-05T13:53:00.006-05:00

On the University of Maryland campus, staff and students have access to (at least) two campus-run wireless networks: umd and umd-secure. Predictably, the umd SSID is completely unencrypted, while umd-secure sends data using WPA2 technology. If you are on umd, anyone with (widely available) wireless snooping tools installed can observe, or "sniff," your data. This is bad!

The University of Maryland provides Windows- and Mac-based instructions on how to connect to the secure umd-secure SSID (link). However, their site neglects a third popular player in the campus OS battle: Ubuntu.

If you would like to connect to umd-secure using Ubuntu, use the following settings:

Security: WPA & WPA2 Enterprise
Authentication: Tunneled TLS
Anonymous identity: anonymous
CA certificate: see below
Inner authentication: PAP
Username: (Your Directory ID)
Password: (Your Directory Password)

To select the CA Certificate, open the "Choose a Certificate Authority certificate..." dialog box. Navigate to /etc/ssl/certs. Select Thawte_Premium_Server_CA.pem. Press "Open."

If you are using an older version of Ubuntu, you may need to download the Thawte certificate from their site.

That's all there is to it! If you'd like more information about what's going on, check out the following Wikipedia pages:

WPA/WPA2 (link)
Public-key Cryptography (link)
CA, or Certificate Authority (link)

This post written from umd-secure on Ubuntu.

African ECD Report

2009-10-31T14:37:00.004-04:00

African Early Childhood Development
In contrast to many other fields of social and economic development, early childhood development (ECD) lacks a system of global indicators that include all key early childhood areas: education, nutrition, health, sanitation, and child rights and protection.

We are working on meeting this urgent need for a worldwide ECD database, in conjunction with the RISE Institute and the Consultative Group for Early Childhood Care and Development.

Initial Report
We put together an initial report on 37 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The printers just returned the first printing of this initial report. I think it turned out pretty well!

We are presenting this initial report at the Fourth African International Conference on Early Childhood Development in Dakar, Senegal on November 10-13, 2009.

LCCD on Primetime TV!

2009-10-27T00:01:00.006-04:00

Numb3rs
Our lab's work was featured on Numb3rs, a popular television crime drama. The show directly references our SOMA (Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agent) system, which is at the heart of my CAGE and CIG projects. Although the explanation was "spruced up" a bit for television, the show portrays the basic concept fairly accurately. Exciting!

Description of SOMA

Another Mention of SOMA

Episode Details
Air Date: 23 October 2009
Identifier: Season 6, Episode 5
Title: Hydra
Summary: The team attempts to rescue a kidnapped girl, but their involvement in the case brings up personal and moral issues for Liz, Amita and Charlie when they begin to suspect she might be one of the first human clones. (source)

Asset Protection

2009-10-18T14:31:00.003-04:00

Finally submitted my first (real) academic paper this week, to the AAMAS (Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems) 2010 conference in Toronto. Hopefully it will get accepted, although their roughly 20% acceptance rate does not bode well.

A Graph-Theoretic Approach to Protect Static and Moving Targets from Adversaries
J.P. Dickerson, G.I. Simari, V.S. Subrahmanian and Sarit Kraus

The static asset protection problem (SAP) in a road network is that of allocating resources to protect vertices, given any possible behavior by an adversary determined to attack those assets. The dynamic asset protection (DAP) problem is a version of SAP where the asset is following a fixed and widely known route (e.g., a parade route) and needs to be protected. We formalize what it means for a given allocation of resources to be ``optimal'' for protecting a desired set of assets, and show that randomly allocating resources to a single edge cut in the road network solves this problem. We develop a polynomial time algorithm for SAP and experimentally show that it works effectively in practice. We also formalize DAP. Unlike SAP, we show that DAP is not only an NP-complete problem, but that approximating DAP is also NP-hard. We provide the GreedyDAP heuristic algorithm to solve DAP and show experimentally that it works well in practice, using road network data for real cities.

My (out of date) writeup on the project can be found here.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

2008-12-04T22:59:00.002-05:00

The second iteration of the Star Trek series -- The Next Generation -- is perhaps the best television show I have ever seen.

Although I saw a significant amount of it while growing up, viewing it again has brought back great memories while helping to make new ones. The writing, characters, attention to scientific detail, and (dare I say it) general message of the show are all extremely appealing.

If you have not experienced TNG, do so! It is . . . wonderful.

2008-07-18T12:41:00.005-04:00

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. Page 74.

Mr. Vandemar slid his knife back into the holster in his sleeve. He put his coat on as well, pushed his hands deep into the pockets, and was pleasantly surprised to find an almost untouched mouse in one pocket. Good. He was hungry. Then he pondered Mr. Croup's last statement with the intensity of an anatomist dissecting his one true love, and, realizing the flaw in his partner's logic, Mr. Vandemar said, "We don't need bodyguards, Mister Croup. We hurt people. We don't get hurt."

The description of Mr. Vandemar's thinking matches his character perfectly: steady, methodical, and devoid of normal emotion.

2008-06-18T00:44:00.003-04:00

Orson Scott Card's Enchantment. Page 134.

That's what Ivan had to face about himself. The life he had chosen was a cocoon. Surrounded by a web of old manuscripts and scholarly papers, he would achieve tenure, publish frequently, teach a group of carefully selected graduate students, be treated like a celebrity by the handful of people who had the faintest idea who he was, and go to his grave deluded into thinking he had achieved greatness while in fact he had stayed in school all his life.

I smell bias, Orson Scott Card -- I smell bias. Card spent a year as a graduate student at Notre Dame after his mission in Brazil and subsequent graduation from Brigham Young University.

Still, the man has a point.

2008-06-09T22:40:00.004-04:00

Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Page 137.

The American police are involved in psychological warfare against those Americans who don't frighten them with imposing papers and threats. It's a Victorian police force; it peers out of musty windows and wants to inquire about everything, and can make crimes if the crimes don't exist to its satisfaction.

It's disheartening that this is even more true now than it was fifty years ago. It's hardly considered out of the ordinary to keep video and audio surveillance in a vehicle, for use in the event of a run-in with the so-called law.

2008-06-09T21:30:00.003-04:00

Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Page 127.

He had more books than I've ever seen in all my life -- two libraries, two rooms loaded from floor to ceiling around all four walls, and such books as the Apocryphal Something-or-Other in ten volumes. He played Verdi operas and pantomimed them in his pajamas with a great rip down the back. He didn't give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenth-century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets. His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light. He rolled his neck in spastic ecstasy. He lisped, he writhed, he flopped, he moaned, he howled, he fell back in despair. He could hardly get a word out, he was so excited with life.

Jack Kerouac's amazement with life bleeds through the page in every description of every character - and there are many of these - in this stream of consciousness chronicle of a few years of his life.

2008-06-05T21:41:00.003-04:00

St. Thomas More's Utopia, translated by Paul Turner. Page 81.

And, as they see it, the scientific investigation of nature is not only a most enjoyable process, but also the best possible method of pleasing the Creator.
For they assume that He has the normal reactions of an artist. Having put the marvelous system of the universe on show for human beings to look at - since no other species is capable of taking it in - He must prefer the type of person who examines it carefully, and really admires His work, to the type that just ignores it and like the lower animals remains quite unimpressed by the whole astonishing spectacle.

In the immortal words of Bill Nye the Science Guy -- Science Rules! In a time when the Church and Crown were at odds with the scientific community (this, obviously, is no longer the case . . .), Thomas More's fictional friend gives a simple, yet easily palatable argument as to why we should indulge our natural curiosity.

2008-06-04T12:03:00.003-04:00

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.

Now white and brown sculptures of foam and sludge drifted serenely down the river, often covering it for yards at a stretch. And where the surface of the water was visible it was covered with a molecules-thin petrochemical sheen.
There was a loud whirring as a couple of geese, thankful to be back in England again after the long, exhausting flight across the Northern Atlantic, landed on the rainbow-slicked water, and sank without a trace.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse -- War, Famine, Pollution (Pestilence retired in the 1930s post-discovery of penicillin), and Death -- are preparing to ride per the Book of Revelation. Pollution's introduction occurs on the banks of the river mentioned above, while the quotation refers to his nearly romantic view of contamination and waste.

2008-06-03T14:57:00.002-04:00

St. Thomas More's Utopia, translated by Paul Turner. Page 86.

But anyone who deliberately tries to get himself elected to public office is permanently disqualified from holding one.

Sure, the book's either an advertisement for Catholicism or thinly veiled communist propaganda (St. More is the only Christian to be honored with a statue at the Kremlin, courtesy Lenin), but I can't help but feel that this statement -- one of the core rules of his fictional Utopia -- holds some bearing in our current times.