Research Overview
Focus
Beginning with the industrial age, machines and tools have extended and magnified the physical abilities of humans, a classical example being the steam shovel. In the information age, we now have machines that extend and magnify our cognitive activities, adding to our individual skill sets, a simple example being tax preparation software. More advanced tools will, in the future, allow for a true semi-autonomous telepresence of humans in remote battlefield operations, and ultimately a telepresence on distant planets. By telepresence we do not mean a conventional electronic presentation of the remote environs, but a true sensory experience of being in the remote site. To achieve this capability, significant fundamental advances are necessary in system autonomy, data understanding, and seamless exchanges among varying levels of cognitive function as they are distributed among humans and their machines. At the heart of these investigations are languages. Languages serve as the fundamental framework for the way we organize complexity internally and the way in which we communicate our understanding. The center will focus on the fundamental advances needed in order to accomplish a vision of computer-human interactions to include remote operation of instruments and machines, including robots. These advances will be tested against hard applications including ones critical to battlefield operations, space and planetary exploration, remote agricultural, and industrial applications. Industrial applications include the treatment of hazardous chemicals and objects, together with oilfield operations.
Main Research Efforts
- Identify requirements to establish causal links in data for the purposes of reflexive autonomy.
- Advanced autonomy - efforts to link cause-effect data understanding to provide information for action-based reasoning in order to deal with uncertainty in hostile or remote environs.
- Declarative Language Investigations - efforts to understand the language requirements needed to organize, at varying levels of reasoning, a system's understanding of uncertain situations.
- Human-centered Computing - a study of the information flow among distributed levels of reasoning working towards a seamless exchange among humans doing higher order reasoning and machines doing reflexive reasoning.
- High-performance Computing - automatically finding parallelisms in problem domains through advanced languages and compilers.
- Software Engineering - technology transition applying fundamental results of computer science to hard applications.
Computer Science, Center for Advanced Intelligent Systems, Box 43104, Boston & 8th, Lubbock, TX 79409, USA
806.742.3257 (Phone)