The 2004 NASA Faculty Fellowship Program Research Reports

This is the administrative report for the 2004 NASA Faculty Fellowship Program (NFFP) held at the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) for the 40th consecutive year. The NFFP offers science and engineering faculty at U.S. colleges and universities hands-on exposure to NASA s research challenges through summer research residencies and extended research opportunities at participating NASA research Centers. During this program, fellows work closely with NASA colleagues on research challenges important to NASA's strategic enterprises that are of mutual interest to the fellow and the Center. The nominal starting and .nishing dates for the 10-week program were June 1 through August 6, 2004. The program was sponsored by NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC, and operated under contract by The University of Alabama, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, and Alabama A&M University. In addition, promotion and applications are managed by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and assessment is completed by Universities Space Research Association (USRA). The primary objectives of the NFFP are to: Increase the quality and quantity of research collaborations between NASA and the academic community that contribute to the Agency s space aeronautics and space science mission. Engage faculty from colleges, universities, and community colleges in current NASA research and development. Foster a greater public awareness of NASA science and technology, and therefore facilitate academic and workforce literacy in these areas. Strengthen faculty capabilities to enhance the STEM workforce, advance competition, and infuse mission-related research and technology content into classroom teaching. Increase participation of underrepresented and underserved faculty and institutions in NASA science and technology

A New Paradigm to Address Threats for Virtualized Services

With the uptaking of virtualization technologies and the growing usage of public cloud infrastructures, an ever larger number of applications run outside of the traditional enterprise’s perimeter, and require new security paradigms that fit the typical agility and elasticity of cloud models in service creation and management. Though some recent proposals have integrated security appliances in the logical application topology, we argue that this approach is sub-optimal. Indeed, we believe that embedding security agents in virtualization containers and delegating the control logic to the software orchestrator provides a much more effective, flexible, and scalable solution to the problem. In this paper, we motivate our mindset and outline a novel framework for assessing cyber-threats of virtualized applications and services. We also review existing technologies that build the foundation of our proposal, which we are going to develop in the context of a joint research project

Humanoid Robots

For many years, the human being has been trying, in all ways, to recreate the complex mechanisms that form the human body. Such task is extremely complicated and the results are not totally satisfactory. However, with increasing technological advances based on theoretical and experimental researches, man gets, in a way, to copy or to imitate some systems of the human body. These researches not only intended to create humanoid robots, great part of them constituting autonomous systems, but also, in some way, to offer a higher knowledge of the systems that form the human body, objectifying possible applications in the technology of rehabilitation of human beings, gathering in a whole studies related not only to Robotics, but also to Biomechanics, Biomimmetics, Cybernetics, among other areas. This book presents a series of researches inspired by this ideal, carried through by various researchers worldwide, looking for to analyze and to discuss diverse subjects related to humanoid robots. The presented contributions explore aspects about robotic hands, learning, language, vision and locomotion

Understanding and Managing Medical Data and Knowledge Dynamics

For several decades, Artificial Intelligence is concerned with the definition of the concept of knowledge in order to exploit it for various purposes such as information retrieval, decision support or semantic interoperability. This is mainly done thanks to knowledge representation models such as ontologies aiming at representing and organising the concepts of a given domain. However, the evolution of these models and its impact on depending artefacts remain open research problems.The biomedical domain is specific in a sense that its associated knowledge is complex and constantly evolving as underlined by the ever increasing number of published scientific communications. This is why I have focus on this domain and its specificities have been the various lines I have followed during my research work.Three main thematics have focused my efforts over the past years:1- Biomedical knowledge representation2- The management of the evolution of biomedical knowledge representation models 3- The validation of biomedical knowledge representation models These topics are more largely detailed in this manuscriptDepuis plusieurs décennies, le domaine de l’Intelligence Artificielle s’intéresse à définir la notion de connaissance afin de l’exploiter à des fins diverses dans plusieurs cadres d’application tels que la recherche d’information, l’aide à la décision ou encore l’interopérabilité sémantique. Ceci est en partie réalisé grâce à l’utilisation de modèles de représentation des connaissances tels que les ontologies permettant la spécification d’une conceptualisation. Cependant, les aspects liés à l'évolution des connaissances et des modèles qui leur sont associés restent largement inexplorés et demeurent des problèmes de recherche ouverts.Le domaine biomédical est un domaine très riche dans la mesure où les connaissances qu’il intègre sont complexes et en perpétuelle évolution comme le démontre le nombre sans cesse croissant de communications scientifiques publiées au quotidien. C’est pour ces raisons qu’il a suscité mon intérêt et ses spécificités ont constitué la ligne directrice de mes activités de recherche.Trois grandes thématiques ont focalisé mes efforts au cours de ces dernières années et ont concentré la majeure partie de mes contributions scientifiques et collaborations dans ce domaine particulier.1- La représentation des connaissances en santé.2- La gestion de l'évolution des modèles de représentation des connaissances biomédicales.3- La validation des modèles de représentation des connaissances biomédicales.Mes travaux autour de ces trois thématiques sont détaillés dans ce manuscrit

Aviation Noise Impact Management

This open access book provides a view into the state-of-the-art research on aviation noise and related annoyance. The book will primarily focus on the achievements of the ANIMA project (Aviation Noise Impact Management through Novel Approaches), but not exclusively. The content has a broader theme in order to encompass. regulation issues, the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) balanced approach, progresses made on technologies and reduction of noise at source, impact of possible future civil supersonic aircraft, land-use planning issues, as well as the core topics of the ANIMA project, i.e. impact on human beings, annoyance, quality of life, health and findings of the project in this respect. This book differs from traditional research programmes on aviation noise as the authors endeavour, not to lower noise at source, but to reduce the annoyance. This book examines these non-acoustic factors in an effort to help those most affected by aviation noise – communities living close to airports, and also help airport managers, policy-makers, local authorities and researchers to deal with this issue holistically. The book concludes with some recommendations for EU, national and local policy-makers, airport and aviation authorities, and more broadly a scientifically literate audience. These recommendations may help to identify gaps for progress in terms of research but also genuine implementation actions for political and regulatory authorities

Capital, State, Empire

The United States presents the greatest source of global geo-political violence and instability. Guided by the radical political economy tradition, this book offers an analysis of the USA’s historical impulse to weaponize communication technologies. Scott Timcke explores the foundations of this impulse, then demonstrates how the militarization of digital society creates structural injustices and social inequalities. He analyses how new digital communication technologies support and fund indirect and informal means that ensures American paramountcy, in turn sustaining enduring conditions for worldwide capital accumulation. Identifying selected features of contemporary American society, Capital, State, Empire undertakes a materialist critique of this digital society and assesses the impact of The New American Way of War, understood here as an outcome of a capitalist state’s military budgets priorities under imperial strategy