Application of Absorbing Markov Chains to the Assessment of Education Attainment Rates within Air Force Materiel Command Civilian Personnel

Increasing the education levels of an organization is a common response when attempting to improve organizational performance; however, organizational performance improvements are seldom found when the current and future workforce education levels are unknown. In this research, absorbing Markov chains are used to probabilistically forecast the educational composition of the Air Force Materiel Command civilian workforce to enable organizational performance improvements. Through the purposeful decoupling of effects resulting from recent workforce arrivals and education level progressions, this research attempts to determine the implications that stationarity assumptions have throughout the model development process of an absorbing Markov chain. The results of the analysis indicate that the four combinations of stationarity assumptions perform similarly at representing the historical data and that the forecasted educational attainment rates of the Air Force Materiel Command civilian workforce are expected to increase significantly

Probabilistic and artificial intelligence modelling of drought and agricultural crop yield in Pakistan

Pakistan is a drought-prone, agricultural nation with hydro-meteorological imbalances that increase the scarcity of water resources, thus, constraining water availability and leading major risks to the agricultural productivity sector and food security. Rainfall and drought are imperative matters of consideration, both for hydrological and agricultural applications. The aim of this doctoral thesis is to advance new knowledge in designing hybridized probabilistic and artificial intelligence forecasts models for rainfall, drought and crop yield within the agricultural hubs in Pakistan. The choice of these study regions is a strategic decision, to focus on precision agriculture given the importance of rainfall and drought events on agricultural crops in socioeconomic activities of Pakistan. The outcomes of this PhD contribute to efficient modelling of seasonal rainfall, drought and crop yield to assist farmers and other stakeholders to promote more strategic decisions for better management of climate risk for agriculturalreliant nations

A METHODOLOGY FOR TECHNOLOGY-TUNED DECISION BEHAVIOR ALGORITHMS FOR TACTICS EXPLORATION

In 2016, the USAF found that current development and acquisition methods may be inadequate to achieve air superiority in 2030. The airspace is expected to be highly contested by 2030 due to the Anti-Access/Area Denial strategies being employed by adversaries. Capability gaps must be addressed in order to maintain air superiority. The USAF identified new development and acquisition paradigms as the number one non-material capability development area. The idea of a new development and acquisition paradigm is not new. Such a paradigm shift occurred during the transition from threat-based acquisition during the cold war to capability-based acquisition during the war on terror. Investigation into current US development and acquisition methods found several notional methodologies. Effectiveness-Based Design and Technology Identification, Evaluation, and Selection for Systems-of-Systems have been proposed as notional solutions. Both methodologies seek to evaluate the means – the technologies used to perform a mission – and the ways – the tactics used to complete a mission – of the technology design space. Proper evaluation of the ways would provide critical information to the decision-maker during technology selection. These findings suggest that a new paradigm focused on effectiveness-based acquisition is needed to improve current development and acquisition methods. To evaluate the ways design space, current methods must move away from a fixed or constrained mission model to one that is minimally defined and capable of exploring tactics for each unique technology. The proposed Technology-tuned Decision Behavior Algorithms for Tactics Exploration (Tech-DEBATE) methodology enables the exploration of the ways, or more formally, the mission action design space. The methodology enables further exploration of the technology design space by improving the quantification of mission effectiveness through deep reinforcement learning in a minimally defined mission environment. The data's foundation is based on traceable tactical alternatives that increase the confidence in the measures of effectiveness for each technology-tactic alternative. The methodology enables more informed decisions for technology investment, thereby reducing risks in the development and acquisition of new technologies. The reduction in risk inherently reduces the costs and development time associated with investment in new technologies. The Tech-DEBATE methodology provides a new methodology for technology evaluation through its emphasis on quantifying mission effectiveness in a minimally defined mission to inform technology investment decisions.Ph.D

Concept of a Robust & Training-free Probabilistic System for Real-time Intention Analysis in Teams

Die Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Analyse von Teamintentionen in Smart Environments (SE). Die fundamentale Aussage der Arbeit ist, dass die Entwicklung und Integration expliziter Modelle von Nutzeraufgaben einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Entwicklung mobiler und ubiquitärer Softwaresysteme liefern können. Die Arbeit sammelt Beschreibungen von menschlichem Verhalten sowohl in Gruppensituationen als auch Problemlösungssituationen. Sie untersucht, wie SE-Projekte die Aktivitäten eines Nutzers modellieren, und liefert ein Teamintentionsmodell zur Ableitung und Auswahl geplanten Teamaktivitäten mittels der Beobachtung mehrerer Nutzer durch verrauschte und heterogene Sensoren. Dazu wird ein auf hierarchischen dynamischen Bayes’schen Netzen basierender Ansatz gewählt

Proceedings, MSVSCC 2017

Proceedings of the 11th Annual Modeling, Simulation & Visualization Student Capstone Conference held on April 20, 2017 at VMASC in Suffolk, Virginia. 211 pp

Artificial intelligence techniques towards adaptive digital games

Digital games rely on suspension of disbelief and challenge to immerse players in the game experience. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a significant role in this task, both to provide adequate challenges to the player and to generate believable behaviours. An emerging area of application for digital games is augmented reality. Theme parks are expressing interest to augment the user experience via digital games. Bringing together cyber- and physical- aspects in theme parks will provide new avenues of entertainment to customers. This thesis contributes to the field of AI in games, in particular by proposing techniques aimed at improving players' experience. The technical contributions are in the field of learning from demonstration, abstraction in learning and dynamic difficulty adjustment. In particular, we propose a novel approach to learn options for the Options framework from demonstrations; a novel approach to handle progressively refined state abstractions for the Reinforcement Learning framework; a novel approach to dynamic difficulty adjustment based on state-action values, which in our experiments we compute via Monte Carlo Tree Search. All proposed techniques are tested in video games. The final contribution is an analysis of real-world data, collected in a theme park queuing area where we deployed an augmented reality mobile game; the data we collected suggests that digital games in such environments can benefit from AI techniques, which can improve time perception in players. Time perception, in fact, is altered when players enter the state of "flow", which can only happen if suspension of disbelief is maintained and if the level of challenge is adequate. The conclusion suggests this is a promising direction for investigation in future work

Bayesian methods for knowledge transfer and policy search in reinforcement learning

How can an agent generalize its knowledge to new circumstances? To learn effectively an agent acting in a sequential decision problem must make intelligent action selection choices based on its available knowledge. This dissertation focuses on Bayesian methods of representing learned knowledge and develops novel algorithms that exploit the represented knowledge when selecting actions. Our first contribution introduces the multi-task Reinforcement Learning setting in which an agent solves a sequence of tasks. An agent equipped with knowledge of the relationship between tasks can transfer knowledge between them. We propose the transfer of two distinct types of knowledge: knowledge of domain models and knowledge of policies. To represent the transferable knowledge, we propose hierarchical Bayesian priors on domain models and policies respectively. To transfer domain model knowledge, we introduce a new algorithm for model-based Bayesian Reinforcement Learning in the multi-task setting which exploits the learned hierarchical Bayesian model to improve exploration in related tasks. To transfer policy knowledge, we introduce a new policy search algorithm that accepts a policy prior as input and uses the prior to bias policy search. A specific implementation of this algorithm is developed that accepts a hierarchical policy prior. The algorithm learns the hierarchical structure and reuses components of the structure in related tasks. Our second contribution addresses the basic problem of generalizing knowledge gained from previously-executed policies. Bayesian Optimization is a method of exploiting a prior model of an objective function to quickly identify the point maximizing the modeled objective. Successful use of Bayesian Optimization in Reinforcement Learning requires a model relating policies and their performance. Given such a model, Bayesian Optimization can be applied to search for an optimal policy. Early work using Bayesian Optimization in the Reinforcement Learning setting ignored the sequential nature of the underlying decision problem. The work presented in this thesis explicitly addresses this problem. We construct new Bayesian models that take advantage of sequence information to better generalize knowledge across policies. We empirically evaluate the value of this approach in a variety of Reinforcement Learning benchmark problems. Experiments show that our method significantly reduces the amount of exploration required to identify the optimal policy. Our final contribution is a new framework for learning parametric policies from queries presented to an expert. In many domains it is difficult to provide expert demonstrations of desired policies. However, it may still be a simple matter for an expert to identify good and bad performance. To take advantage of this limited expert knowledge, our agent presents experts with pairs of demonstrations and asks which of the demonstrations best represents a latent target behavior. The goal is to use a small number of queries to elicit the latent behavior from the expert. We formulate a Bayesian model of the querying process, an inference procedure that estimates the posterior distribution over the latent policy space, and an active procedure for selecting new queries for presentation to the expert. We show, in multiple domains, that the algorithm successfully learns the target policy and that the active learning strategy generally improves the speed of learning

Design methodology and productivity improvement in high speed VLSI circuits

2017 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document

Compilation of Abstracts, June 2016

NPS Class of June 2016This quarter’s Compilation of Abstracts summarizes cutting-edge, security-related research conducted by NPS students and presented as theses, dissertations, and capstone reports. Each expands knowledge in its field.http://archive.org/details/compilationofabs109454990