Fractionating Human Intelligence

What makes one person more intellectually able than another? Can the entire distribution of human intelligence be accounted for by just one general factor? Is intelligence supported by a single neural system? Here, we provide a perspective on human intelligence that takes into account how general abilities or ‘‘factors’’ reflect the functional organiza- tion of the brain. By comparing factor models of individual differences in performance with factor models of brain functional organization, we demon- strate that different components of intelligence have their analogs in distinct brain networks. Using simulations based on neuroimaging data, we show that the higher-order factor ‘‘g’’ is accounted for by cognitive tasks corecruiting multiple networks. Finally, we confirm the independence of these com- ponents of intelligence by dissociating them using questionnaire variables. We propose that intelli- gence is an emergent property of anatomically distinct cognitive systems, each of which has its own capacity

Pandemic Drugs at Pandemic Speed: Infrastructure for Accelerating COVID-19 Drug Discovery with Hybrid Machine Learning- and Physics-based Simulations on High Performance Computers

The race to meet the challenges of the global pandemic has served as a reminder that the existing drug discovery process is expensive, inefficient and slow. There is a major bottleneck screening the vast number of potential small molecules to shortlist lead compounds for antiviral drug development. New opportunities to accelerate drug discovery lie at the interface between machine learning methods, in this case developed for linear accelerators, and physics-based methods. The two in silico methods, each have their own advantages and limitations which, interestingly, complement each other. Here, we present an innovative infrastructural development that combines both approaches to accelerate drug discovery. The scale of the potential resulting workflow is such that it is dependent on supercomputing to achieve extremely high throughput. We have demonstrated the viability of this workflow for the study of inhibitors for four COVID-19 target proteins and our ability to perform the required large-scale calculations to identify lead antiviral compounds through repurposing on a variety of supercomputers

Responding to terrorism across the technological spectrum

In April 1994, the Army War College\u27s Strategic Studies Institute held its annual Strategy Conference. This year\u27s theme was The Revolution in Military Affairs: Defining an Army for the 21st Century. Dr. Bruce Hoffman presented this paper as part of a panel examining New Technologies and New Threats. Terrorism, of course, is not new. Hoffman warns, however, of the changing nature of terrorism. In the past, terrorists have been motivated by limited political and ideological objectives. Popular images fostered by terrorist events like the bombing of PAN AM Flight 103 and the attack on the Marine Barracks in Beirut notwithstanding, in the past the preponderance of terrorist attacks targeted specific individuals or small groups. The weapons of choice were the pistol, knife, and, on occasion, dynamite. Often the terrorist was a highly-trained individual, a professional in pursuit of specific political or ideological objectives. Hoffman warns that, by comparison, the terrorists of today and tomorrow are amateurs. Furthermore, they are likely to act from religious and racial convictions rather than radical political or ideological motivations. Their objective may be to kill large numbers of people. Indeed, they may want to annihilate an entire race or religious group. Not only are these amateurs less predictable and, therefore, more difficult to apprehend before the incident occurs, they have at their disposal lethal devices that range from the relatively simple fertilizer bomb to biologically-altered viruses. Military professionals and civilian planners must contend with warfare at every level. The threat posed by the changing nature of terrorism falls very much within their purview.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1257/thumbnail.jp