STEM Outreach Activities to Inspire Future Engineers and Scientists

With some basic tools and a plan, students can discover the exciting world engineering and science. We will provide inexpensive materials (paper, masking tape, etc.) for a hands-on activity with professional engineers who appreciate the various skills of budding engineers interested in coming into the field

DAIDS: a Distributed, Agent-based Information Dissemination System

The Distributed Agent-Based Information Dissemination System (DAIDS) concept was motivated by the need to share information among the members of a military tactical team in an atmosphere of extremely limited or intermittent bandwidth. The DAIDS approach recognizes that in many cases communications limitations will preclude the complete sharing of all tactical information between the members of the tactical team. Communications may be limited by obstructions to the line of sight between platforms; electronic warfare; or environmental conditions, or just contention from other users of that bandwidth. Since it may not be possible to achieve a complete information exchange, it is important to prioritize transmissions so the most critical information from the standpoint of the recipient is disseminated first. The challenge is to be able to determine which elements of information are the most important to each teammate. The key innovation of the DAIDS concept is the use of software proxy agents to represent the information needs of the recipient of the information. The DAIDS approach uses these proxy agents to evaluate the content of a message in accordance with the context and information needs of the recipient platform (the agent's principal) and prioritize the message for dissemination. In our research we implemented this approach and demonstrated that it provides nearly a reduction in transmission times for critical tactical reports by up to a factor of 30 under severe bandwidth limitations