Kinetic and Cyber

We compare and contrast situation awareness in cyber warfare and in conventional, kinetic warfare. Situation awareness (SA) has a far longer history of study and applications in such areas as control of complex enterprises and in conventional warfare, than in cyber warfare. Far more is known about the SA in conventional military conflicts, or adversarial engagements, than in cyber ones. By exploring what is known about SA in conventional, also commonly referred to as kinetic, battles, we may gain insights and research directions relevant to cyber conflicts. We discuss the nature of SA in conventional (often called kinetic) conflict, review what is known about this kinetic SA (KSA), and then offer a comparison with what is currently understood regarding the cyber SA (CSA). We find that challenges and opportunities of KSA and CSA are similar or at least parallel in several important ways. With respect to similarities, in both kinetic and cyber worlds, SA strongly impacts the outcome of the mission. Also similarly, cognitive biases are found in both KSA and CSA. As an example of differences, KSA often relies on commonly accepted, widely used organizing representation - map of the physical terrain of the battlefield. No such common representation has emerged in CSA, yet.Comment: A version of this paper appeared as a book chapter in Cyber Defense and Situational Awareness, Springer, 2014. Prepared by US Government employees in their official duties; approved for public release, distribution unlimited. Cyber Defense and Situational Awareness. Springer International Publishing, 2014. 29-4

Replacing the Irreplaceable: Fast Algorithms for Team Member Recommendation

In this paper, we study the problem of Team Member Replacement: given a team of people embedded in a social network working on the same task, find a good candidate who can fit in the team after one team member becomes unavailable. We conjecture that a good team member replacement should have good skill matching as well as good structure matching. We formulate this problem using the concept of graph kernel. To tackle the computational challenges, we propose a family of fast algorithms by (a) designing effective pruning strategies, and (b) exploring the smoothness between the existing and the new team structures. We conduct extensive experimental evaluations on real world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency. Our algorithms (a) perform significantly better than the alternative choices in terms of both precision and recall; and (b) scale sub-linearly.Comment: Initially submitted to KDD 201

Neural correlates of confidence during item recognition and source memory retrieval: evidence for both dual-process and strength memory theories

Abstract ■ Although the medial-temporal lobes (MTL), PFC, and parietal cortex are considered primary nodes in the episodic memory network, there is much debate regarding the contributions of MTL, PFC, and parietal subregions to recollection versus familiarity (dual-process theory) and the feasibility of accounts on the basis of a single memory strength process (strength theory). To investigate these issues, the current fMRI study measured activity during retrieval of memories that differed quantitatively in terms of strength (high vs. low-confidence trials) and qualitatively in terms of recollection versus familiarity (source vs. item memory tasks). Support for each theory varied depending on which node of the episodic memory network was considered. Results from MTL best fit a dual-process account, as a dissociation was found between a right hippocampal region showing high-confidence activity during the source memory task and bilateral rhinal regions showing highconfidence activity during the item memory task. Within PFC, several left-lateralized regions showed greater activity for source than item memory, consistent with recollective orienting, whereas a right-lateralized ventrolateral area showed low-confidence activity in both tasks, consistent with monitoring processes. Parietal findings were generally consistent with strength theory, with dorsal areas showing low-confidence activity and ventral areas showing high-confidence activity in both tasks. This dissociation fits with an attentional account of parietal functions during episodic retrieval. The results suggest that both dual-process and strength theories are partly correct, highlighting the need for an integrated model that links to more general cognitive theories to account for observed neural activity during episodic memory retrieval.

Cyber Teaming and Role Specialization in a Cyber Security Defense Competition

A critical requirement for developing a cyber capable workforce is to understand how to challenge, assess, and rapidly develop human cyber skill-sets in realistic cyber operational environments. Fortunately, cyber team competitions make use of simulated operational environments with scoring criteria of task performance that objectively define overall team effectiveness, thus providing the means and context for observation and analysis of cyber teaming. Such competitions allow researchers to address the key determinants that make a cyber defense team more or less effective in responding to and mitigating cyber attacks. For this purpose, we analyzed data collected at the 12th annual Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (MACCDC, http://www.maccdc.org), where eight teams were evaluated along four independent scoring dimensions: maintaining services, incident response, scenario injects, and thwarting adversarial activities. Data collected from the 13-point OAT (Observational Assessment of Teamwork) instrument by embedded observers and a cyber teamwork survey completed by all participants were used to assess teamwork and leadership behaviors and team composition and work processes, respectively. The scores from the competition were used as an outcome measure in our analysis to extract key features of team process, structure, leadership, and skill-sets in relation to effective cyber defense. We used Bayesian regression to relate scored performance during the competition to team skill composition, team experience level, and an observational construct of team collaboration. Our results indicate that effective collaboration, experience, and functional role-specialization within the teams are important factors that determine the success of these teams in the competition and are important observational predictors of the timely detection and effective mitigation of ongoing cyber attacks. These results support theories of team maturation and the development of functional team cognition applied to mastering cybersecurity

Rules and more rules: The accessibility of productions in highly trained younger and older adults

Under the tenets of Anderson\u27s ACT-R model (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998), an information-processing system is governed by a library of production rules which specify, for a given stimulus configuration, the requisite processing procedure. Access to productions is postulated to be in parallel. We tested this postulate by measuring production selection and execution as a function of the size of the production library (varied from set size 1 to 4), using arithmetic-like rules that operated on digit stimuli. After five sessions of training, the ACT-R prediction was confirmed for most younger and a few older participants: beyond the special case where only one production was active, increases in set size had no further effect on response time. The step increase from size 1 to size \u3e1 was substantial and was represented by an analysis of RT distributions as a shift in all three ex-Gaussian distribution parameters, mu , sigma , and tau . It is suggested that the step size 1 to size \u3e1 reflects either the engagement of processes active in cognitive control or the manifestation of a limited capacity system. The form of the step function can also be characterized in terms of task switch costs (Rogers & Monsell, 1995), in which case there were constant global and local switch costs attached to the maintenance of any production set \u3e1. In older participants, the increase in RT was negatively accelerated and all of the individuals had equivalent RTs for set size \u3e2. The curvilinear form of the older adult function was largely determined by global switch costs and a corresponding shift in the mu parameter, which has been implicated in peripheral processing (Balota & Speiler, 1999). Preliminary studies also suggest that in either age group, non- homogeneous rule sets may be less well-behaved

Modeling age-related memory deficits: A twoparameter solution

Recent research and meta-analytic reviews suggest that 1 observed pattern of impaired and intact memory performance with advancing age is a deficit in measures of episodic but not semantic memory. The authors used computational modeling to explore a number of age-related parameters to account for this pattern. A 2-parameter solution based on lifelong experience successfully fit the pattern of results in 5 published studies of the word-frequency mirror effect and paired-associate recognition. Lifelong experience increases the strength (resting level of activation) of concepts in the network but also saturates the network with an increasing number of episodic associations to each concept. More episodic associations to each concept mean that activation spreads more diffusely, making retrieval of any newly established memory trace less likely; however, the greater strength of a concept makes recognition based on familiarity more likely. The simulations provide good quantitative fits to the extant age-related memory literature and support the plausibility of this mechanistic account. Keywords: memory and aging, item recognition, associative recognition, recollection, meta-modeling Supplemental data: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.22.1.104.supp Prominent researchers have called for formalized models of cognitive aging processes for the purpose of organizing and integrating this sizeable research literature in a rigorous and testable manner (e.g., Memory impairments are a salient characteristic of aging, yet not all memories are equally subject to decline. Longitudinal studies have demonstrated separate trajectories for measures of episodic and semantic memory The Pattern of Age-Related Decline of Memory Function A common focus in the cognitive psychology of adult development has been to establish patterns of impaired and intact performance with advancing age. A number of meta-analytic reviews of age-related changes in memory performance 1 Across a variety of experimental paradigms and over 100 published studies, there are few, if any, age differences for indirect 1 Our view is based on the process distinction proposed by Reder (1999) of procedural (skills) and nonprocedural (semantic, priming, episodic) memory processes. As nonprocedural memory processes, the dual processes of familiarity and recollection operate in the source of activation confusion model on a common representation of semantic and episodic nodes. This differs from the modular view of declarative (semantic, episodic) and nondeclarative (skills, priming) memor

Modeling age-related memory deficits: a two-parameter solution.

Recent research and meta-analytic reviews suggest that 1 observed pattern of impaired and intact memory performance with advancing age is a deficit in measures of episodic but not semantic memory. The authors used computational modeling to explore a number of age-related parameters to account for this pattern. A 2-parameter solution based on lifelong experience successfully fit the pattern of results in 5 published studies of the word-frequency mirror effect and paired-associate recognition. Lifelong experience increases the strength (resting level of activation) of concepts in the network but also saturates the network with an increasing number of episodic associations to each concept. More episodic associations to each concept mean that activation spreads more diffusely, making retrieval of any newly established memory trace less likely; however, the greater strength of a concept makes recognition based on familiarity more likely. The simulations provide good quantitative fits to the extant age-related memory literature and support the plausibility of this mechanistic account.</p

Participation shifts explain degree distributions in a human communications network.

Human interpersonal communications drive political, technological, and economic systems, placing importance on network link prediction as a fundamental problem of the sciences. These systems are often described at the network-level by degree counts -the number of communication links associated with individuals in the network-that often follow approximate Pareto distributions, a divergence from Poisson-distributed counts associated with random chance. A defining challenge is to understand the inter-personal dynamics that give rise to such heavy-tailed degree distributions at the network-level; primarily, these distributions are explained by preferential attachment, which, under certain conditions, can create power law distributions; preferential attachment's prediction of these distributions breaks down, however, in conditions with no network growth. Analysis of an organization's email network suggests that these degree distributions may be caused by the existence of individual participation-shift dynamics that are necessary for coherent communication between humans. We find that the email network's degree distribution is best explained by turn-taking and turn-continuing norms present in most social network communication. We thus describe a mechanism to explain a long-tailed degree distribution in conditions with no network growth

Memory for Items and Associations: Distinct Representations and Processes in Associative Recognition.

In two experiments, participants studied word pairs and later discriminated old (intact) word pairs from foils, including recombined word pairs and pairs including one or two previously unstudied words. Rather than making old/new memory judgments, they chose one of five responses: (1) Old-Old (original), (2) Old-Old (rearranged), (3) Old-New, (4) New-Old, (5) New-New. To tease apart the effects of item familiarity from those of associative strength, we varied both how many times a specific word-pair was repeated (1 or 5) and how many different word pairs were associated with a given word (1 or 5). Participants could discriminate associative information from item information such that they recognized which word of a foil was new, or whether both were new, as well as discriminating recombined studied words from original pairings. The error and latency data support the view that item and associative information are stored as distinct memory representations and make separate contributions at retrieval.</p