Pitt gets more defense dollars

Two Pitt researchers and their colleagues from universities across the nation have secured the… Two Pitt researchers and their colleagues from universities across the nation have secured the patronage of the Department of Defense for three projects with possible implications for military and civilian technology.

Pitt’s Michael Lewis of the School of Information Sciences and Jeremy Levy of the Department of Physics and Astronomy will collaborate with researchers across disciplines and state borders on projects that focus largely on improving communication strategies, be they between military officers and their troops or across cultural and lingual boundaries.

Lewis is involved in two separate projects funded by grants from the Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative that deal with both of these communication issues.

Lewis said he believes the review board for the MURI grants took an interest in proposals like his in light of the government’s recognition of its increasingly important and increasingly difficult interactions with countries in the Middle East.

“If you follow our military’s progression in Iraq from ‘Shock and Awe’ to the current emphasis on peace-keeping, negotiation and comity under Gen. Petraeus you see the Defense Department’s growing realization that our weaknesses may lie in a lack of cultural understanding rather than inadequate military might,” Lewis said.

To remedy this, one of Lewis’s projects will utilize his expertise in a field that is something of a hybrid between social psychology and information sciences.

“When people from different cultures encounter each other, particularly under stressful conditions, it is easy for misunderstandings to arise and escalate, leading to unintended things such as the slaughter of civilians or the alienation of potential allies,” Lewis said.

“My own part of the overall research in the project centers on developing an online simulation environment for capturing intra- and intercultural negotiation behavior of participants from the Middle East.”

With geographic distance complicating Lewis’ team’s need for a large, diverse sampling of cultures to study in order to develop effective computer training modules, they will rely on access to their sample populations through an online environment of their own creation to simulate negotiation practices.

Here, members of different cultural groups will be able to draw up their proposals using menus, prompts and instructions in their own language.

Lewis hopes this will ensure that the environment will feel as natural as possible for each contributing culture, thus yielding data that can be better analyzed for cross-cultural similarities in negotiations and intercultural idiosyncrasies.

The team will then attempt to review the information with an eye for important procedures formerly lost in translation in communications across cultural boundaries and eventually incorporated into “virtual reality training simulations” for military personnel.

Lewis’ second project has similar objectives, albeit a little closer to home.

Together with researchers from CMU, Cornell, MIT and George Mason University, Lewis will study the pros and cons of restructuring military practices so that communication follows a more lateral route as opposed to the traditional top-down model and incorporates more automation.

The basis of this proposal is that communication will be more effective and efficient the closer the order originates to the situation and the greater the control military operators have over their automated devices.

More than a matter of streamlining communication, difficulties arise in procedures like this as the government hopes to increasingly substitute robotic communicators for humans.

“It’s one thing to design something like a Roomba,” Lewis said, referring to the popular consumer robot vacuum cleaner. “It’s designed to navigate out of corners and return to the center of the room and all that, but you start putting 15 of those things in your room and you don’t want them to do random things,” he said.

Expectations change, too: Whereas before the lone Roomba was expected to cover the space however it saw fit, 15 Roombas would be expected to systematically sweep the area, spreading out, maximizing efficiency and recognizing where to work so as not to get in the way of others.

“You move this same scenario to a military operation or a search and rescue operation and it just grows that much more complex,” Lewis said.

Jeremy Levy’s main obstacle in his MURI project also lies in manipulating technology.

“We want to develop new material systems that exploit electron spin or magnetic behavior to create more energy-efficient electronics, combine logic and memory and transmit information,” Levy said.

To some extent, the general public is already familiar with technology of this kind – it is utilized in every computer hard drive.

But Levy says his team is looking for effects that involve electron spin that might be used for devices five, 10 or 20 years down the road.

Electron spin can be used to read information in magnetic materials or even store and process information in a smaller space, using less power, Levy said.

“The energy required to flip a spin from “up”, or clockwise, to “down,” or counter-clockwise, is much smaller than the energy required to switch a transistor on and off in a computer,” Levy said.

“Magnetic domains can oscillate at frequencies much higher than the clock rate of existing computers, easily reaching 100 GHz. We want to explore how these oscillations can be used to transmit and process information at comparable rates,” he said.

Of the 143 competitive proposals vying for the Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative grants, 30 were chosen to split the $150.6 million in grant money over a period of five years.