Mitre Corporation

About: Mitre Corporation is a company organization based out in Bedford, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Air traffic control & National Airspace System. The organization has 4884 authors who have published 6053 publications receiving 124808 citations. The organization is also known as: Mitre & MITRE.

Agent-oriented compositional approaches to services-based cross-organizational workflow

Abstract: With the sophistication and maturity of distributed component-based services and semantic web services, the idea of specification-driven service composition is becoming a reality. One such approach is workflow composition of services that span multiple, distributed web-accessible locations. Given the dynamic nature of this domain, the adaptation of software agents represents a possible solution for the composition and enactment of cross-organizational services. This paper details design aspects of an architecture that would support this evolvable service-based workflow composition. The internal coordination and control aspects of such an architecture is addressed. These agent developmental processes are aligned with industry-standard software engineering processes.

Visual salience affects performance in a working memory task.

Abstract: Many studies of bottom-up visual attention have focused on identifying which features of a visual stimulus render it salient—i.e., make it “pop out” from its background—and on characterizing the extent to which salience predicts eye movements under certain task conditions. However, few studies have examined the relationship between salience and other cognitive functions, such as memory. We examined the impact of visual salience in an object–place working memory task, in which participants memorized the position of 3–5 distinct objects (icons) on a two-dimensional map. We found that their ability to recall an object9s spatial location was positively correlated with the object9s salience, as quantified using a previously published computational model (Itti et al., 1998). Moreover, the strength of this relationship increased with increasing task difficulty. The correlation between salience and error could not be explained by a biasing of overt attention in favor of more salient icons during memorization, since eye-tracking data revealed no relationship between an icon9s salience and fixation time. Our findings show that the influence of bottom-up attention extends beyond oculomotor behavior to include the encoding of information into memory.

Female–male differences in conversational interaction

Abstract: This article describes a preliminary experiment looking at possible differences in how females and males interact in conversation. The article analyzes data from an experiment where two females and two males talked to each other in all possible pairs; a total of 60 minutes of conversation (six dyads) was transcribed. The goal was to isolate quantifiable entities related to controlling or directing the conversation. We looked at issues such as who talked how much, how fluently or confidently – and how the two people in the conversation interacted in terms of interruptions and indications of support, agreement, or disagreement. The findings from such a small sample are only relevant to suggest hypotheses for further research. However, we noticed a number of interesting differences: the female speakers used more 1st person pronouns and fewer 3rd person references than the male speakers; the female speakers used mm hmm at a much higher frequency than the male speakers; the female speakers also interrupted each other more; and the female/female conversation seemed more fluent than the other conversations, as measured by number of disfluencies and number of affirmative transitions upon speaker change. All of these differences suggest that this area is a fruitful one for further investigation. (Conversational analysis, gender differences)

A paradigm for quality-of-service in wireless ad hoc networks using synchronous signaling and node states

Abstract: Most limitations in mechanisms geared at achieving quality-of-service (QoS) in wireless ad hoc networking can be traced to solutions based on mapping wireless networks to a wireline paradigm of nodes and links. We contend that this paradigm is not appropriate since links are not physical entities and do not accurately represent the radio frequency (RF) media. Using the link abstraction makes arbitration of the use of the RF media cumbersome leaving only overprovisioning techniques to deliver QoS. In this paper, we argue that an appropriate paradigm should match the physics of the network. The critical resource is electromagnetic spectrum in a space; in turn, this results in a complex paradigm since the part of the spectrum-space that each node wants to use is unique to that node and its destination and will overlap with parts that other nodes may want to use creating interdependences among nodes. This paper describes protocol approaches for access and routing that seek solutions within this wireless paradigm. Access is arbitrated using synchronous signaling and topology is resolved through the dissemination of node states. This approach provides an intuitive framework that provides mechanisms that can be exploited to arbitrate RF media use and implement traffic engineering techniques to deliver QoS. Our proposed approach provides a novel way of tracking the state of the network that can serve as a unified state dissemination mechanism to simultaneously support routing, multicasting, and most QoS heuristics.

Developing custom intrusion detection filters using data mining

Abstract: One aspect of constructing secure networks is identifying unauthorized use of those networks. Intrusion detection systems look for unusual or suspicious activity, such as patterns of network traffic that are likely indicators of unauthorized activity. However, normal operation often produces traffic that matches likely "attack signatures", resulting in false alarms. We are using data mining techniques to identify sequences of alarms that likely result from normal behavior, enabling construction of filters to eliminate those alarms. This can be done at a low cost for specific environments, enabling the construction of customized intrusion detection filters. We present our approach, and preliminary results identifying common sequences in alarms from a particular environment.