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The effects of two advanced level-dependent communication devices on face-to-face speech intelligibility in military noises were investigated. Devices were the NACRE QuietPro and the PELTOR Powercom Plus. Noises from the LAVIII and Bison light-artillery vehicles were reproduced in a noise simulation room at 80-95 dBA. Over 45 subjects covering a wide range of hearing profiles from normal hearing to severe hearing loss were tested using sentences from the Hearing&-In-Noise Test (HINT). When used as passive devices with the electronics powered off, the two devices performed as expected from conventional hearing protectors having the same amount of attenuation. In this mode, there were large performance differences among subject groups in terms of the effects of wearing the devices compared to unprotected listening. However, when used in active talk-through (or surround) mode, both devices showed large speech intelligibility benefits over the passive mode and demonstrated a level of performance often exceeding that in unprotected listening. The subject group with the most impaired hearing benefitted the most from the active mode. The findings indicate that the current technology of high-end tactical communication devices could provide substantial benefits in situational awareness during noisy military operations for all hearing grades.

While developing a documentation solution for medics in the field, confidence measures have been incorporated to improve command rejection and minimize enrollment. The new enrollment algorithms makes speaker-dependent recognition competitive with speaker-independent recognition., The original document contains color images.

As compared to their mounted peers, dismounted soldiers lack effective radio communications, situation awareness displays, and request or reporting systems that integrate with other elements of the combined arms team. This project looks to emerging commercial technologies for mobile cellular networks as a cost effective means to fill these gaps. These technologies are in wide use across the international commercial sector and allow robust and high bandwidth communications in a very small package. They are employed in all types of terrain, and international standards have emerged that allow communications between disparate systems. The study team concluded that a brigade/battalion owned CDMA network delivered the most value at the lowest cost as compared to Nett Warrior systems. This is a standalone unclassified network owned by the brigade. The brigade decides who to allow to enter the network and what information to provide on that network. The network consists of static cell towers on bases, mobile cell towers in vehicles, and if necessary, dismounted cell towers covering small patrols.

Presented at the 32nd Annual USN-USMC Spectrum Management Conference, 7-11 March 2011, San Diego, CA.

This paper describes work to develop a hands-free, heads-up control system for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) under an SBIR Phase I contract. Industry is building upon pioneering work that it has done in creating a speech recognition system that works well in noisy environments, by developing a robust key word spotting algorithm enabling UGV Operators to give speech commands to the UGV completely hands-free. Industry will also research and develop two sub-vocal control modes: whisper speech and teeth clicks. Industry is also developing a system that will enable the Operator to drive a UGV, with a high level of fidelity, to a location selected by the Operator using hands-free commands in conjunction with image segmentation and video overlays. This Phase I effort will culminate in a proof-of-concept demonstration of a hands-free, heads-up system, implemented on a small UGV, that will enable the Operator have a high level of fidelity for control of the system., Presented at the NDIA Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering and Technology Symposium, held in Dearborn, MI on 9-11 August 2011. Published in the Proceedings of the NDIA Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering and Technology Symposium, August 2011.

The SRI speaker recognition system for the 2010 NIST speaker recognition evaluation (SRE) incorporates multiple subsystemswith a variety of features and modeling techniques. We describe our strategy for this year's evaluation, from the use of speech recognition and speech segmentation to the individual system descriptions as well as the final combination. Our results show that under most conditions, the cepstral systems tend to perform the best, but that other, non-cepstral systems have the most complementarity. The combination of several subsystems with the use of adequate side information gives a 35% improvement on the standard telephone condition. We also show that a constrained cepstral systembased on nasal syllables tends to be more robust to vocal effort variabilities., To be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) to be held in Prague, Czech Republic 22-27 May 2011. The original document contains color images.

In 1998, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) took a heightened interest in the role of language in airline accidents. Member states agreed to take steps to ensure air traffic control personnel and flight crews involved in flight operations where the use of the English language is required were proficient in conducting and comprehending radiotelephony communications in English. Since then, ICAO developed its English language requirements and urged its members to document their English Language Proficiency (ELP) test implementation plans by March 8, 2008. This report is a compilation of written responses and comments by a group of 48 U.S. pilots of their difficulties in international operations. There were 12 international U.S. pilots from American, Continental, Delta, and United Airlines. In this report, the pilots' responses to questions 54-59 and their comments from discussions of those questions with 2 interviewers are presented as a compiled narrative. We derived 5 recommendations from these interviews. (1) Research is needed to determine the optimal speech rate for ATC messages. (2) ATC messages must be delivered using standard ICAO terms and phraseology. (3) Graphic and text representations of taxi clearances, route clearances, and route modifications should be made available to pilots on the flight deck as stand-alone messages. (4) Research is needed to identify how controllers communicate nonstandard situations (e.g., maneuvering around thunderstorms, traffic conflicts, delays). (5) Research is needed to determine the extent to which the absence of party-line information has on situational awareness and safety prior to takeoff and landing as pilots attempt to discern the intentions (and potential threat) of other pilots (especially those less proficient in English).

The objective of this research paper is to document our experiences building an assured services SIP (AS-SIP) end instrument from a commercial, embedded SIP stack as defined by the DOD Unified Capabilities Requirements specification. The SIP stack chosen came from a company called Unicoi Systems. We chose an existing reference design. The reference design also included a complete SIP phone application embedded into a Fanstel ST-3116 phone. The Unicoi source code could also be cross compiled for nearly any host based platform such as Windows. This report is based on the following research and validation testing: - L-3 Maritime Systems internal research, - L-3 Maritime Systems VoIP lab research, - L-3 Maritime Systems prototyping of a VoIP Communications Terminal,- - Unified Capabilities Requirements 2008, Change 1 Final - L-3 Maritime Systems Technical Report Intelligent Advanced Communications IP Telephony Feasibility for the US Navy, Volumes 1 and 2 (ISRN L3COM/Maritime Systems/TR-2007/001). - Unicoi Fusion RTOS, SIP and networking stacks, call manager and voice engine - REDCOM Slice2100 soft switch with Transip, HDX - GL Communications VoIP quality test tool. - Unicoi Licensing requirements - Wireshark The major findings are: - SIP stack behavior and characteristics vary substantially among vendors. - Unlike traditional TDM based phones, SIP stacks and consequently SIP phones are somewhat switch specific in terms of compatibility. Where you can easily plug a TDM based phone into just about any TDM network, the same is not true for IP phones integrated with the SIP stack or at all. The inherent nature of the embedded environment makes the embedded solution far more secure than a typical PC based soft phone. A closed network environment on board a ship would provide an optimal environment for IP based communications., ISRN-L3COM/MARITIMESYSTEMS/TR--2011/002. The original document contains color images.

The objective of this research paper is to detail our exploration of open source SIP solutions as a viable alternative to building an Assured Services SIP end instrument (aka IP phone) as defined by the DOD Unified Capabilities and requirements specification. This report is based on the following research and validation testing: - L-3 Maritime Systems internal research, - L-3 Maritime Systems VoIP lab research, - L-3 Maritime Systems prototyping of a VoIP Communications Terminal, - Unified Capabilities Requirements 2008 Change 1, - L-3 Maritime Systems Technical Report Intelligent Advanced Communications IP Telephony Feasibility for the US Navy, Volumes 1 and 2 (ISRN L3COM/Maritime Systems/TR-2007/001), - L-3 Maritime Systems Technical Report Intelligent Advanced Communications IP Telephony Feasibility for the US Navy, Phase 2 (ISRN L3COM/Maritime Systems/TR-2009/001), - OSIP, an open source SIP stack, - SipXtapi, an open source SIP stack, - SipXtapi-3.3.0, an open source SIP stack, - REDCOM Slice2100 soft switch with Transip, HDX, - GL Communications VoIP quality test tool, - Wireshark, - Licensing requirements and legal implications of various open source VoIP solutions. The major findings are: - SIP stack behavior and characteristics varies substantially among vendors. - Unlike traditional TDM based phones, SIP stacks and consequently SIP phones are somewhat switch specific in terms of compatibility and vary substantially in terms of what they chose to support. Though one can plug a TDM-based phone into another TDM network and base functionality will work, the same is not true for IP phones. - 2 of the 3 open source SIP stacks we evaluated were maintained outside the United States. - The SipxTapi package in particular has over 13,000 source files; vetting the source for potential malware or any type of security risk would be extremely difficult. None of the open source stacks we surveyed had support for IPV6 fully integrated with the SIP stack. A st, ISRN-L3COM/MARITIMESYSTEMS/TR--2011/001. This document is the third in a series of research papers that laid the foundation for the implementation of the Assured Services (AS) Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) (AS-SIP) stack, as well as the foundation for the methods used to test the network for Mean Opinion Scores. The original document contains color images.

The United States Air Forces generates various waste during the repair and overhaul activities. These wastes can involve hazardous material. Depending on the material, technologies exist or could be readily developed to convert wastes into feed-stock for other processes The old concept of managing material from cradle-to-grave now has evolved into cradle-to-cradle. This concept goes beyond the disposal of waste and can be even more cost-effective than recycling. The objective is to generate ?food? by identifying and developing other processes to use current wastes in its own production processes. By shifting from waste disposal to an endless reusing model improves cost efficiency and reduces the overall environmental impact (not limited to landfill space, water consumption and carbon footprint). This research will develop a methodology to employ state-of-the-art commercial practices to analyze depot waste production processes. The goal is to identify and classify waste generated by volume, hazard, and costs, then analyze the environmental flow by comparing government and commercial users of by-products in a synergy model. Optimal solutions for current product flow will be identified, along with potential areas for investment in by-product technologies. Solutions are mutually beneficial for both parties not only economically but also from social and environmental concerns., The original document contains color images.

This final report provides research results in the areas of automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech processing, machine translation (MT), natural language processing (NLP), and information retrieval (IR).

A critical challenge for military personnel when operating in foreign countries is effective communication with the local population. To address this issue, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) created the Spoken Language Communication and Translation Systems for Tactical Use (TRANSTAC) program. The program's goal is to develop speech-to-speech translation technologies enabling English speakers to quickly communicate with the local population without an interpreter. DARPA has funded the National Institutes of Standards and Technology to lead the design and implementation of the TRANSTAC performance evaluations. This article presents these evaluations that enabled the collection of rich quantitative and qualitative metrics., Published in ITEA Journal, v32 p69-75, 2011.

Link adaptation is a promising technique for increasing the data rate and spectral efficiency of wireless data-centric networks, without wasting power or sacrificing the bit error rate (BER) performance. The underlying premise of link adaptation is a real-time balancing of the link budget by dynamically adapting the transmitted power level, modulation (signal constellation size), coding rate, block length (symbol rate), or any combination of these parameters to take advantage of prevailing channel conditions. However, conventional adaptive modulation schemes were primarily designed for wireless networks that carry only homogeneous traffic, and thus may not be well suited for next-generation wireless multimedia networks. This report considers the problem of designing an adaptive hierarchical modulation for supporting multimedia transmission over multipath fading channels, in a cross-layer design paradigm. In particular, a method to mechanize a prioritized unicast transmission using hierarchical modulations at the physical layer in response to the disparate quality of service (QoS) requirements for multimedia traffic in an integrated voice/data networks is discussed., Prepared in cooperation with Prairie View A&M University, Prairie View, TX.

The total duration of the project is divided into 2 phases The first phase planned for the period May 2008 to Oct 2008. The second phase planned for Nov 2008 to April 2008. It has the following 3 work-packages (WP). This project counts on Voice of America (VOA) data collection performed by LDC in the several past years. The VOA data will need to be completed with the available meta-information, especially about the language(s) contained. The following step will consist of cleaning the data and selecting relevant speech information, as we are aware of the automatically acquired data being quite dirty for the purposes of LRE: 1. automatic segmentation into speech, music and noise segments, while only speech will be retained. The speech/music segmentation was the topic of a diploma thesis finished at our department [Hovorka2006] and is available for use in this project. 2. voice activity detection (VAD) that will be performed by our phoneme recognizer [Schwarz2006] with all phoneme classes linked to speech class. This setup was successfully used in a wide range of applications such as speaker recognition, language recognition, speech transcription and spoken term detection and evaluated in several NIST evaluations. 3. detecting telephone conversations in the data. In this project, we will mainly investigate the data that is as closed as possible to the target domain: conversational telephone speech (CTS). Therefore, we will concentrate on the segments with detected telephone speech (people calling in the broadcast) as we believe these should correspond the best to CTS. Initial work on Thai done for NIST LRE 2007 has shown a yield of 8 hours of telephone conversations from approximately 400 hours of VOA data downloaded from the Internet archive of VOA., The original document contains color images.

There is considerable interest in detecting people crossing the border with fewer false alarms and high confidence. This capability requires understanding the phenomenology of various sensor modalities and developing algorithms based on the phenomenology. In an effort to develop this capability, U.S. Army Research Laboratory scientists went to the southwest border to collect data using acoustic, seismic, passive infrared (IR), profiling, electric field, magnetic field, radar, sonar, visible, and IR imaging sensors. In this report, we discuss the data collection effort and resultant data, phenomenology of various sensor modalities, and robust detection algorithms. In the future, the acoustic sensor data will be processed to determine the characteristic features of human voice (formants, etc.), the seismic data will be processed using the ground transfer function to determine the cadence of the person walking (as opposed to an animal), and the radar and ultrasonic data will be processed to determine the Doppler frequency resulting from various limb movements., The original document contains color images.

We are proposing a link layer for a new VHF/UHF narrowband (25 kHz) waveform (NBWF) to be standardised by NATO for combat net radio (CNR). The user requirements are for a networking waveform providing concurrent voice and IP data. The primary voice service is push-to-talk (PTT) multicast to reach all or a predefined group of users in a multi-hop network. The primary vocoder to be used is MELPe, but other vocoders are also required to be supported. We will try to serve multicast voice by reserving resources only when required, including any required automatic relays. Data transfer relies on a combination of contention and reservation. The paper will outline the proposed link layer, with focus on the most challenging services. A simulator is being developed, based on Omnet++. Some results for the performance (delay and probability of success) of multicast voice are presented, in addition to initial performance for data services. Simulation results are compared to analytical estimates., See also ADA568727. Military Communications and Networks (Communications et reseaux militaires). RTO-MP-IST-092

In this paper, we describe an application of speaker verification using Romanian vowels as speaker's models in case of a small Romanian language database. Afterwards the models are classified with the powerful technique named SVM., See also ADA564697. Information Assurance and Cyber Defence (Assurance de l'information et cyberdefense). RTO-MP-IST-091

This paper examines tagging models for spontaneous English speech transcripts. We analyze the performance of state-of-the-art tagging models, either generative or discriminative left-to-right or bidirectional, with or without latent annotations, together with the use of ToBI break indexes and several methods for segmenting the speech transcripts (i.e. conversation side, speaker turn, or human annotated sentence). Based on these studies we observe that: (1) bidirectional models tend to achieve better accuracy levels than left-to-right models, (2) generative models seem to perform somewhat better than discriminative models on this task, and (3) prosody improves tagging performance of models on conversation sides, but has much less impact on smaller segments. We conclude that, although the use of break indexes can indeed significantly improve performance over baseline models without them on conversation sides, tagging accuracy improves more by using smaller segments for which the impact of the break indexes is marginal., Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 821 831, MIT, Massachusetts, USA, 9-11 October 2010.

Service quality on computer and network systems has become increasingly important as many conventional service transactions are moved online. Service quality of computer and network services can be measured by the performance of the service process in throughput, delay, and so on. On a computer and network system, competing service requests of users and associated service activities change the state of limited system resources which in turn affects the achieved service quality. Modeling dynamic relations of service activities, system state and service quality is required to determine if users' service requests and requirements of service quality can be satisfied by the system with limited resources and how the system and service configuration can be adapted to meet service quality requirements. This paper presents our empirical study to establish activity-state-quality models for a voice communication service. We run experiments to collect system dynamics data under various service conditions and use statistical techniques to analyze experimental data and build activity-state-quality models. The results reveal four major types of dynamic relations among service activity parameters, system resource state, and the network throughput--a measure of achieved service quality for the voice communication service. Although delay-related measures are also important for voice data communication, they are not collected in this study. Five system state variables concerning the memory, CPU, process and IP resources are uncovered to be affected by service activity parameters significantly and be associated with the achieved service quality closely. We also obtain an insight about increasing the size of the buffer which holds voice data before transmission over the network to alleviate the workload on system resources and maintain the network throughout when the number of client requests and the client requirement in voice quality increase., Published in Information Knowledge Systems Management v9 p99-116, 2010.

To provide Quality of Service (QoS) demanded by many online services (e.g., e-commerce), computer and network systems need to have QoS monitoring and adaptation which must be based on cause-effect dynamics relations among service activities, the state of system resources, and the QoS performance of service processes. This paper presents our study on cause-effect dynamics models for one of computer and network services, the voice communication service with the throughput of network data as the QoS feature of interest. Experiments are conducted to obtain computer and network data under various service conditions that are set up using three service parameters: the sampling rate, the number of clients and the buffer size. The experimental data is then analyzed. We uncover four major types of cause-effect dynamics. We found a set of five system state variables concerning the memory, CPU, process and IP resources that are significantly affected by the service parameters and are closely linked to the network throughput performance of the voice communication service. New insights are also gained about satisfying high QoS demands by properly increasing the size of the buffer which holds the network data before the data transmission., U.S. Government or Federal Rights License. Proceedings of the 2010 Industrial Engineering Research Conference.

The problem of localizing in-band wormhole tunnels in MANETs is considered. In an in-band wormhole attack, colluding attackers use a covert tunnel to create the illusion that two remote network regions are directly connected. This apparent shortcut in the topology attracts traffic which the attackers can then control. To identify the nodes participating in the attack, it is necessary to determine the path through which victims' traffic is covertly tunneled. This paper begins with binary hypothesis testing, which tests whether a suspected path is carrying tunneled traffic. The detection algorithm is presented and evaluated using synthetic voice over IP (VoIP) traffic generated in a network testbed. After that, we consider multiple hypothesis testing to find the most likely tunnel path among a large number of candidates. We present a tunnel path estimation algorithm and its numerical evaluation using Poisson traffic. A main feature of the proposed algorithms is their robustness against the presence of chaff packets (possibly introduced to avoid detection), packet loss caused by unreliable wireless links, and clock skew at different nodes., Sponsored in part by Army Research Office grant no. W911NF-08-1-0238.

We describe recent research to enhance a training system which interprets Call for Fire (CFF) radio artillery requests. The research explores the feasibility of extending the system to also understand calls for Close Air Support (CAS). This work includes automated analysis of complex language behavior in CAS missions, evaluation of speech recognition performance, and simulation of speech recognition errors., Presented at the of the Army Science Conference (27th) held in Orlando, FL on 29 November-2 Dec 2010. Published in the Proceedings of the Army Science Conference (27th), 2010.

This study evaluated the effects of 25 mg of intramuscular (IM) ketamine versus 10 mg of IM morphine versus saline placebo on the performance of representative Warrior Skill Tasks in 48 healthy subjects. Ketamine demonstrated rapid onset of action and hemodynamic stability but did not result in improved Soldier performance. Overall, subjects reported more symptoms associated with ketamine versus morphine and placebo, chiefly among them dizziness, poor concentration, and feelings of happiness. Performance decrements on ketamine, when present, manifested as slower performance times rather than procedural errors. This may represent the adoption of a cautious posture suggested by risk propensity testing whereby the subject is aware of his or her impairment, trading speed for preservation of task accuracy. Despite the fact that subjects were more symptomatic on ketamine, the Warrior Skill Tasks were largely resistant to performance decrements, suggesting that a trained task skill (autonomous phase) remains somewhat resilient to the drugged state at this dosage., The original document contains color images.

In 2005, the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) identified communication as one of the three pillars of leadership, and, in reaction, created the Leadership Communication Skills Center (LCSC) in 2007. Since the introduction of the QEP, the University has placed a greater emphasis on communication skills and publication. In addition, a 2008 Officer PME study, which identified the need for Joint Officers to have strong communications skills, further reinforced the need for a guide that Marine Corps University students can use both in the classroom and in the operating forces. As such, the Leadership Communication Skills Center was tasked with developing a user-friendly guide that would provide a communications reference for Marines at the University as well as for Marines in the operating forces. About the LCSC The Leadership Communication Skills Center is a resource designed to support MCU students, faculty, and staff. The Center provides one-on-one sessions to help students improve their research, writing, and oral communication skills in a non-threatening environment. In addition, the Center helps students to edit and prepare their work for publication/contests. The LCSC also supports MCU faculty and staff by providing educational programs and editing work for publication. The LCSC's focus and operating procedures are included on page xiii. About the Style Guide: Purpose, Style, and Format Purpose This style guide serves three main purposes: First, the guide introduces a uniform style and procedure of writing that will be implemented university-wide. Second, the guide provides University students with a user-friendly reference for effective communication that they can refer to when they return to the operating forces. Finally, the guide directs students to additional resources for effective communication guidelines.

Our goal is to find relationships between social/cognitive networks and communications networks to devise strategies to maximize various performance metrics within these networks. We consider the case of a group of users that are performing a particular decision-making objective by passing information through a social network that uses a communication network with errors and delays in the transmission of information. The quality of service of the communication network will adversely affect overall user performance and trust relationships within the users by changing the dynamics of information-sharing within the network. However, if the affected users are able to adapt to these network errors, they may be able to maintain the same level of performance when compared to their performance in an optimally performing network. We are interested in characterizing the effects of these errors and determining if these dynamics can be compared to properties of traditional communication networks. We are currently exploring the use of ELICIT to examine the effect of communications errors and delays on user performance. We use existing capabilities within ELICIT by altering the sense-making agent parameters to mimic communication errors (failure to share factoids) and delays (delay in sharing factoids). Further, we are interested in the effect of connectivity within the organization structure for the ELICIT experiments. This is a study using ELICIT from a perspective that concentrates on the relationship of the communication network with the social network., Presented at the International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (ICCRTS '10) (15th), held in Santa Monica, CA, on 22-24 Jun 2010. The original document contains color images.

This experiment compared subjects' ability to understand a series of messages presented either over a pair of loudspeakers or a headset used in the Bison Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (C3I) mobile command post (MCP). The messages were presented in quiet or in a background of noise heard in a light armoured vehicle driving along a highway, speech babble noise or both, at signal-to-noise ratios that were close to zero. The intention was to generate a baseline of results against which to judge divided auditory attention which entails the overlapping of messages from the various sources. Ten normal-hearing males were tested individually while seated in a mock up of the vehicle. The messages they heard were comprised of a Call Sign, Colour and Number combination. They were instructed to respond only to their assigned Call Sign which occurred with a 25% probability. While the percentage of hits exceeded 85% under all conditions, subjects performed significantly more poorly in the presence of the vehicle noise and when messages were presented over the loudspeaker. The results demonstrated that Signals Operators working in the Bison C3I MCP should have no difficulty with communication, as long as messages from various sources do not overlap and the speech and noise levels are similar., in English and French; text in English.

Military operations often occur in noisy environments, which can interfere with effective verbal communication. Previous studies have established the effectiveness of allowing a listener to see the speaker's mouth. This study examined the efficacy of incorporating a computer-animated facial avatar into a visual display in order to improve the comprehension of speech in noisy environments, while performing concurrent tasks. It also examined the effect of the avatar on the performance of concurrent auditory and visual tasks. Twenty volunteers participated in an experiment measuring verbal comprehension, concurrent task performance and gaze dwell times while auditory, verbal and visual tasks were being performed under noisy conditions. The results indicated that the simple presence of the facial avatar did not significantly improve verbal comprehension while performing concurrent tasks. However, the facial avatar significantly improved verbal comprehension when the tasks being completed concurrently were more difficult and/or auditory-type tasks. The participants' performance for the concurrent tasks was not significantly affected by the presence of the facial avatar. The incorporation of computer-animated facial avatars into visual displays has the potential to improve verbal comprehension in noisy environments, depending on the nature of the concurrent task.

Electroencephalography (EEG) offers a non-invasive brain-imaging technology with potential to extract user intent from brain signals. This can offer a potential method for dispersed soldiers to communicate silently with one another. The usual interface for acquiring EEG signals may house 128 or more electrodes. Each EEG signal may be sampled at KHz sampling rates and may last for a few seconds. Thus the number of samples used to represent each trial can be large. The goal of this short-term innovative research (STIR) project was to investigate innovative sample and channel (i.e., EEG electrode) selection methods to reduce the storage and computational complexity in analyzing EEG signals. In experiments aimed at determining the redundancy in imagined speech EEG signals, it was observed that EEG data has limited spatial redundancy, but large temporal redundancy. In another set of experiments, we investigated the classification of two imagined speech syllables (namely "Ba" and "Ku") from imagined speech EEG signals. Using all good channels, only one of the seven volunteer subjects produced "better than chance" classification accuracy of about 60%. By selecting specific electrodes, two subjects yielded better-than-chance results with recognition rates close to 60% for all trials. Overall classification rates appear to have improved slightly by the selection of electrodes, indicating that imagined speech classification performance can be improved by careful selection of EEG electrodes., The original document contains color images.

In June 2009, the Secretary of Defense announced the creation of U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), a new subunified command to be led by the director of the National Security Agency (NSA). While the press colored the announcement with Big Brother undertones and hints of civil liberties surrendered, the real story lies in the intriguing legal landscape of USCYBERCOM and what it could mean for the security, efficiency, and economy of the military's networks. The Department of Defense (DOD), the largest single consumer of Federal information technology dollars, has struggled for decades to bring a singular voice and management process to its communications infrastructure. Although this is not the stated intent of the new command, USCYBERCOM must ultimately reconcile its role in information technology "ownership" and draw clear operational boundaries if it is to administer cyber security through unified standards and procedures. As USCYBERCOM now has its first commander and begins shaping its core functions, fundamental changes in the legal landscape must occur in parallel with the new organizational structure if the command hopes to effect a "comprehensive approach to Cyberspace Operations." In short, it must go beyond cosmetic organizational change and set to work on a campaign that genuinely reduces interdepartmental friction, repairs ailing processes, and truly empowers it to meet its mission, both specified and implied., Published in Joint Forces Quarterly (JFQ), v59 p115-120, 4th quarter 2010.

This thesis explores the accuracy and utility of a framework for recognizing a speaker by his or her voice called the Modular Audio Recognition Framework (MARF). Accuracy was tested with respect to the MIT Mobile Speaker corpus along three axes: 1) number of training sets per speaker, 2) testing sample length and 3) environmental noise. Testing showed that the number of training samples per speaker had little impact on performance. It was also shown that MARF was successful using testing samples as short as 1000ms. Finally, testing discovered that MARF had difficulty with testing samples containing significant environmental noise. An application of MARF, namely a referentially-transparent calling service, is described. Use of this service is considered for both military and civilian applications, specifically for use by a Marine platoon or a disaster-response team. Limitations of the service and how it might benefit from advances in hardware are outlined., The original document contains color images.

Assessments are critical for an organization to understand how well the organization performs its mission; both what it produces as an output and what it achieves as an outcome. Assessments provide a rigorous analytic bridge between the functioning activities of the organization and those decisions necessary to make improvement; often articulated in policies and plans. Assessments often can help identify opportunities for vertical alignment of goals and objectives and the horizontal integration of capabilities to achieve those goals and objectives. The end result of assessments is to continuously improve how well the organization achieves its goals and objectives and to provide opportunities to innovate. Assessments must follow a comprehensive approach that is multidisciplinary, multinational, and interagency. Assessments have a role to play before, during, and after an operation and can significantly improve overall performance of the organization. Useful assessments frequently become a management center of gravity, especially under conditions of scrutiny. Useful means several things. Aligned and integrated assessments within a theater must speak with one voice, establish manageable expectations, and serve many masters. First and foremost, assessments must serve the commander and support decision making. Assessments must add value "down and in" to the subordinate commanders whose assets are being tasked to collect and analyze. Assessments must support reporting requirements "up and out", often through multiple chains of command to national governments in order to satisfy national security objectives. The proper alignment and integration of assessments is critical to achieve one voice and minimize competition among messages and across resources. Despite the critical role that assessments play, organizations frequently treat assessments as an afterthought., Presented at Irregular Warfare III - Presented at Improving Analytical Support to the Warfighter: Campaign Assessments, Operational Analysis, and Data Management Held 19-22 April 2010 at Lockheed Martin, Orlando, Florida. The original document contains color images.

Purpose: To identify the latest transformational initiatives and activities associated with recruiting. This working group also identified concepts, techniques, and new technologies that address shaping and balancing the total force. WG1 conducted four working group sessions covering the following topics: * Transformational Recruiting Initiatives * Analytical Tools and Techniques * Social Media * Diversity * Each session consisted of presentations, open questions and facilitated discussion * Focused on discussing key questions., Personnel and National Security: A Quantitative Approach (Unclass), 25-28 January 2010, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland. The original document contains color images.

Menagerie of Metrics * Vast variation in data types for social media measurement (metadata) * Structured/Unstructured Data (hard and soft) * Traffic Analysis (mega-metadata) * Community engagement "rules" can be ambiguous; but this opens up opportunity for authentic experimentation. The Old Model * Standard Sender > Receiver Research * Fixed and easily controlled communication processes to research * Venues were easily "trackable" * Rigid interaction processes * Measurement was "simple science" * The New Model * Dynamic Quantum Interactivity., Personnel and National Security: A Quantitative Approach (Unclass), 25-28 January 2010, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland. Document consists entirely of briefing charts. U.S. Government or Federal Rights License. The original document contains color images.

In 1998, the International Civil Aviation Organization took a heightened interest in the role of language in airline accidents. Member states agreed to take steps to ensure air traffic control personnel and flight crews involved in flight operations in airspace where the use of the English language is required were proficient in conducting and comprehending radiotelephony communications in English. This report is a compilation of written responses and comments by U.S. pilots from American, Continental, Delta, and United Airlines of their difficulties in international operations. In this report, the pilots? responses to questions 46-53 are presented as a compiled narrative. Their responses had eight major thrusts from which we derived the following five recommendations: (1) Adopt a standard dialect for use in ATC communications. (2) All trainees and current certified professional controllers successfully complete instruction and training in the principles of voice production and articulation as it relates to ATC communication. (3) Define an optimal rate of speech for use by certified professional controllers when communicating with pilots. Research is needed to provide guidance on the optimal rate of speech for different populations of speakers ? U.S., Foreign. (4) Develop new standard phraseology for non-routine events. Generally, the controller needs to have the pilot answer one question, ?What do you need from me?? The controller would coordinate the appropriate actions to provide the pilot with what is needed. (5) Controllers should be discouraged from using local jargon, slang, idiomatic expressions, and other forms of conversational communications when transmitting messages to pilots., Work performed under Task AM-B-06-HRR-516.

In this paper we attempt to quantify the ability of naive listeners to perform speaker recognition in the context of the NIST evaluation task. We describe our protocol: a series of listening experiments using large numbers of naive listeners (432) on Amazon's Mechanical Turk that attempt to measure the ability of the average human listener to performance speaker recognition. Our goal was the compare the performance of the average human listener to both forensic experts and state-of-the-art automatic systems. We show that naive listeners vary substantially in their performance, but that a voting of listeners can achieve performance similar to that of expert forensic examiners.

The United States Secret Service (USSS) teamed with MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT/LL) in the US National Institute of Standards and Technology's 2010 Speaker Recognition Evaluation of Human Assisted Speaker Recognition (HASR). We describe our qualitative and automatic speaker comparison processes and our fusion of these processes, which are adapted from USSS casework. The USSS-MIT/LL 2010 HASR results are presented. We also present post-evaluation results. The results are encouraging within the resolving power of the evaluation, which was limited to enable reasonable levels of human effort. Future ideas and efforts are discussed, including new features and capitalizing on naive listeners., The original document contains color images.

In 1987 I first wrote out my thoughts on leadership. The compilation included 13 principles that Air University published in the summer of 2005 as part 1 of what became the Lorenz on Leadership series. Later, in the spring of 2008, Air University published part 2, which included an additional eight leadership principles. Over the last few years, various experiences have highlighted yet another group that I present for your consideration. When I first wrote down these principles, I certainly didn't intend to prescribe an approved way to think or lead. After all, none of these tenets is unique. I took them from other leaders who influenced me through the years, hoping that readers would develop their own set of principles. Families are important--this goes without saying. When I say that this is a "family business," realize that the term family encompasses more than just your immediate loved ones. In this case, it also includes our extended Air Force family. I can't tell you the countless times I've heard people thank their "brothers and sisters in the Air Force family." Sometimes they do so at promotion or retirement ceremonies, but I've also heard the phrase at going-away parties and in daily conversations., Published in Air & Space Power Journal, p5-12 Fall 2010.

Computer intrusion is a growing concern and field of investigation among government and private agencies. The main issue with most of the current Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) is that they are based on signature based observations, which means this class of detection system will only alert on attacks that the system is programmed to see. Entropy can be applied in various ways to examine data, but it is not a standalone IDS. It offers a theoretical, yet practical approach for the detection of abnormal patterns of behavior., The original document contains color images.

In speaker verification, the result of a trial is traditionally summarised as an arbitrary score, where a higher score indicates stronger evidence in favour of the speaker hypothesis. However this is difficult to interpret. It is useful to convert this score into a "confidence level", i.e. the posterior probability that the speaker hypothesis is correct, given the score. One of the simplest formulae to obtain a confidence level is using a logistic curve, but this requires the assumption that the true and impostor speaker scores are distributed according to a Normal distribution. In this report I propose a new formula, called the dual Detection Error Trade-Off (DET) curve, since it represents the same information as a DET curve. This formula avoids the assumption of normally distributed target and impostor scores. Experiments on the NIST 99 data prove the dual DET curve performs slightly better than the logistic curve., The original document contains color images.

In 1998, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) took a heightened interest in the role of language in airline accidents. Its Air Navigation Commission was directed to complete the task of strengthening relevant ICAO provisions concerning language requirements. Member states agreed to take steps to ensure air traffic control (ATC) personnel and flight crews involved in flight operations in airspace where the use of the English language is required were proficient in conducting and comprehending radiotelephony communications in English. Since then, ICAO developed its English-Language Proficiency requirements (ELP) and urged its members to document their ELP test implementation plans by March 8, 2008. Until all ATC personnel and flight crews involved in flight operations obtain a passing level of ELP, the language-based problems international pilots face is not known. This report is a compilation of written responses and comments by a group of 48 U.S. pilots of their difficulties in international operations who met with interviewers to discuss their language experiences flying into countries where English may or may not be the local or national language among its radio operators, controllers, and pilots. In this report, the pilots' responses to questions 31-38 and their comments from discussions of those questions with interviewers are presented as a compiled narrative. The pilots' responses had nine major thrusts, among them the following: (1) Traveling into nonnative English-speaking countries can be a positive learning experience leading to professional growth and development; (2) English-language proficiency varies from country to country and individual to individual, however, problems occur everywhere; and (3) Hearing multiple languages on the radio restricts situational awareness and diminishes pilots' expectations as information derived from the party line decreases., Work was accomplished under approved task AM-B-06-HRR-516.

In 1998, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) took a heightened interest in the role of language in airline accidents. Its Air Navigation Commission was directed to strengthen relevant ICAO provisions concerning language requirements. Member states agreed to take steps to ensure air traffic control (ATC) personnel and flight crews involved in flight operations in airspace where the use of the English language is required were proficient in conducting and comprehending radiotelephony communications in English. Since then, ICAO developed its English Language Proficiency (ELP) requirements and urged its members to document their ELP test implementation plans by March 8, 2008. Until all ATC personnel and flight crews involved in flight operations obtain a passing level of ELP, the language-based problems international pilots face is not known. This report is a compilation of written responses and comments by a small focus group of 48 U.S. pilots of their difficulties in international operations. The focus group consisted of 12 international U.S. pilots each from American, Continental, Delta, and United Airlines. Each focus group met with two interviewers to discuss their language experiences flying into countries where English may or may not be the local or national language among its radio operators, controllers, and pilots. In this report, the pilots' responses to questions 24-30 and their comments from discussions of those questions with interviewers are presented as a compiled narrative. The pilots' responses had eight major thrusts, among them the following: (1) Once pilots get past the controller's accented English, understanding is not a problem during routine operations; (2) The lack of standardized pronunciation of NAVAIDs, waypoints, intersections, etc., complicates understanding what was said; and (3) Currency in flight time in the theater of operation is critical to understanding accented English., Work was accomplished under approved task AM-B-06-HRR-516.

In 1998, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) took a heightened interest in the role of language in airline accidents. Member states agreed to take steps to ensure air traffic control (ATC) personnel and flight crews involved in flight operations in airspace where the use of the English language is required were proficient in conducting and comprehending radiotelephony communications in English. This report is a compilation of responses and comments by a group of U.S. pilots from American, Continental, Delta, and United Airlines of their difficulties in international operations. In this report, their responses to questions 39-45 are presented as a compiled narrative. We derived six major thrusts: (1) The English-language proficiency of nonnative English-speaking controllers may be inadequate for high-workload conditions; (2) Pilots develop and use different strategies to improve ATC communications once they determine the controller's language proficiency; (3) Pilots describe ATC communications between users of the same and different languages; (4) Language switching distracts pilots and limits understanding, adversely affects situational awareness, leaves them with feelings of uncertainty, and increases their workload; (5) Language barriers most affect situational awareness just prior to top-of-descent and during taxi; and (6) How pilots compensate for reductions in situational awareness. We offer 16 recommendations to improve communication practices ranging from developing standardized and secure English-language testing for use by all ICAO member states, to realistic emergency and nonroutine scenarios and simulations demonstrating use of conversational English to enhance datalink for surveillance and communications., Work was accomplished under approved task AM-B-06-HRR-516.

The U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development, and Engineering Center (AMRDEC) was tasked to analyze options for potential Text To Speech (TTS) improvements as part of the scenario generation system for the Common Driver Trainer (CDT). This report provides a discussion of some of the available TTS technologies, as well as a recommended path forward. In addition to the research performed, AMRDEC personnel also developed code to assist in familiarization with TTS capability. Descriptions of this software,along with code samples from some of the commercial products, are provided in the report. AMRDEC recommended that the CDT program develop an application or component that provides TTS capabilities, including text and file input, voice selection, a custom dictionary, voice recording, file exporting to standard audio formats, and sound file organization., The original document contains color images.

The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is an autonomous and continuous broadcast system that exchanges maritime safety/security information between participating vessels and shore stations. Three new binary type AIS messages have been developed for transmission from Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) ports to improve vessel traffic safety and reduce VHF voice communications. These new messages are Environmental, Area Notice, and Waterways Management messages. The equipment and software to transmit these messages were successfully tested in various locations. The next step is to transition the AIS transmit from a research effort into an operational system that is implemented at all VTS ports. The purpose of this report is to present various options for transitioning the enhanced AIS capability developed by the United States Coast Guard (USCG) Research and Development Center (RDC) from a proof-of-concept to an operational system. The report will first discuss the status of the ongoing research and address the attainment of the project's goals. A snapshot of the as-is state of all of the test beds and demonstration areas is presented as the starting point for the transition discussion. Since the plans for transitioning the VTS and non-VTS areas are different, they are treated separately in this report. Various transition options and the costs of each option are detailed for the implementation of the enhanced AIS capability at all 12 VTS ports. Separate plans are presented for moving responsibility for the demonstration projects to other government agencies.

We determined that it is possible to automatically detect persuasion in conversations using three traditional machine learning techniques, naive bayes, maximum entropy, and support vector machine. These results are the first of their kind and serve as a baseline for all future work in this field. The three techniques consistently outperformed the baseline F-score, but not at a level that would be useful for real world applications. The corpus of data was comprised of four types of negotiation transcripts, labeled according to a persuasion model developed by James Cialdini. We discovered that the transcripts from the Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas were significantly different from the rest of the corpus. We have included suggestions for future work in the areas of data set improvements, feature set improvements, and additional research. Advancements in this field will contribute to the Global War on Terror by alerting intelligence analysts to enemy persuasion attempts and by enabling U.S. forces to conduct more effective information and psychological operations using local persuasion models., The original document contains color images.

Multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver is known output (MIMO) as multiple-input multiple-system. This has emerged as the most promising technique for improving the performance of wireless digital transmission systems as well as allowing higher data rates to be obtained for a given bandwidth. A consequence of the MIMO wireless communications revolution is that multipath scattering of the transmitted signal has moved from being a problem to being a valuable resource. This has happened to such extent that MIMO systems have come to rely on this resource. However, away from dense urban and indoor environments such as Australian rural and remote areas with wide open spaces and flat or smooth undulating terrain such rich scattering can be hard to find. This research seeks to develop MIMO schemes which will give robust and reliable performance in environments that can change rapidly from rich scattering environment to clear line of sight between transmitter and receiver. Wirelesss communications system which are robust to changing environment conditions are a particular important factor in military communication systems as well as for civilian emergency services. In this work, polarization is proposed as a source of diversity in wireless communications. Polarization diversity is particularly suited to the Australian rural and remote environment where wide open spaces and flat or smooth undulating terrain give rise to line of sight conditions between the transmitter and the receiver. The polarization diversity of transmitted signals is mostly preserved by the line-of-sight environment presenting an opportunity for transmitter and receiver diversity techniques, Another aspect of the research presented here is the development of fast, fixed complexity, decoding algorithms for space-time codes that are robust to the changing transmission conditions. Reliable high rate transmission over the MIMO system ca only be achieved through "space-time coding".

In theory, autonomous robotic swarm can be used for critical Army tasks (i.e., accompanying convoys); however, the Soldier controlling the swarm must be able to monitor swarm status and correct actions, especially in disrupted or degraded conditions. For the concluding year of this two-tear Director's Research Initiative (DRI), we designed multimodal (speech and touch) Soldier-swarm control concepts to allow Soldiers to efficiently control a robotic swarm participating in a representative convoy mission. We used a potential field approach for swarm control because it scales easily to large heterogeneous swarms and allows users to dynamically alter swarm behavior by adjusting field parameters. We tested the effectiveness of the swarm controls in a laboratory study using 12 male Marines (volunteers) with a mean age of 19 years. The metacognition results showed that the swarm (which consisted of members fulfilling sentry and explorer functions) could maintain adequate coverage most of the time. Interface results showed that most participants, 58%, used speech commands first almost exclusively, while the remaining used touch commands first. Results can be applied to future swarm and command and control systems., The original document contains color images.

This research highlights the preliminary findings on the potential of computer mediated social networks. This research focused on social networks as an alternative method for support and maintenance of software intensive systems. The activities of the members of the discipline have impacted the support and maintenance practice. The computer mediated social network has attributes of a decision support system and other organized activities, but the potential is unknown and unmeasured. Our research provided empirical evidence that is a first step in defining the behavior and potential of a social network., Presented at the International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (ICCRTS '10) (15th), held in Santa Monica, CA, on 22-24 Jun 2010. The original document contains color images.

Social media has had an undeniable effect on the way we live, work, and communicate throughout the world. Military leaders are recognizing the importance of social media and taking steps to incorporate change into their organizational cultures. This is partly due to the sheer number of users in the military community who are using social networking as a conduit to stay connected and tell their story. Facebook, a social networking website, has more than 250 million users with more than 120 million of them logging on at least once a day. Every minute, YouTube users upload 10 minutes of video and watch hundreds of millions of videos. Social media has introduced a whole new language, where complete words now become one letter and smiley faces and emoticons show emotion and feeling. This ever-evolving technology flourishes in a culture where time is precious and social interaction is unpredictable. Social media computer concepts are not new and have in fact been around for over 20 years. The first online chat system surfaced in 1980 with CompuServe's CB simulator. The simulator connected corporate America and cyberspace. In 1986, these services expanded to include Europe, and networking became a global application. The World Wide Web, not to be confused with the Internet, went public in 1991, and gave birth to the dot.com boom that enabled companies and organizations to reach a wider target audience. Today these same concepts have given organizations and individuals social networking websites such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and other social networking avenues for information sharing., Published in Military Review, p63-67, 2010.

This paper will focus on answering the fundamental question that military leaders need to understand: what influence do public opinion and popular will have on our national will in the context of forming and executing national military strategy? I hope to banish the "specter" of Vietnam from matters of national military strategy, and offer a different opinion with respect to the public's role. To what extent can the American public influence or alter our national military strategy? The speed of information in the twenty-first century has affected how Americans voice their opinions, concerns, criticisms and support for the President and our elected leaders. Does this influence how our democratically elected officials and our military leaders interpret the collective national will of our nation? I will describe popular will as a subset of national will and present the actors that represent the "voice" of Americans. The effects of public opinion on national military strategy and policy are examined through political and military lenses. From this, conclusions will be drawn as to the effect of popular will on the decision to employ military power through the study of the 2006 Operation Iraqi Freedom "Surge", and the current Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) "Surge."