ModelBlog: Innovation in Simulation

Game Technology in Medical Education

2010-08-01T17:10:00.000-07:00

My dissertation at the University of Maryland focused on the impact of new innovations on established business practices, specifically the use of 3D computer graphics, interactive computers, networking, and intelligent software in medical education. I began with the introduction of simulation devices in teaching anesthesiology in the late 1960's with SimOne. That technology had been transferred directly from military training.

This book explores the research that has already been done in evaluating the effectiveness of simulation and gaming technologies in medical education. It is especially interested in the benefits that are derived from these technologies.

Lower Cost of Delivering Education
Better Access to Learning Events
Reduced Time to Achieve Proficiency
Reduced Errors in Later Practice

After analyzing over 250 papers in the medical literature I demonstrated that evidence already exists that all four of these are true under specific conditions. Therefore, the medical education field is currently in a position to adopt these technologies and reap the benefits that come from them.

Overcoming the 4 Failures

2010-08-01T17:01:00.000-07:00

While walking through a large discount store I wondered why many of the shoppers had not been more successful in their careers and perhaps in their lives. As I watched and thought about their situation, as well as my own successes and failures, I arrived at four failures that severely limit people's lives.

Stupid - uneducated and unprepared to learn and grow.
Lazy - unwilling to work hard and put out the effort to overcome obstacles.
Ugly - rude, inconsiderate, and even violent to other people.
Afraid - terrified to try something new or to brave the unknown.

I researched each of these areas in the psychology, leadership, and self-help literature. This book speaks very frankly to the damage that these four behaviors can do to your life. It offers alternatives and a means to change these weaknesses into strengths, specifically into:

Smart
Active
Attractive
Bold

Chief Technology Officer

2010-08-01T16:51:00.000-07:00

The CTO position is relatively new in corporate circles. It originally evolved out of the role of Director of Research in the 1970's. However, during the dot.com boom, the CTO title was adopted by the CIO shop, often as a deputy position. Chief Technology Officer: Defining the Responsibilities of the Senior Technical Executive is a collection of papers from research journals and popular trade publications on the role of the CTO. It attempts to give a wider definition of the importance of this role than just as part of the IT staff.

In the first chapter I offer five distinct patterns of the CTO position.

Genius - the brilliant scientist at a start-up company.
Administrator - part of the IT staff.
Advocate - customer facing service provider.
Director - head of the R&D labs.
Executive - C-suite executive pursuing new technologies that generate revenue.

From there I discussion the roles, responsibilities, and relationships that will make a CTO effective and successful.

Advice: Written on the Back of a Business Card

2010-08-01T16:44:00.001-07:00

In 2009, I was invited to give a presentation to a group of interns at the US Army command where I was working. It seemed to me that these young minds could use some advice on becoming successful in their new careers. So I asked several people in my professional network to give me the one piece of advice that they would write on the back of their own business card and give to a fresh college graduate.

I thought I would get a dozen or so responses. I received 250 -- which looked like a book to me. So I use the "business card" idea to create a book of short advice, along with the name and position of the person who provided it. It has been hugely popular with both the seasoned people who gave the advice and the college graduates.

Military Simulation & Serious Games

2010-08-01T16:35:00.000-07:00

There are many books on traditional discrete event simulation. But there are few specifically on the interactive, real time, simulation that is used for military training. These are also the techniques that formed the basis of the 3D computer games that are now hugely popular.

In Military Simulation & Serious Games, I brought together a number of chapters that explore the technologies in both of these industries. It begins with an introduction to the important concepts behind simulation, including DES. But, I try to summarize this well known material in one chapter before getting into unique material on interactive simulation and gaming.

There is so much to be learned about military simulation that I hope other authors will write books specifically on this topic in the future.

This blog has moved

2010-03-16T07:29:00.001-07:00

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2010 Defense GameTech Conference

2010-01-14T16:52:00.000-08:00

One Week on a Mega Yacht ... Thanks to my Advice book

2010-01-01T12:11:00.001-08:00

How do you get invited on a week long trip down the Atlantic Intercoastal with a group of computer geeks? Well I did not do it, but Dave Edstrom of Sun Microsystems did. The key to entry? A copy of my book "Advice: written on the back of a business card".

Both Dave and Mike O'Dell are quoted in that book. Dave bought an extra copy and gave it to Mike (who owns the Yacht). Mike was putting together the trip down the Intercoastal in his Mega Yacht and invited his old buddy Dave to go along. All thanks to a timely reminder in the form of one of my favorite books.

Read Dave's account of the trip and see the pictures at:
http://photonsandelectrons.blogspot.com/2009/12/intracoastal-waterway-my-bucket-list.html

So what can you make happen by giving away one of my books? :)

2010 Defense GameTech Users Conference Keynote Speakers

2009-12-21T09:55:00.000-08:00

There are some outstanding speakers scheduled for the Defense GameTech Users Conference in Orlando, Florida, March 29-31, 2010. The event is still 3 months away, but the keynotes who have accepted our invitations are:

Will Wright, Creator of Spore, The Sims, and all things SimCity. Will is now running his own startup, The Stupid Fun Club.
General James Mattis, Commander of US Joint Forces Command. GEN Mattis has a passion for providing better training to support the infantry soldier.
Major General Melvin Spiese, Commander USMC Training and Education Command.
Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium. Larry is sponsoring and creating some very clever and useful applications of virtual worlds.

That is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more great sessions and tutorials that are still under wraps. Keep on eye on the web site for more details.

http://www.teamorlando.org/gametech/

Military Simulation & Serious Games

2009-10-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

"The world inside a simulator is as real as the world inside your head – but it is more accurate."

Simulation has been a powerful tool for training the military for over 3000 years. What began as sand tables and board games has evolved into advanced computer and communication systems that encompass the globe and provide training portals on every continent. Commercial computer games have followed a similar evolutionary trajectory in delivering entertainment. The core technologies behind both fields have many commonalities and become more intertwined every year.

This book is a collection of essays on the technical, social, and economic importance of simulation and gaming techniques, tools, and technologies. It provides a fascinating historical summary, explores important technical capabilities, and speculates on the role that these technologies will play in the future.

http://www.modelbenders.com/milsimgame.html

Military getting help from showbiz

2009-10-13T06:32:00.001-07:00

Military getting help from showbiz

Posted using ShareThis

2009-09-27T07:20:00.000-07:00

Advice: written on the back of a business card

This book is filled with short words of advice from hundreds of successful professionals in industry, government, and academia. It emerged from one simple question posed to all of them.

“Imagine that you are about to give your business card to a young person entering your profession. But first, you turn that card over and write a short piece of advice to help them get started in their career. What would you write on the back of your own business card to help them?”

The advice is from the people who will hire you and for whom you will work. They are all very eager to share their most valuable ideas with new people entering their field. Each of these leaders remembers how clueless they were when they started in business. This is their way of helping you get started with the advice that they never received – but wished that they had.

"You can do anything ... but not everything." - Bill Waite

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." – Charles Darwin

http://www.modelbenders.com/advice.html

Game Technology in Medical Education

2009-08-25T06:03:00.000-07:00

This book proposes four hypotheses concerning the impact and acceptance of virtual reality, simulation, and computer game technologies in medical education. It focuses on laparoscopic surgery because of the similarities between that form of surgery and virtual reality systems. The evidence indicates that the following four hypotheses are supported by the medical research literature.

· Hypothesis 1: Surgical training can be accomplished at a lower cost using virtual reality and game technology-based tools than through existing methods of training.

· Hypothesis 2: Virtual reality and game technology-based training environments provide better access to representative patient symptoms and allow more repetitive practice than existing forms of training.

· Hypothesis 3: Virtual reality and game technology-based training environments can reduce the training time required to achieve proficiency in specific procedures.

· Hypothesis 4: Virtual reality and game technology-based training can reduce the number of medical errors caused by residents and surgeons learning to perform new procedures.

The strong evidence collected in this study indicates that game-based systems are becoming much more accepted in medical education and that the technical limitations that existed when these devices were first introduced are being overcome.

Web Page: http://www.modelbenders.com/medsim.html

Combat Medic Card Game

2009-07-30T11:27:00.001-07:00

Published: Wednesday, July 29, 2009

The U.S. Army is working with UCF to design a card game to help combat medics memorize life-saving techniques. “The research question is, ‘Can we effectively train and use some of the training downtime for combat medics to help reinforce some of the key life-saving processes that they need to know perfectly?’” said David Metcalf of IST, principle investigator for the project. “That’s the goal of what we’re doing.”

The U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, Simulation and Training Technology Center, (RDECOM-STTC), has teamed up with the UCF Institute of Simulation and Training on the project.

The object of the card game is to test medics’ and nurses’ knowledge of medical techniques that are used in the first hour of an injury or incident that are vital to saving lives. “These are process steps around what’s called the ‘golden hour’ where certain treatments can save people’s lives,” Metcalf said. “Things like obstructed airways or a hemorrhage that needs to be taken care of, or a chest wound, a collapsed lung or something like that.

“Those are some things that if you treat them well in the first hour using the right processes, you can save a life.” The game will quiz the medics on their knowledge of these processes and can be played individually or in groups.

“We’ve actually designed several card games, and we have a series of students and research associates at the Institute of Simulation and Training that are working in conjunction with Army RDECOM-STTC, some actual combat medics and combat nurses that are subject matter experts, and then some of the developers and designers who are helping us with the actual cards,” Metcalf said.

The team plans to have a sample deck ready by Aug. 10, Metcalf said.

They will begin conducting demonstrations and receiving feedback from Army personnel and combat medics. From there they hope to have a finished deck ready by October.
Some of the developers and designers include UCF students Denice Lancashire, an instructional technology graduate student, and Jorge Oyola, a digital media senior.

Lancashire is working to develop the game instructions and help with game testing.
While she’s not involved in the actual construction of the cards, she believes the best part of the project is watching everyone’s work come together to create a valuable final product.Oyola is working on the card designs, focusing on editing images for them and creating and retooling card templates.

At first, it wasn’t clear to Oyola how this project would benefit the combat medics.
“At the beginning of the project, I didn’t really see how combat medics or soldiers would really have any enjoyment for the game,” Oyola said. “I thought they might see it as sort of like a gimmick and not really pay much attention to it.

“But as I’ve seen the art evolve and the fact that there are multiple games that you can play with this, as well as use it as a standard deck of 52 cards with the four suites and everything, I really think that they’ll take home a lot from it.”

Metcalf is enthusiastic about the student participation in the project.

“They’ve been really valuable on the project too,” Metcalf said. “They’ve had some really good ideas.

“They’ve also been involved in play-testing out the games to make sure that the actual game-play works.”

They all agree that one of the highlights of the final game will be knowing it is working to save lives in the field.

“I think that helps a lot,” Oyola said, “knowing that we’re doing something that can save lives on the field as well as alleviate some of the boredom and some of the stress. I think it’s a really great feeling.”

Link: Central Florida Future - Card game reinforces medic training

Waiting for the Dot.Sim Boom

2009-05-19T10:40:00.000-07:00

Simulation has not had its dot.com boom. Our field has always grown in lockstep with a number of high technology areas. We have ridden right along with, and in some cases have driven, the leading edge of new technologies. As mainframe computers became workstations, and then PC’s, simulation products leveraged all of this equipment and became better for it. As computer graphics moved out of the university research labs, we were quick to adapt these new technologies to our flight and driving simulators. We moved from large cabinet-sized image generators, to smaller graphics boxes, to dedicated workstations, to internal graphics cards. As networking and the Internet became prolific we connected our simulators together, created standard networking protocols, and constructed distributed events across all of our facilities.

We have always been very hungry for advanced technologies because our customers constantly demand more capability, better performance, and lower costs. Working in the simulation and simulator business has always given engineers the opportunity to apply the newest technologies emerging from research labs and commercial vendors.

But all of a sudden this stopped. The commercial world discovered that the Internet allowed them to do business in an entirely different way. They were able to connect directly to millions of customers around the world without creating physical stores and without shipping special equipment to every customer. The Internet opened the door to delivering products and services to every single customer in the world. With it the Amazon.com website could sell more books than Barnes & Noble with its 800 physical stores. This was a huge change in the relationship between a vendor and its customers. I grew up in a small town in Southeast Colorado with very limited access to retail products and professional services. A big shopping center was the Sears Catalog store. It contained a refrigerator, a dishwasher, and a table full of catalogs. If you needed appliances, lawn equipment, tools, or clothes you shopped for them in the catalog and placed your order. There were only a couple of storefronts on Main Street and not a single bookstore. My bookstore was a single small shelf at the local drugstore. My Amazon.com was the mail-in form on the back pages of the books I purchased from the drugstore. Barnes & Noble could not reach out to me with its vast selection. I had to reach into the inventory through the soda straw listed on one page of a paperback book.

Amazon.com is not just a huge warehouse of books. It is a delivery system that can reach every single person in the networked world. It allows a child in a small town of 500 people to access the same books as a child in the heart of New York City. It breaks down the location-specific barriers that prevent people from learning and exploring on their own initiative. That is the real power of the dot.com boom. In the simulation community we have not created this kind of service for our customers.

Simulation systems are still delivered like heavy products to specialized facilities. We create destination sites in the pattern of Disney World that soldiers have to visit physically to experience. And like Disney World, such visits can be once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Our soldiers cannot travel to our high-end destinations every time they want to improve their performance or explore a new idea. A dot.com boom in simulation would extend our systems through the military Internet to every soldier’s desktop computer. It would allow every soldier to browse our offering of simulation services, enter the one of their choice, and join a team to explore a new idea or receive a lesson from a leader.

The technologies to do this are available now and pooling at our feet. But we continue to insist that training via simulation requires a dedicated facility, specialized equipment, and a large support staff. We insist that simulation cannot do a soldier any good unless it is custom crafted by an experienced professional and makes scant use of the newest technologies. To continue the Amazon.com analogy, we are insisting that books should only be sold in physical stores by a trained staff, and that an online bookstore would corrupt this process by allowing people to select their own books without explicit human guidance. This same argument was made against online education for years. Online universities were once considered the lowest form of crass commercialization of a much higher calling, not much above a diploma mill. But today, every university from Harvard to the local Community College offers some or all of their degree programs on the Internet.

The technical tools already exist to provide Internet-delivered, simulation-driven, training and exploration. What does not exist is the will to customize and extend our resources to reach every soldier in the service. We still want the soldiers to come to our specialized facilities and our dedicated staff. We are not ready to let soldiers take a hand in guiding their own training.

We currently have wargames that can be adapted to run on the server side of these training networks. We have computer games that can provide the intuitive client side interface. We have IT infrastructure tools that can tie the right soldiers to the right applications. New “Web 2.0” applications are opening the door to user created and modified content like our simulation scenario databases. These will allow a soldier to modify existing scenarios and select specific AAR products from within a standard browser. User interfaces like Google’s Earth and Map products can provide a window into a simulation running in the military computer cloud. Though DOD security regulations may make the use of such tools difficult, they do not make it impossible. What is really difficult is to get our community to see simulation as a service that can be extended to millions of soldiers, rather than as a device, a facility, or a destination experience.

Each time our industry grasps new technologies there is the fear that we might abandon the good work that is being done with the older methods. But these fears are never realized. There was a time when all training was Live. The emergence of board wargames provided tools to supplement and extend that live training, but not to replace it. The computer revolution brought us virtual flight and vehicle simulators, but these did not replace live training. Instead they allowed pilots and vehicle crews to experience situations that were impossible to create in the live world. Simulation as a Service will expand and extend the value of our products to the soldier in the same way that virtual and constructive systems have done in the past. Some tasks can be trained very effectively from a standard desktop computer. Other skills must remain in the live, virtual, or constructive systems that we already have.

A dot.com boom in simulation will do the same for the soldier that Amazon.com did for the reading children of small town America. It will make huge volumes of training material accessible to every soldier, everywhere, all the time.

History of Games: From Dice to Computers

2009-05-01T06:32:00.001-07:00

I have created a presentation on the History of Games. It was first presented at a defense simulation & gaming conference so has definite bias in that direction. But the long-term goal is to pull together a sahred resource that many people can use in education.

You will find the PowerPoint on SlideShare.net and are welcome to use it for your own non-commercial uses. If you make significant additions, please send them to me so I can incorporate them into the briefing for other people as well.

History of Games: From Dice to Computers

View more presentations from Roger Smityh.

Games vs. the Wizards of Grep

2009-02-12T08:59:00.000-08:00

Games are making a big splash in the military training world. They offer beautiful graphics, simplified user interfaces, and low cost to entry. But some people question whether they are really valuable simulations. They point to the lack of detail in some models and the singular focus on direct fire combat engagements. But that is the same way that a lot of simulation have entered the inventory. One of the earliest models, CARMONETTE, was introduced in 1953. The first version contained only tank-on-tank combat with a little anti-tank play. Each year new capabilities were added - infantry in version 2, helicopters in version 3, and communications in version 4.

Games are going to evolve like that as well. They are being introduced in their sweet spot. Once they are running well in that specialty, they will grow into other areas. We will discover how to apply them to situations that are unique to the military and that have not be perfected in the commercial entertainment space. Such perfection in the entertainment world requires 100's of millions of dollars and many years of trail-and-error product launches. They are not going to do all of that work for functions that draw in 10 or 100 customers.

Remember when all computers were used from the command line? We all learned cryptic commands like ls, grep, chdir, chpwd, and hundreds more. With these and their endless list of arguments we could invoke thousands of different actions on the computer. But then we were presented with X-Windows, the Mac interface, and Windows. These hid the magic commands and allowed anyone to hunt-and-peck their way through a set of menus to invoke the same actions. The Wizards of Grep all proclaimed, "too slow", "for amateurs", "not flexible", "can't really see what is happening". But these interfaces opened the door to millions of new users of computers. They allowed people to use the machines without becoming wizards and they eliminated a lot of the tragic mistakes that even experts made. (Remember your first accidental "rm -rf" command? ...oops...) This led to computers as artistic devices, multi-media machines, and replacements for all office equipment.

Games will do for simulation, what windows and Windows have done for desktop computing. They are also undeniable and unstoppable.

Games vs. Virtual Worlds for Nation-sized Problems

2009-01-16T11:53:00.000-08:00

3D Shooters are the most prominent form of game system and environment in the consumer and the defense space. These portray conflict, combat, and deadly threats. They immediately plunge the player into a simulating environment with urgent problems to solve. They also mirror some of the most important engagements that real people and real societies engage in. However, these environments are extremely limited in time and space. The battlefield is a relatively small area – usually just large enough to contain a specific vignette, and never so large that the players can wander far enough to miss the entire point of that piece of the world. These vignettes and geospaces are linked together in such a way that the player can move immediately from one “hot spot” to the next. There is no room in these for intervening relationship building, downtime learning, AAR, or planning for the next engagement. For entertainment this hot-spot-hopping is exactly what you want. But as a venue for wrestling with real problems, this is a very small and single-focused experience.

MMOGs create a much larger space in which player spend more time wandering, conversing, building relationships, and joining clans that will participate in specific battles. It includes spaces for combat, socialization, trade, and exploration. This size and diversity enables a much broader and somewhat richer experience of the world and the other players in it. Specific battles may still be the focus for many players, but they can also plan, rehearse, and regale in stories surrounding these as well. The algorithms that determine engagement outcomes, but battle and trade, are simple – often just subtracting and adding points to a player’s health.

Virtual Worlds create an world that can be smooth and continuous like the real world. They can create context, connections, and history that is similar to what exists in the real world. But in their current state they are only slightly different from MMOGs. Second Life, and others like it, are unique in that the content is created by the users, not by the development company. This begins to allow the users to shape the world to meet their needs. But to really become distinct and useful, these spaces need to allow the users to upload/link their own models into the world. The VW needs to provide an infrastructure that can accommodate heterogeneous models provided by users and allow these diverse models to interact with each other. Business and Government problems cannot be represented by generic one-size-fits-all models provided by an entertainment company.

Each game designs a set of models that meet the needs of that game. The preference is to create sparse models that are computationally inexpensive and that fit together to allow interactions across all of the objects in a space. As virtual worlds are adopted to the needs of real government and intelligence customers, there is going to be a need to (1) add much more complex models that require more computational power, (2) bring together a very diverse set of models that were not originally meant to work together. A government Virtual World cannot align these models one at a time, that is an N-squared problem that will very quickly become impossible to manage. There needs to be an infrastructure that allows heterogeneous models to be integrated into the world and to work with the existing models without requiring customer model-to-model modifications. This would be a big environment with an underlying software infrastructure that present real value to the government.

For the complete briefing see: http://www.peostri.army.mil/CTO

2008 Defense GameTech Conference

2008-11-26T09:21:00.000-08:00

The agenda and presentations for the 2008 Defense GameTech Conference are posted on the web at:
http://www.peostri.army.mil/PAO/pressrelease/20080425_gametech.jsp

[Note: This is a belated posting. Google does not seem to have indexed the link above.]

The 3D Cellphone

2008-09-08T10:07:00.000-07:00

Big computer companies like IBM and HP are developing software that allows you do view highly detailed 3D worlds on modest client machines (see DCV and RGS links below). This is accomplished by doing the rendering on the server side and sending the screen to a number of smaller clients.

Companies like Vollee and OTOY are doing something similar, but targeted at the cellphone. Imagine that you are running a 3D world like Second Life on your cellphone. But, since your phone does not have the compute or storage resources to really do this, all of the rendering is being done on a server and the results streamed to your phone in the form of a digital movie (MP3, Flash video, etc.). Your inputs on the phone are commands to move through the virtual world and interact with the objects there. These commands are carried to a server where the simulation and graphic rendering are done and the finished video frames are streamed back to your phone for you to see. Clearly there will be some video lag between the command and the visual results as the key entries travel to the server, are simulated and rendered, and the results travel back to your phone. if you are old enough you will remember that this is how text entry and order execution worked with the old terminal windows back when "the Internet" meant textual applications on a command line and there was no such thing as "the Web". You may also have seen the gradual evolution of that primitive interface into rudimentary graphic menues as clever people showed that the text could acrually drive a menu system rather than just showing up on a command line.

High-def rendering on all devices will become a reality. A few years ago we thought it would happen through the miniaturization of the GPU so that all phones had an Nvidia or ATI chip in them. But faster networks are making this possible while the GPU remains on the server machine. The connection between the client and server is fast enough that the two seem to share the visualization capability. There may be several technical hurdles to work through, but the community have solved bigger problems than those to get where we are now. Keep looking for great things on small devices.

IBM: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/visualization/
HP: http://h20331.www2.hp.com/hpsub/cache/286504-0-0-225-121.html
Vollee: http://www.vollee.com/secondlife
OTOY: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/20/the-truth-behind-liveplaces-photo-realistic-3d-world-and-otoys-rendering-engine/

Virtual tea parties on the ceiling

2008-08-31T13:21:00.001-07:00

Why do we have chairs in our offices, classrooms, and public spaces? Are they a real necessity? Somewhere in the distant past people recognized the advantage of doing certain types of work mounted on a platform up off of the ground. They also found the need to keep nice clothes off of the ground and out of the dirt. Then there is the comfort factor for sitting down rather than standing up. In the physical world, chairs have become a staple of our existence.

When we enter the virtual world, what is a chair good for? There is no dirt, there is no physical fatigue, and characters can often float anywhere? So what use is there for chairs?

But if you navigate through Second Life you will find chairs, desks, lamps, and all of the typical artifacts of the the real world. All of them useless. We are so excited about the possibilities that can be achieved in the virtual world. But once inside it appears that most people cannot imagine anything different from what they have in the physical world. In fact, it looks like the virtual world is just a place where we can possess something that resembles what we cannot get in the physical world. If, in the physical world, you have a small office or cubicle, the first thing you might build in the VW is a bigger office. One bigger than the boss'.

Where is the imagination? It appears that most VW residents have little and most large organizations that enter the VW have absolutely none. Even though people complain that sitting in conference rooms and classrooms all day long is the most boring part of their lives, that is the first thing we offer them when they enter the virtual world.

Given an empty virtual canvas we create images directly from the physical world. We create load-bearing columns for buildings that weigh nothing. We hang light fixtures from virtual chains even though there is no gravity to pull them down. We put all of the furniture on the "floor" and leave the walls and ceiling of buildings empty. Where are the tea parties on the ceiling?

Second Life has many very clever and imaginative residents. But for some reason the islands of large organizations are just as sterile, standard, and unimaginative as the real offices. The "rules of the office" carry into the virtual world, even the rules that call for chairs that serve no purpose.

Pancake People

2008-07-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

Historically each individual has had the opportunity to become very deep in a very narrow part of existence. The farmer on an isolated piece of land in the Great Plains spent his entire life learning the fine details about the weather, soil, wildlife, growing patterns, and planting strategies that worked at a particular point of latitude and longitude. His education began as a boy between the ages of 5 and 8 years-old. If he chose to stay on the farm and carry on the family business, his experience and understanding of that point in time and space would continue until he was between 55 and 65 years-old. This type of life allowed him to become an expert with fifty or sixty years of expertise in a very specific domain of industry, geography, and time. He had the opportunity to socialize with other farmers around him and to learn from their experience as well. Like a scientist who spends all of his time in personal experimentation and works only with a tight-knit group of kindred souls, this farmer was able to master one specific domain through hard work and endurance.

Similar pockets of focused expertise existed all across the country and the world. They were characteristic of the “up by your own bootstraps” determination that was required to survive and succeed in such isolated conditions and with so little access to outside information. But as mediums for communication spread and became more accessible, the farmer was able to learn about the ideas of others around the state, the country, and the world. He began to rely on the expertise and discoveries of people far from his point in space, people he had never seen, met, nor imagined. He did not have to understand how their ideas worked. He just had to know enough to implement them effectively. Knowledge came to him embedded in new kinds of seeds, new equipment, and new farming practices that he had not created himself. He began to explore beyond his own experience of nature, work, and society. He was once an intellectual pillar standing on a particular point in space and time. He was tall, certain of his knowledge, and master to his place in the world. But the distribution of new products and the communication of new information allowed him to expand out and become more knowledgeable of the world. He was able to learn about and experiment with ideas beyond those tied to survival. He could take on hobbies and indulge his interest in machinery beyond farming. The farmer was becoming more broad and well-rounded. He was flattening out to cover more area and to rely on the expertise of others to perform his core function.

This picture of the lone farmer working to survive is similar to what has happened in all parts of society. The television and the Internet have played an important and unstoppable role in the flattening and broadening process. Since the 1950’s, society has broadened its exposure to information and thinned its specialization on one specific topic - especially concerning topics that are directly aligned with their professional and economic survival. We have created pancake people who know a little bit about everything in the world, but not a great deal about any one thing. Some individuals and groups remained dedicated to mastering their specialty. Professionals in law, medicine, engineering, philosophy, history, literature, and similar disciplines still prided themselves on their depth of thinking and their understanding of the great writings in their fields. However, the recent explosion of the World Wide Web has begun to link, summarize, critique, and repeat all knowledge. Even the islands of experts have found themselves seduced by the easy assess to vast stores of information. Even they have become information surfers. Though they may have criticized the masses of television channel surfers, they have succumbed to the same fate. The seduction of surfing across all information in any field, the ability to quickly locate and scan anything that has been written, these opportunities are too tempting to resist. But as we navigate these vast tracts of information we are just beginning to notice that the depth of our absorption, understanding, and incorporation of that information into our own ideas is becoming shallow. The intellectual classes of society are being broadened and flattened by the Internet in the same way that the television flattened the general public. Pancake intellectuals are joining the ranks of the pancake society.

From an intellectual perspective, the ability to think deeply about a subject may be attributed to the creation of the book. This abstract representation of knowledge could be patiently and painstakingly created by an author. It could be shared with millions of readers, who could spend their time working through it. Prior to its invention there was no means to collect, record, and disseminate large volumes of thought. The Internet is changing the era of the book into the era of the page. It is returning society to a time when all knowledge was limited to the size of a single piece of paper. It appears that we are not veering into a new type of information exchange, but are returning to a previous pattern.

Are we better off as pancake people?

Certainly exposing someone to a broad set of information in their early years is an advantage. It allows them to consider many options for directing their life. It opens doors that were previously closed or unimagined. But, is the shallow surfing of information the best way to conduct one’s life indefinitely? It is an effective means of discovering a new field, but not of mastering it. Sergey Brin argues that people are better off if they have access to all of the world’s information. That is certainly true. But it does not speak to the question of how a person should use that access. Being able to read the entire encyclopedia of human knowledge is a way to see the surface of a very large world. But it is not an effective method for becoming a master of any one part of that world. The expert must focus his attention on one small area for a significant amount of time. But, Nicholas Carr wonders whether it is possible to develop a mind which can both surf broadly and penetrate deeply into information. His own experience has been that broad surfing has weakened his ability to penetrate deeply. It appears to be a choice that each person must make – the wide flat pancake of familiarity, or the deep-rooted pillar of expertise.

It is encouraging that authors like Carr have the ability to see the transformation that is happening and to express it in a compelling manner that draws attention. Carr says, “I am not thinking the way I used to think.” But it is excellent that he is able to recognize that the change is happening. It is important that we in society recognize that we must choose between the pancake and the pillar of knowledge.

Ref: Carr, N. (July/August 2008). Is Google making us stupid? The Atlantic.com. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

Wired Danger Room - Virtual Worlds for Military Training

2008-07-29T14:01:00.001-07:00

Today the Wired Danger Room Blog carried a summary of some ideas that I have been promoting on the use of virtual worlds for military training. The idea of a game on a soldier's desktop is old hat. The idea of a military virtual world that soldiers can access is relatively current. But the idea of the military creating a training service that allows any soldier or unit anywhere to access hundreds of different types of training systems and content - now that is a very big new idea. The Wired blog just begins to introduce that idea.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

2008-07-29T13:56:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Carr created a firestorm around the value of IT in 2003 when he wrote the article “IT Doesn’t Matter” for the Harvard Business Review. He has a new article in The Atlantic entitled “Is Google Making us Stupid?” Google and similar tools allow us access to a lot more information than any other generation has ever had. However, the style of the information and the mental behaviors that we use to access and absorb it are very different from the way previous generations absorbed books and detailed articles. Carr suggests that are becoming accustomed to all information being delivered as small bites that can be consumed in a few minutes. As a result we are losing the mental habit and facility to sit with a long treatise on a subject and work through it over many hours or many days. He reaches back to historical examples that have had similar effects on people’s behaviors. In summary he proposes that the tools that we use to create and deliver information shape the way our brains work and that the Web fails to create the mental muscles required to deeply investigate a subject.

Web 2.0 and Mashups for Military Information

2008-07-29T13:55:00.000-07:00

There is a very interested research paper from MITRE on the use of Web 2.0 tools and mashups for military applications. Web 2.0 usually refers to tools that allow you to collaborate with others online. Mashups are the combinations of services provided by different providers. There are a number of Google Map mashups in which people use Google’s map as the background reference for their own databases. The paper from MITRE describes tools from Yahoo, Kapow, and Google that can be used to process information. It contains an example of hunting through Flickr photos for a picture of a white van that was at a specific location at a specific time. This application ties together Yahoo Pipes with the Flickr photos database. The author goes on to describe the importance of ad hoc information processing to get inside your opponent’s OODA loop.

Ref: “Mashup the OODA Loop”, Jeffery Heier, MITRE C2C Center, New Jersey

Military Compute Cloud

2008-07-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

Amazon Web Services offers computing, storage, and network resources for sale by compute-hour or MB of storage. There are a number of new dot.com companies built on top of these services. The companies do not buy their own hardware, but instead rent only as much as is needed from Amazon, adding or subtracting every week as necessary. DISA has picked up this idea and created a similar service for use by military organizations. For example, STRI could host our applications on their machines and test them (hopefully across the “.mil” domain) – or leave them active as permanent services. The cost of the service is $500/month for unlimited resources. Long-term, DISA sees this as a means of becoming the permanent hosting service for many applications.

NextGov article

Web 2.0 for Simulation

2008-06-26T07:46:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 is a term often invoked to describe social networks, blogs, wikis, and similar tools that allow ad hoc groups to form around topics of interest. These tools are just beginning to be considered as business IT applications. In a military simulation domain, they could become the tools with which exercises are planned and the data from simulations is collected.I believe some of these will emerge at the next IT tool equivalent to email and the web browser. I cannot be certain which application is will be but I would put my money on the Wiki for real business and military operations.

Business Week Article

Web 2.0 for Warfigher Training

Virtual Surgery

2008-06-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

Dr. Richard Satava, US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, believes that a realistic future improvement in surgery is “virtual surgery”. His definition of this term is a surgical process that involves the following steps:

Patient is scanned with MRI to create an accurate digital model of their body and internal organs.
The surgeon operates on this virtual model until he/she arrives at a perfect procedure that is best for this patient. The surgery procedures can be edited just as you would edit a Word document until you remove all errors.
Upload the surgery to a robot that can follow the surgery file exactly. This is similar to a manufacturing robot which can cut metal parts more accurately than a human.
Let the robot perform the surgery under the observation of a surgeon who can override if necessary.

Future of the Internet

2008-05-30T20:48:00.000-07:00

Many people see the Internet and the applications that leverage it maturing into a system and a service similar to electricity, television, or the telephone network. They present this as a good and natural change which will make the system more ubiquitous, reliable, and predictable. However, Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard University is worried about this change. He points out that the power of the Internet has come from its openness and the ability of any person or company to create a product or service that takes it in a new direction. He argues that really innovative, valuable, and powerful products come from strange and unpredictable corners. What centralized approval board would have given the green light to projects like Facebook, Flickr, Second life, and Digg? These are the 21st century equivalents of the Web Browser, VRML, and Google search of the 20th century. Most established users of the network do not see real value in these new applications. But their value comes from the fact that they appeal to people who are not interested in what the Internet did for their parents, but are looking for something entirely different – preferably something that their parents “don’t get” or better yet, something their parents “don’t approve of”. A standardized, stable, commodity product stops growing and changing. There was very little innovation in the telephone network while AT&T held a monopoly on it. In fact, AT&T litigated against a number of innovators who dared to create a product that connected to their telephone system. Zittrain fears that the era of innovation, anarchy, and reinvention on the Internet is coming to a close. He is in favor of a “generative system” that is unruly and always changing itself rather than a platform that must maintain its reliability so that “the big boys” can reliably run their businesses on it.

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Johnathan Zittrain.

Lead User Innovation

2008-05-23T06:29:00.000-07:00

In most industries, R&D is done by a specific in-house department. However, for many products there is a leading edge group of users who buy the product and immediately make modifications to meet their very unique needs. Eric von Hippel (2005) of the MIT Sloan School of Management has studied the impact of "lead users" on the development of new features for products. He describes this effect in windsurfing, mountain biking, and open source software. These customers are effectively an external R&D lab for the company’s products. von Hippel argues that they need to be enrolled by the company as partners in identifying and developing features for the next generation of products. Three criteria must exist for this to be effective: (1) the users must have an incentive to innovate, (2) they must have an incentive to reveal their innovations and share them, and (3) their work must be at a competitive level with innovations created internally and by competing companies.

von Hippel’s book Democratizing Innovation is available as a free download on his web site: http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm

Free Computers with Every Electricity Contract

2008-04-25T09:33:00.001-07:00

Johnathan Swartz, CEO of Sun, was just speaking at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. He reiterated the fact that electric power costs more than computer hardware. Electricity is second only to staffing in many business costs.

A power company could offer a free data center to a company that would sign a multi-year contract to buy power. Note also that Chris Anderson's next big idea is offering free products (his last big idea was The Long Tail).

Self-destructing Email and Instant Messages.

2008-04-25T09:33:00.000-07:00

A small company at Web 2.0 offers a product that allows people to send email and instant messages that disappear over time. Initially this seemed like a very tricky feat. But after getting into the details, I learned that their system just sends an email or IM which contains a link to the content on their web server. When you read the message it is really loading from the server. At the specified time-out they just delete the message from the server and the link that exists in your email or IM client can no longer access the content of the message. This simple idea could be very useful and could be implemented by any web-based email service (e.g. Yahoo, Gmail). Though it is a good idea it is not a likely business success because it is too easily copied by any company.

Four Approaches to Simulation as an IT Service

2008-04-10T13:48:00.000-07:00

Previously I have described an idea to deliver simulations as an IT service in the same way that people are able to use the Web, email, and other online services. Further investigation and discussions with companies pursuing similar projects suggest that there are four methods of achieving this. Each has their own advantages and drawbacks.

Basic HTML. If a simulation can be delivered as basic HTML, then the infrastructure and desktop software is already in place to deliver this. Currently, Google Maps is an example of how far this can be taken with user interactivity.
Plug-in. We could develop a browser plug-in so that the main interface to simulation tools and content is still through the browser, but it would allow us to create more advanced content. The most popular plug-in of this type is Flash. Garage Games has developed a plug-in that uses DirectX and the power of the graphics card on the machine. This service is currently in Beta test at InstantAction.com.
Simulation Framework or Driver. A framework driver is a program that is approved to reside on a standard Army desktop and contains generalized rendering, AI, a GUI, and other tools that can be installed to support specific simulation content modules. The specific content (flight ops, team tactics, etc.) would be downloaded by the driver according to the needs of the soldier that was using a specific machine. The content modules would not be installed as unique programs but would be libraries to an already installed and approved driver.
Full Simulation. Finally, each computer user would have to download and install a full application that is specific to their needs. This is the most problematic in terms of server support, bandwidth, and user permissions.

20th vs. 21st Century Simulation

2008-03-26T18:33:00.000-07:00

We have reached the 21st century. How are military or interactive simulations different in this century than in previous centuries? Are we just going to run them faster than we have in the past? Or are we going to leverage 3D graphics, global networking, gigantic compute and storage servers, ad hoc social networks, the remote sensing explosion, and other technologies to create a fundamentally new product and service? Given the huge changes in computing and communications that have occurred, it would seem criminal to continue creating simulations in the same forms that we have been using for decades.

3D Browser - looks like Google Earth

2008-03-26T18:32:00.000-07:00

HTML and browsers like IE have come to define what the Internet and the Web are, how data is organized, and how it is presented and navigated by the user. But this understanding of he Web is just a snapshot in its continual evolution. There have been a number of attempts to provide a 3D experience on the web (like early VRML). But most of these occurred before the technology could really support them and they emerged as a single point in the vast digital universe - a hobby shop demo of capabilities rather than a really useful tool. But in the last few years products like Google Earth and Worldwind have emerged as tools for viewing data geographically. It allows us to see the world as it has been in the form of maps, satellite images, and multiple layers of cultural information – including 3D features. Google Earth is a billboard announcing that it is time to try a 3D version of the Web again. But this time the widely available technology can support it and Google Earth begins with an integrated framework of data that already has value and can grow into a much richer space. There is a great deal of information on the web that can be organized geographically and presented via a 3D web browser like Google Earth. For people who need to understand their neighborhoods, vacation locations, combat zones, or other areas of interest it is highly inefficient to have to collect data from many disparate sources in the current web. Instead they should be able to access it geographically. It should be organized and offered up by its location. This would be a great addition, but it does not mean that all information can be organized this way. All of the entries in Wikipedia cannot be plotted on a map – e.g. Chevy Chase may mean a comedy actor, a city in Maryland, a financial corporation, or a large group of neighborhood branch banks. Half of these do not fit well on a 3D map. It seems that Google Earth or something like it needs to merge with the current browser to create a tool that allows people to see data in more forms than just flat HTML pages. Adding a 3D application to the desktop is not a good idea because it splits the data into different silos that have to be navigated independently. Instead the two views need to be interlaced together so that a web surfer sees data in the form that is most natural for it.

Microsoft Open XNA

2008-03-04T08:14:00.001-08:00

In 2004, the game Full Spectrum Warrior for the Xbox was published. It was a long and difficult collaboration between the Army, game developers, and Microsoft. With the exception of this game, consoles have been off-limits to serious game developers. The expensive development platforms and licensing agreements focused on games with broad appeal that would be sold in the millions of copies. However, Microsoft has made significant changes to its development model. It is now possible to develop for the Xbox360 without a specialized computer. Microsoft has also just opened up its Xbox Live service so that any independent developer can create a game and get it distributed as a software download through this online service. Potentially, this may open up the console for serious games in military training. These downloadable games will be reviewed by a committee to determine whether they violate any IP or contain objectionable content. If cleared, then they will be posted on Xbox Live for customer purchase and download. This could become an avenue for serious games distribution as well.

Server-side 3D Rendering

2008-02-13T13:29:00.000-08:00

The idea that it is more efficient to render 3D images on a server and then deliver these to clients in real time runs counter to the way distributed systems have been developed for decades. We have always lived in a world in which network bandwidth was so scarce and so slow that it was the bottleneck for distributed systems. IBM, Sun, and HP all see a future in which bandwidth is much more abundant and the delivery speeds are many times faster. They are beginning to create distributed visualization systems that allow all of the heavy visualization work to be done on a server and distributed to clients in a manner similar to MP3 movies (e.g. try watching streaming movies on your PC from Netflix). But they also believe that delivery speeds will be fast enough to allow two-way interaction so that the customer on the client end can navigate through the world and make changes to it while it is being rendered on the server side. Currently it appears that they are able to do this with 3D spaces where the client is primarily interested in moving around objects like machine parts and 3D molecules. The client may occasionally make a change and see the effect reflected back by the server in near real time. This is a necessary first step toward server-side rendering for virtual simulation and gaming environments. I do not think we are at a point where we can support real time interactive play yet and are probably very limited in the number of independent players that can be supported. But the financial benefits of this technology are so compelling that I expect many companies to push on this technology until they make it happen. Even Amazon web Services could be a provider in this space if there is enough demand It essentially turns every electronic device into the equivalent of a rendering machine. Imagine playing the hottest new computer game on your iPod, PDA, or cellphone – and not the high-end version, but a very mediocre piece of hardware. Also, imagine that you do not have to upgrade your computer when a new high-powered game comes out because all of the hardware upgrade is done on the servers. The number of potential customers for such a service is certainly in the tens of millions and perhaps handreds of millions. It seems to be on the scale of the cell phone market in size.

Serious Games Hype Cycle

2008-02-13T13:23:00.000-08:00

In 1995 the Gartner Group created and promoted a graph that they called the Hype Cycle. It describes the boom-and-bust cycle of media coverage and popular attention to a new technology. Once the seeds of a new technology become available, companies begin working on new products that exploit it. If the technology is sexy enough, the media covers it so aggressively that expectations far exceed what can be delivered in the near-term. At some point the real products fail to meet the expectations that were generated by the media, the media and the mass audiences tag it as a failure or disappointment, and wander off to pump up some other technology. However, industry continues to work with the technology and turn it into a product. A few years later the technology delivers successful products that everyone is interested in and customers wonder why it took so long. This Hype Cycle curve has been applied to many technologies and you can see some of these in the links below.

Over the last 2 years the media and our own community have gotten very excited about the promise of serious games. During 2007, the media was particularly enamored with Second Life. There was a point at which Second Life was appearing in the mainstream business press every single week (competing for attention with Facebook). Perhaps, we have gone over the peak of attention and expectation in serious games. We may be entering a period in which many people lose interest in the subject and it is no longer seen as the next revolution in simulation. But even as the media attention wanders away, there will be developers who continue to work in this area. If the hype cycle idea holds true for serious games, then in a couple of years we should see some successful products emerge and the media recognize that the industry is finally catching up with the hype that was generated in 2005-2007.

I have discussed this idea with reps from 2 different companies that develop tools for both the gaming and the military communities. One vendor believes there is no near-term growth opportunity in serious games and are ignoring it, the other vendor believes there is a good growth curve here but the market has to get past the fractured fiefdoms and love of legacy products before it can take off (beginning in 2008 or 2009 in her opinion).

Gartner Hype Cycle Web Site: http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=130115
Wikipedia Hype Cycle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype

Project Darkstar

2008-02-10T12:53:00.000-08:00

Project Darkstar is a research project at Sun Labs aimed at making massively scalable game
server system easy for traditional game programmers to construct. As such, it presents
an event driven, apparently mono-threaded programming model to the game developer while
exploiting the inherently parallel nature of games in an underlying multi-threaded/multi-process
execution environment.

Immortality for 30 cents

2007-12-27T18:39:00.001-08:00

If a gigabyte of hard disk storage costs $100, then you have to manage what you save and what you decide to record in digital form. Now if this cost keeps falling every year, what does it mean if a gigabyte of storage costs nothing? On the Internet a gigabyte of storage is free, I can get it free from Google or Yahoo! just by signing up for an account. If I insist on having that disk drive in my own home, then I can get a gigabyte for about 30 cents.

Would you pay 30 cents to be able to keep your worst digital photos forever?
Would you pay 30 cents to eliminate the job of cleaning up your hard drive?
Would you pay 30 cents so that your email and your voice mail never hit their max capacity?
Would you pay 30 cents to store the medical records of 1,000 people in Africa who do not have 30 cents to store their own medical data?
Would you pay 30 cents to store your most valuable memories in a Digital Library of Congress forever?
Would you pay 30 cents to store a survey of your home for insurance claims?
Is there anything so trivial that you would refuse to pay 30 cents to save it?
How would you answer these questions when 30 cents drops to 1 cent?

Have you stopped to think about what all of this means to the future of information, commerce, personal memories, ... everything?

Santa meets the Warcrafter ....

2007-12-25T18:58:00.000-08:00

10 Kinds of People in the World (The Techie Version)

2007-12-24T13:01:00.000-08:00

There are 10 kinds of people in the world:

01 - Those who understand binary, and

10 - Those who don't.

If you don't understand this joke, then you are in category 10.

New Ideas from Next Door

2007-12-16T15:44:00.000-08:00

Where do new ideas come from? There are the researchers who look for the next big thing in any industry, including simulation. They seek to improve the state of tools or science based on limitations that customers have right now. The simulation community has been clamoring for better interoperability, shared and rapid terrain generation, and more powerful AI for decades. There are entire conferences and committees that explore and discuss each of these.

But who is looking at how multi-core PCs might fundamentally change the simulation industry? Who can see how to apply business IT tools to simulation? What about supercomputers and Web 2.0 tools? Adjacent to simulation are a number of fields that are thriving on different, but related customer problems - as well as lots of money to solve them. Digging deeper in the same hole is not always the best way to solve the problems that are in the hole with you. Sometimes you need to get out of the hole and see what your neighbors are doing in their holes. Your technology neighbors are just as smart as the people in your hole, perhaps smarter. And often by looking at a similar problem from a different angle they come up with a solution that really makes the problem look a lot easier.

Another advantage of the neighbors hole is that you are not required to be consistent with all of the historical work that have been done in your own area. You are allowed to think and explore at tangents that are just not quite proper in the official hole. Gian Zaccai at the Design Continuum says that, "moving among many different industries frees you from the dogma of any one industry and their firm belief in the links between problems and solutions." Andrew Hargadon at UC Davis believes that "bridging multiple worlds, in essence, makes you less susceptible to the pressures of conforming in any one because you have somewhere else to go."

So where some promising places to look for technologies that are valuable in teh simulation world? I like:

High Performance Computing, including multicore and GPU.
Business IT, including the Service Oriented Architecture.
Computer Games, with emphasis on their tools for creating simulations.
Web 2.0 because they are all about collaboration, networking, and authoring unique information.

When I look at what these communities are doing I see so many great ideas that can be used directly in our community. The struggle is always in bringing new ideas from the neighbors next door and convincing my own family that they are valuable. Imagine how the two Marines who created Marine Doom felt back in the 1990's when they introduced their ideas. Back then it was, "that's nice how made a toy look more real". Today the toys are overturning big parts of the industry. All of the industries listed above offer similarly powerful tools.

Get out of your hole and go visit the neighbors.

CPU vs. GPU

2007-12-06T05:52:00.000-08:00

What is the primary and overridding difference between the CPU and the GPU is a nice consumer computer? It is NOT the speeds at which vectors can be processed, it is NOT the ability or lack of ability to processes double precision numbers.

The most important factor is who makes the most money from that PC you bought. Under the current configuration a nice graphics card can account for 50% of the cost of a computer and the GPU often costs more than the CPU.

This situation does not set well with Intel and AMD. The latter has made a move to change this by purchasing ATI and working on a new computer design that combines the capabilities of the CPU and the GPU and brings more computer revenues to the compined company (AMD+ATI).

Intel, on the other hand, is changing the paradigm from inside the company and inside the CPU. Their Larrabee project is looking to perovide a multi-core chip that includes cores that can handle the graphics that have traditionally been owned by the GPU.

So what is Nvidia doing to defend their very profitable turf? It appears that they are pursuing high-applications with their Tesla product that uses multiple GPUs to handle high-compute problems. Given that the consumer desktop is where all of the money is, you would expect them to be doing their own innovation in the consumer space. That may include multi-core GPU, multi-chip cards, combined CPU/GPU architectures ... Or something entirely different.

THe situation where the GPU pulls in a significant share or the PC price is equivalent to a serious threat to Microsoft's ownership of the O/S and Office productivity tools. The power of Intel HAS to rise up to reclaim these revenues. There will be a new architecture for consumer grade computers in CPU/GPU specifically because of the current revenue share ... Intel will make it happen. The real question is why has it taken so long?

Twitter

2007-11-20T06:44:00.000-08:00

Imagine a Blog on which people are constantly updating their current activities. Twitter is a small application that allows a person to post what he/she is doing or thinking right now. It is a strange hybrid between Blog and Instant Message. It has become most popular as a widget that people add to their Facebook or MySpace web pages. Since many people uses these pages as their web home page and the basis for communications with friends or associates, they find tools like this useful for sharing real-time information. This is an application that does not really make sense to a traditional worker who does not use Facebook or have time to be constantly updating their personal status. But one interesting application might be to create remote sensors that are constantly posting their data through Twitter. Anyone interested in the information from that sensor would subscribe to its “twit” and be able to see what is happening. A user would probably subscribe to multiple “twits” and look for an aggregating tool that can pull all of these into a unified picture. In this case the interesting part of Twitter is the publish/subscribe feature over the internet.

The Curse of Knowledge

2007-11-20T06:42:00.000-08:00

The Curse of Knowledge was introduced by Chip Heath, a Stanford Economics professor, in the book Made to Stick. He explains why the more people learn, the less capable they become at communicating what they know.

“People tend to think that having a great idea is enough, and they think the communication part will come naturally. We are in deep denial about the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads of others. It’s just not true that, ‘If you think it, it will stick.’

And that brings us to the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.

Here’s the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly. That’s why knowledge is a curse. But notice we said “unnatural,” not “impossible.” Experts just need to devote a little time to applying the basic principles of stickiness.
JFK dodged the Curse with ‘put a man on the moon in a decade’. If he’d been a modern-day politician or CEO, he’d probably have said, ‘Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.’ That might have set a moon walk back fifteen years.”

Machinima and Training

2007-11-08T19:01:00.001-08:00

I previously described the basics of Machinima. Since this art form uses the same tools that computer games are based on, it is possible to create digital movies that exactly match the look, feel, and capabilities of a game. This would be particularly useful in building a pre-exercise movie that explains the situation and the mission that is to be conducted in a game/simulation. The same tools could be used to record the execution of the in-game mission and then that those movies in the AAR. A 3D window into the exercise from multiple perspectives would be a much more powerful learning tool than an outbrief based on bullet points and a 2D schematic of unit movement.

From an entertainment perspective, Machinima may be a better medium for creating Internet-based “television” programming. This form falls somewhere between filming live actors and traditional animation. One set of authors offers a list of the Top 10 Machinima films that have been created. Watch them at home:

Microsoft XNA for Serious Games

2007-11-08T18:59:00.000-08:00

Microsoft recognized that it was difficult for game studios to create both a PC and an Xbox version of every game. So they created the XNA Framework which allows a team to create a single code base that can be compiled for either the PC or the Xbox without changes to the code. The framework provides a great deal of the functionality needed for a game (similar to a game engine, but not the same breadth of capabilities). Microsoft has released all of this code to the public so that it can be downloaded and used by anyone to create a game (specifically first-person shooters and real-time strategy games). The games developed by amateur users can be compiled to run on either the PC or the Xbox and is an effective way to turning every aspiring game programmer into an Xbox developer – similar to the approach that they took in promoting DirectX over OpenGL ten years ago. Potentially, a serious game developer for the Army could use the XNA Framework to create a military game that is ready for either the PC or Xbox. We have not seen any defense contractors working with XNA yet. However, in order for the game to run on the Xbox, the developer must get a licensing code from Microsoft. Currently, Microsoft has made it clear that they intend to give such licenses to games that fit well into their Xbox Live (online) family of games. They are not interested in seeing XNA used to create serious games, though that might change in the future.

Desktop Game Client

2007-11-08T18:56:00.000-08:00

Delivering simulations/games to the desktops of every soldier in the Army poses a number of challenges, one of which is the ability of the soldier on the receiving end to install a new application on his G-6 provided computer. Most users receive locked-down machines that do not allow any additional installation. But a library of games would require that the user have some ability to do something like installing a module/application unique to his needs. This is similar to the delivery of Flash-based or Java applet content in a web browser. If the Flash player is installed in the browser, then all Flash content that follows can be loaded and run without system admin privileges. To deliver game content to a controlled user, we need a trusted client application playing a role similar to the browser, while all games are handled similar to Flash content. If every game-based training app was built on a single game engine (such as RealWorld), then the specific content could be delivered as data (like a new level in a game). However, physics additions to a game engine would still require the addition of new code (as in a dynamically linked library). It is unlikely that all applications will come from a single game engine.

Universal distribution of simulation software in the military is going to require either installation by the system admin or the creation of a new kind of game client manager that can handle game applications in a manner similar to a Flash file or a Java applet.

Humans as Computing Devices

2007-11-08T18:51:00.000-08:00

Louis von Ahn is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He has been studying the use of games to motivate people to do useful work. He refers to his tools as “Games with a Purpose” - very similar to “Serious Games”. However, his programs focus on image recognition and categorization. They create a playful environment in which two players compete to identify what is shown in a picture. The descriptions they type into the game are captured on a server and become the text descriptions of the images. Each image is used in a number of game rounds to validate that the descriptors applied are agreed upon by multiple players. In his experiments he finds that people played this game for many hours straight – some as many as 12 hours/day. My own experiments with my children showed the same engaging behavior with the games. Using his game and the number of players he has attracted he estimates that he could create tags for all of the images in Google Images in just 5 weeks.

This idea is huge. It uses a gaming environment to motivate people to do valuable work – for free. In the military it might be used to categorize all of the intelligence/reconnaissance imagery on file. It could also be used to train people to identify what is in the images.

I highly recommend watching his lecture (51 minutes) and playing the two games he has designed.

Google Talk lecture
ESP Game: http://www.espgame.org/
Peek-a-Boom Game: http://www.peekaboom.org/

Deploying HPC for Interactive Simulation

2007-11-05T08:11:00.000-08:00

Deploying HPC for Interactive Simulation

Panelists:
Roger Smith, CTO, U.S. Army Simulation and Training
Brian Goldiez, Deputy Director, UCF Institute for Simulation and Training
Dave Pratt, Chief Scientist, SAIC Simulation
Robert Lucas, Division Director, USC Information Sciences Institute
Eng Lim Goh, CTO, SGI

Introduction

The community of academia, industry, and government offices that are leading the development of new interactive simulations for training and analysis are reaching a point at which the application of traditional networks of computing assets are no longer able to support simulation scenarios of sufficient scope, breadth, and fidelity. Several organizations are turning to high performance computing in the form of clusters and shared memory machines to create a flexible computing platform that is powerful enough to run realistic models of military activities and very large scenarios as a matter of course. This BOF will discuss the problem-space and experiments that have been conducted in applying HPC’s to this domain.

HPC Application to Interactive Simulation

Army Interactive Simulation (Roger Smith)

The Army training and simulation community, which includes TRADOC and PEO STRI are currently limited in their ability to provide systems and opportunities to units to train from locations that are remote from existing training facilities. These limitations are driven by historical limits on technology and our ability to design systems and training events that can be initiated at the request of a unit that wants to be trained. However, advances in networking, computing, and distribution services have created an opportunity for us to design systems which can be hosted at a powerful central facility, but which can be accessed, configured, and operated by remote units that need to be trained.

We are exploring the ability to configure an HPC as a central server for simulation-based training. A OneSAF On-demand HPC Training Center will be an “always on”, network accessible, remotely configurable service for training. It will provide access to training in a manner similar to that delivered by vendors like Sun Microsystems’ Grid Compute Utility or Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Both of these make hardware available on demand as a service to business customers. Portions of an HPC will be configured to make the hardware available to up to 200 simultaneous units for training, but with the OneSAF software and scenario databases installed. The graphic display of the activities will run as clients at the customer’s location. Configuring such a system will require tackling several issues regarding provisioning of machines to specific customers, loading or modifying scenarios for each customer, and providing interactive stimulation of a large number of external client machines. The training organizations listed above have been exploring these issues on a smaller scale for a number of years. The availability of HPC dedicated hardware coincides with the FY07 release of OneSAF 1.0 and the maturing of a number of smaller projects to allow us to take the next step in HPC-enabled, always-on, remotely accessible training.

Physics-Based Environment for Urban Operations (Dave Pratt)

You are invited to attend a capability demonstration. The description that follows is the material of SAIC and is not endorsed or validated by JFCOM. Please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone you feel should attend. Unfortunately, due to the venue, only those with US SECRET clearances will be able to attend. I also have a PPT with additional information but will not attach it here as it is 9MB. Please contact me by email if you'd like for me to send it to you.

As part of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program's (HPCMP) efforts to provide support for the warfighter and demonstrate the effectiveness of HPC class resources, a Mini-Portfolio has been established to demonstrate the applicability of physics-based modeling in realistic mission planning and scenario analysis. The Mini-Portfolio sets a new direction for DoD M&S by integrating traditional high-fidelity computationally intensive models into operationally relevant scenarios. In doing so, we aim to advance the science by combining the physical, logical, and behavior models that enable us to better understand military-relevant operations and their consequences in context (e.g. IEDs, urban combat, smoke, loss of signal), at high resolution and fidelity. By showing the effects of realistic enhancements to the simulation of operationally relevant urban environments that are made possible through the introduction of first order physics models in to the simulation, we increase both the believability and usefulness of the models and simulations. Improved simulation accuracy is achieved by extending existing simulation architecture to support selected traditional HPC level models. We have demonstrated the relevance and effect of the scientifically valid models within the warfighter context. To date, we have integrated into the simulation context OneSAF the C4I (Scalable Urban Network Simulation (SUNS)) and aerosol particulate transport (CT-Analyst) high fidelity models. The end result of this portfolio will be a system where additional HPC researchers can demonstrate the effects of their computational advances in a warfighter relevant environment.

Critical Questions (Brian Goldiez)

High Performance Computing, characterized by 64 bit word length, MPI, high speed interconnects, large amounts of local and spinning memory, and appropriate operating system features (e.g., load balancing) has typically been reserved for batch processing. Also, HPC machines are typically procured for a specific class of problem that might need large amounts of cache, other memory, CPU cycles, or inter-processor communications. Interactive computing brings a potential new challenge with respect to end-to-end system latency and runtime parameter change where end-to-end implies an input from a user and output to a user in real time (say 30Hz) and parameter change implies changing input variables during runtime.

It is not clear what type of architecture best supports interactivity and allows accurate physical and behavioral representations of ever growing numbers of interacting entities in a virtual environment. More specific issues that need to be addressed include;

1. How can inter-core and inter-node communications be mapped with various types of interactive simulation needs?
2. What strategies exist or should be created to partition various interactive simulations such as models of terrain or computer controlled avatars that interact require interactions with human users?
3. Are special I/O devices and interconnects needed distribute user inputs and integrate system outputs to facilitate interactivity?
4. Are existing operating systems used in HPC’s appropriate for interactivity especially where fixed update rates may be needed?
5. How will interactive application scale with various HPC architectures and operating systems?
6. Most batch processing users of HPC build from existing commercially available HPC applications (e.g., MatLab for parallel machines). Are groups working on porting existing interactive applications to HPC platforms? If so, what techniques are being used? If not, how should the process be catalyzed?
Addressing these issues are relevant to the military, homeland security, events where large numbers of crowds of people are expected to interact, massively multi-player game environments, etc.

Opportunities in HPC (Robert Lucas)

There is a continued call for better training, evaluation and analysis, where better means faster, cheaper, more available, and of improved realism and validity. Those of us in the High Performance research community see disparate groups working on issues of common concern and universal utility. Experiments such as Urban Resolve have successfully used Linux clusters to host large ensembles of agents interacting in real time with human users. Now we seek to use forces modeling technology and HPC techniques to enhance both real time analysis of intelligence information and to apply the lessons learned from our simulations to the real World. All of these uses will only be truly effective if interactive HPC becomes a readily available tool. Such use will require a number of adjustments and concessions to implement an interactive environment in a "batch-processing" world. An outline of the challenges facing, as well as the opportunities afforded to, interactive HPC will be presented

HPC Architectures (Eng Lim Goh)

“Today's methods of scientific and engineering investigation range from theoretical, experimental to computational science. In computational science, the classical approach has been modeling and simulation. The concern here is the growing gap between actual applications and peak compute performances. We believe one major solution to this growing performance gap is the new multi-paradigm computing architecture. It tightly integrates, what were previously, disparate computing architectures into a highly scalable single system and, thus, allows them to cooperate on the same data residing in scalable globally-addressable memory. Enabling scientists to focus on science, not computer science.

“Additionally, with globally-addressable memory growing to Terascale sizes, a plethora of new, huge-memory applications that profoundly improve scientific and engineering productivity will come on line. From these, may emerge a new branch of computational science called data intensive methods. It includes the traditional method of query, to the more abstract methods of inference and even interactive data exploration. The availability of such a powerful range of interactive methods, for operation on Terascale data sets, all residing in monolithic globally-addressable memory, is a novel combination that will not only facilitate intended discoveries but may also give rise to a new complement which I will call 'planned serendipity'. The latter will be of growing significance in intelligence, science and engineering. And as the amount of data generated by faster and more productive systems grows, visualization will increasingly become an essential tool. The recent advances in display and related technologies, could pave the way for revolutionary new ways of visual, interactive and collaborative communications.”

“SGI’s focus on memory management stems from us seeing a rising concern from our government customers with the deluge of data they are getting. For various reasons, they are not able to exploit that data effectively. So what we started on is how we could leverage our current architecture to accelerate knowledge discovery.

“What we did was tinker with the idea of putting an entire database in memory. NUMAlink allows multiple nodes to be tied tightly together, so that all the memory pieces are seen as one. Once the processors can see all the memory across all nodes as a single memory, then they can load a large database entirely into that memory. So a complex query that would normally take seconds to return a response—because the disk query takes some time to scan the database—could be returned in under a second. When we went out with the idea, we got enthusiastic responses. We heard how it could fundamentally change the discovery process. When you ask questions with complex queries, you sit and wait for a response. It breaks the thinking process, because you might want to converge on an idea by quickly firing off questions and getting quick responses. You want to have a conversation with the data.”

SC07 Web Site Link: http://sc07.supercomputing.org/schedule/event_detail.php?evid=11317

Simulation in the Dirt

2007-10-22T18:36:00.001-07:00

The ADL Implementation Fest included a session in which soldiers from Iraq presented their perspectives on learning, training, and ADL opportunities. SFC Richard Colon from USSOCOM showed a picture of the dust filled tent that he lived in for 5 months. Then he told the audience that in spite of these conditions 80% of the soldiers there have access to a laptop computer, and could make use of ADL if you delivered it on CD or USB stick. This was very surprising. It implies that we really can deliver digital simulation products all the way to the edge of the force. But, as in all other networked systems, the Last Mile will require some special steps. Any desktop, self-guided simulation can be downloaded to a near-by fixed site with infrastructure, then delivered across the last mile on a USB stick. According to SFC Colon the soldiers are equipped to receive these products now. (Note: Colon’s branch is Intelligence, so 80% may not be characteristic of all the units out there – not yet.)

Paper-embedded Data

2007-10-22T18:34:00.000-07:00

Hewlett Packard has announced a new product that is a 2mm data chip that is thin enough to be embedded in printed paper, such as the pages of a book, magazine, or annual report. These chips can contain up to 500KB of data and can transfer to a reading device at a rate of 10Mbs. It has similarities to RFID, but with much higher storage capacity and transfer rates. Marketers see this as an opportunity to deliver short movies along with a printed advertisement. Financial users could embed an electronic spreadsheet in the printed annual report. Children’s books could contain a chip on every page to enhance the reading experience by transmitting audio and video to a player. One federal use would be to make all printed documents compliant with Section 508 rules by adding an audio version to the paper.

Though 500KB is not a huge amount of storage. These devices should be viewed as a form of USB Data Stick. Initial sizes are small, but if the product is successful, then mass production could lead quickly to storage on the order of 50MB at significantly lower costs. At these volumes, intelligence documents could contain photos and video footage

ComputerWorld Article

Quality Search vs. Quantity Search

2007-10-22T18:32:00.000-07:00

When I ask a person a question, they respond with one or two answers that reflect their understanding about what I asked and in what context it falls. When I ask Google Search a question it returns thousands of answers, primarily because it cannot understand the structure of the question or the context in which is lies. Google relies on brute force word matching and then maximizing the number of matches to order the results returned (as well as a number of other criteria about which entire books are written). When Internet Search is really good, it will return far fewer answers. Like a human it will understand structure and context and will give two or three pertinent answers. If it misses the mark, as with a human conversation, then we will engage it with statements like, “no that’s not what I meant, I was referring to …” Right now there is no way to have such a multi-step conversation with Google to explain what you are looking for (though you can approximate this if you have a programmer’s mindset and study the Google query language). This limitation is the focus of search researchers and the hope that companies like Microsoft have to overcome Google’s lead in the area. Someday Search applications may be smart enough to tell us much less about what are interested in finding or learning.

Web 2.0 Generation

2007-10-16T20:57:00.000-07:00

The Web Browser, HTML pages, and the services structured around these all have a common feel that is the WWW to most people. However, following the dot.com bust a number of unique web capabilities began to emerge that were more powerful and capable than plain web pages. These are commonly referred to as Web 2.0. This usually refers to web services in which the user has the ability to interact with the web site, create and post content, and build networks of relationships. There is no hard boundary around the idea, but common Web 2.0 applications include: Wikipedia, digg, AJAX programming behind the Google Maps and Netflix sites, Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, Blogs like those cataloged at Technorati.com, Flickr photo sharing, del.icio.us, and hundreds of others that are less well known.

There have been a number of articles in the techno and business press about how the high school to 20-something generation that is growing up using these will be a different type of professional employee when they graduate from college. The speculation is that they will be much more creative, independent, and self-directed. They will be less submissive to corporate authority, less tied to a single corporate employer, and less likely to define one office as the place where they spend their working hours. The entertainment, movie, gaming, and web programming industries already work through ad-hoc teams and independent contractors. This pattern has also been showing itself in the defense contracting industry as companies shy away from adding permanent employees and use contractors for much of their technical labor.

AAR Camera Ball

2007-10-16T20:56:00.000-07:00

Immersive Media is selling a “camera ball” with 11 lenses on it that provides nearly-360 degree motion picture capture. All 11 camera feeds are recorded individually and a software algorithm stitches them together in real-time so that you can “pan” around the room, even though the camera does not move, but continues to record everything in all directions. They showed me film of their system being used at NTC.

These cameras can be used to record everything that is happening in an important area during live training. The “camera ball” can see and record in all directions simultaneously and the user can steer around the complete scene in the same manner that we currently pan a single-lens camera. Someone at NTC has already used this at least once, but I was not able to find out who from the vendor.

http://www.immersivemedia.com/

Google as the Future Internet Backbone

2007-10-16T20:54:00.000-07:00

Google has built a number of processing centers around the country. Those in Oregon and North Carolina have been the subject of magazine articles, though there are supposed to be a number of others. These centers initially provide rapid responses to search queries and the delivery of advertisements. However, given the bandwidth that will connect these sites, their processing power, and their data storage, these sites are potentially the backbone of the future media-rich Internet. Google may sell hosting services to companies like YouTube and the television networks who need to deliver movies, music, etc to customers from locations that are close to the customers that requested the information. As Hollywood moves toward digital movies delivered via a network, these sites may also deliver those movies directly to theater projectors

Simulation Books are Hard to Find

2007-10-01T04:22:00.000-07:00

It has always been a challenge to find really good books on interactive simulation. There are a number on niche topics, like Richard Fujimoto's book on Parallel and Distributed Simulation - which is primarily about the synchronization of sims across multiple computers. Then there are all of the Discrete Event college textbooks. Then the pool gets really dry. Keep your eye on game programming books. That who genre is pretty primitive right now, not much more than programming advice. But it might get richer now that the whole world wants to create virtual worlds.

Amazon Listmania on Simulation

Army Facebook 2.0

2007-09-18T15:56:00.000-07:00

My last Blog entry on this subject led to a very interesting conversion with a writer from Fast Company magazine. Ellen McGirt called to get some more details on what the Army was considering regarding Facebook. During that conversation I was able to paint a picture in which the social networks in Facebook could serve as an organizational structure to bring together people who want to train together in a shared environment. Something like this would work for entertainment gamers as well. Imagine that you want to plan out your tactics and then everyone meet to launch into the game at the same time. Facebook is one medium in which you could share information and do the finishing touches before jumping in.

Is the Army working on using Facebook as a group training portal to its online games? No, not yet. But we are talking about what Facebook means to us. What value does it present? What tools could be usefully embedded into or launched from it? Given our security limitations, it is highly unlikely that we would do something like this using the real Facebook. Instead we might instantiate a private version inside of government networks - something similar to what we have already done with Google Earth.

Oh, my talk with Ellen also convinced me to create my own Facebook account. I find it quite fun to play with all of the tools available. I just don't have any friends in there yet, so imagine a party with just 2 people there. But, I have been building quite a network at LinkedIn. It seems my associates are a little more "serious" about their connections and prefer something based on resume stats, rather than personal photos and maps of travel.

BTW - I am currently in Kansas City, MO. As a result of using the travel mapping widget on Facebook I looked at the rental car map and asked, "How far is it to Nebraska from here?" Because I just realized that Nebraska is one state I have not visited yet. The rental agent told me that people who go to Nebraska do not come back. I think he meant it was a great place to live.

Periodic Table of Simulation

2007-09-09T11:37:00.000-07:00

We all learned our chemical elements from the Periodic Table. That curiously arranged graph of elements showed the relationships between the elements and many of their fundamental properties.

Imagine applying that same method to simulation. What are the fundamental elements of simulation? How would you arrange them for meaning in a Periodic Table? Would such a tool be a useful way to convey the core information about our industry?

I have been in this industry for 20 years and have developed a personal mental organization of the core topics. But that is a secret map inside of my head that I have never tried to extract and capture in a concrete form. I think new entrants into this field would find such a Periodic Table extremely useful.

One group has applied the Periodic Table of Elements to the graphical presentation of information. It is one example of how this might be done.

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
Chemical Periodic Table of Elements (just to refresh your memory)

Army Facebook Community

2007-09-02T14:53:00.000-07:00

Facebook is one of the popular social networking sites. It is a distant second in number of subscribers to MySpace. However, the largest social group on Facebook is made up of members of the US Army. The network has 43,000 members who have identified themselves as being associated with the Army. Is it possible to communicate with all of these people through Facebook? If so, then how can this network be used to conduct or coordinate training? Given that the founders of Facebook have opened it up to outside tool development, would it be possible to build training or simulation content that is actually accessed and launched through the Facebook interface?

ComputerWorld and the Golden Nugget

2007-08-30T18:58:00.000-07:00

Everyone in the technology fields has the opportunity to be buried under a deluge of free magazines. We have all been seduced into accepting just one more free subscription. Many of us receive enough of these to build an entire house or to fuel a stove through a long, hard winter. As you would expect of free publications, most of what they contain is shallow drivel that is just good enough to attract advertisers.

In this blizzard of worthless words there are a few pubs that are actually good. Every week I am pleased to receive ComputerWorld. I immediately head to the center of the magazine where "The Grill" column is hidden. They always have a quick interview with someone that I am genuinely interested in hearing from. Honestly, I do not look at anything else in the magazine. It is that one golden nugget that makes it worth getting the magazine.

What will you get in the "The Grill"?
Here is a Google list of Recent Interviews

OPFOR 21

2007-08-29T17:52:00.000-07:00

Large exercises employ a number of Opposing Force (OPFOR) role players, each of which usually has a single job. However, in expanding the availability of training systems and events to remote units, the number of OPFOR players will be a bottleneck on scalability. There are many activities in which a single person manages a number of tasks/scenarios. For example, a chess master can play dozens of challengers simultaneously and stock traders handle hundreds of orders from other traders. Is it possible to a talented OPFOR player to handle two, three, or more scenarios simultaneously? If he had a well designed simulation interface that did not impede such multi-tasking, could he effectively fight multiple missions at the same time? This is just one step in improving the efficiency of human operations in a simulation center.

Nvidia Tesla Supercomputer

2007-08-26T18:48:00.000-07:00

Nvidia has released a “supercomputer” in three small form factors: (1) a PCI card that fits inside a desktop computer, (2) a deskside box that connects to a PC, and (3) a 1U server that fits in a rack. These machines are based on GPU graphics chips and the smallest provides 128 computing cores on a single card. These are vector processors which are very good at performing the same mathematical operation on large volumes of data – such as processing photo images or radar returns, computing fluid flow, or calculating line-of-site. Unfortunately, they are not the most efficient at processing logical code like that found in simulators. However, as the cost point for these machines comes down, they may brute force their way into being a useful solution for us.

Nvidia Tesla website

Sun Blackbox

2007-08-19T16:39:00.000-07:00

Sun Microsystems has created a computing center inside of a 20 foot shipping container. This product is meant to be a portable IT center for oil companies, DHS/FEMA, commercial disaster recovery, portable on-demand computing. The container is completely sealed from the outside and connects to external power and cooling pumps (which could be contained in a second 20 foot shipping container). This could potentially provide all of the computing power for a training base in Kuwait or for a mobile Live/Virtual/Constructive training package.

The product incorporates standard computing capabilities. Its unique features are in the design for shock absorbency, separation from the elements, air flow, and power consumption.

Injecting 3D worlds directly into the brain

2007-08-19T16:36:00.000-07:00

Experiments are being done to allow blind people to see objects by directly simulating their brain. This is a new way to sense the world or to sense a 3D virtual world. Could variations of this technology be used to overlay information from a virtual world with a sighted person’s perception of the real world? This would be a more intense/intrusive method of achieving augmented reality. So a soldier at National Training Center would be able to see the 3D image of an opponent that exists only in a simulation – a new step in Live/Virtual interoperability. Of course the question is who would allow this to be done to them and would it be any better than augmented reality using half-reflective glasses?

BBC Article
Wired Article

Simulation as the Preferred Form of Communication

2007-08-12T19:28:00.000-07:00

Anthony Townsend at the Institute for the Future believes that “simulation will be an innate vocabulary for tomorrow's consumer, worker, soldier, and educator. They will see the world and describe it in terms of simulations in the same way that my parents used written essays and I use PowerPoint. It may well become their preferred mode of visualizing and interacting with data.”

To make this possible the simulation and gaming communities have to create simulation construction tools that are as readily accessible as PowerPoint. These must have: (1) ease of use, (2) ubiquity of access, and (3) affordable price. They must also have a data standard that is community generated (e.g. XML) or commercially driven (e.g. Microsoft Office document formats).

Recent business magazines are talking about the need for a standard 3D representation standard. Perhaps, the world needs the 3D interface in order to connect to a simulation tool. Simulation tools like GPSS/H and Arena are certainly powerful, but perhaps too abstract for the common user.

Persistent Archive of Military Simulation Research and Experience

2007-08-12T19:23:00.000-07:00

A great deal of the simulation technology that is created in defense is not captured in the form of journal articles. This means that a lot of knowledge is lost because it is not archived in a form that can be readily searched by others in the profession. The largest repository of articles on military simulation is on the SISO web site and the last time I checked there was no way to search across all of the conference contents.

In an effort to familiarize our simulation scientists and engineers with their options for publishing their work, we should create a panel session at a major conference like I/ITSEC composed of all of the Editors of the relevant journals in this area. They would present the goals of the journal and the methods for submitting to it to an audience that traditionally limits itself to conference presentations. An initial list of these journals is:

ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation
Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation
Simulation
Presence

Certainly there must be more.

Simulation Center Design

2007-08-05T07:33:00.000-07:00

While visiting the 86th BWFX in Vermont it struck me that the layout and operation of the sim center is almost identical to the first big exercises that I participated in – Certain Caravan and Reforger 1992. There are hundreds of computers, miles of network cables, and hundreds of operators. In the last 15 years it does not appear that we have done anything to redesign the sim center for better efficiency. Most of the systems in the 2007 exercise were new and different from those of 1992, but the number of computers and operators is the same.

The sim center is like a factory that generates training stimulus. It is hard to imagine a factory that has not been significantly changed by automation in the last 15 years. I know the F-16 fighter factory where I began my career is still in the same building, but the layout and operations inside have changed considerably due to computer automation and increased parts outsourcing. There is probably an opportunity to redesign the sim center, eliminate many stations and functions, and make the system more efficient.

Server-side Rendering - Sun and Nvidia

2007-08-05T07:28:00.000-07:00

Sun has been working with Nvidia to create a capability to do both the computation and any associated rendering on the server side. Then they stream the screen image to the client device. This is significant switch from what we do with the DIS and HLA federations now. But Sun’s goal is to make it possible to experience rich 3D scenes on lightweight client devices because all of the rendering is done on the server. They are also working on a capability to use new graphic chips to render “Pixar quality” images in real-time for display in CAVE environments.

If Sun is successful then it is an indication that network bandwidth is becoming plentiful enough that we can change the model we have used for decades of creating very small data packets and doing all of the scene generation on the client side. This is valuable for customers who do not want to have to hold a powerful graphic machine in their hand (like a cellphone). Instead, customers will be able to see rich 3D worlds on very minimal computing clients, e.g. something that is capable of playing MP3 movies today. This brings down a significant commercial barrier. Even the cheapest cellphones and pocket PCs would be able to play a rich 3D game because the game would really be running and rendering on the server. It is hard to imagine a world in which bandwidth is that plentiful for the consumer. Probably it would be rolled out to industrial customers for limited applications and private bandwidth first. Their product name for this is TurboVNC.

On the military side, we would be able to tap into any scene that anyone in the training event is seeing. We could see it on a regular cellphone (if/when it becomes available through a cellular network) or a wireless pocket PC.

Teraflop Computing in Your Palm

2007-08-03T04:33:00.000-07:00

DARPA is looking to build embedded computers out of commercial graphics chips. Their target applications are small, hand-held devices like sensors (imagery, chem/bio, motion, acoustic, etc.). They would prefer to do the signal processing on the sensor device rather than downloading it to a processing center. Downloading requires lots of bandwidth and power to send the info. If the processing is on the sensor, then the transmitted information can be simplified to something like [ID, Target Type, Location, Velocity ... and other parameters]. This can go in short transmission bursts. If the processing is on the sensor, then the computer/chip has to be small, low cost, and low power. Reusing commercial chips is the best approach to get low cost because commercial customers will amortize the development costs. That is what led them to Nvidia chips.

The project looks forward to a day when the processing on the sensor is equal to a current supercomputer (Teraflops). Imagine a hand-held digital camera like something that you can get at Best Buy - but with 500Mpixels and a computer inside. Once the picture is taken the camera can process the image, extract the people in the picture, search a local database and identify the names of the people in the picture, their general location, and the season of the year. All of this could become metadata so that when the picture is posted to the web (like Flikr) the metadata explains what is in the picture and everyone on the net can search for pictures with specific characteristics. If the sensor also has a cellular net connection, the pictures can be uploaded in real-time.

What does this have to do with simulation and training?
IF such a computer in a handheld device existed, then you could run WARSIM or OneSAF on your own Palm Pilot-sized device. You could also hook up to everyone else who is running a simulation on their Palm Pilot, share scenarios, collaboratively train. It would be to modern simulation centers what Wikipedia has been to the Encyclopedia Britannica. It would allow the masses to create and run their own exercises. Like Wikipedia vs. Britannica, the sim center staff is going to immediately criticize this plan because it lacks the "experts". But if you have followed what has happened on Wikipedia you will have noticed that "the masses" have a lot of expertise and are quick to share it when a medium like Wikipedia is available.

Say's Law

2007-08-03T04:30:00.000-07:00

“The power of the Xerox copier did not lie in its capability to replace carbon paper and other existing copying technologies, but in its ability to perform services beyond the reach of those technologies. The 914 [copier] created a market for convenience copies that had previously not existed. Thirty copies of an existing document to share with a group of coworkers was not a need people knew they had before the invention of xerography. Since people couldn’t make thirty easily and inexpensively, no one articulated doing so as a ‘need’.

What we see operating in these cases of technology creating its own previously undreamed of uses is a variant of Say’s Law. Jean Baptiste Say, an early nineteenth century French economist, observed that in many situations, supply creates its own demand. People don’t know they want something until they see that they can have it; then they feel they can’t live without it.”

Reengineering the Corporation, Michael Hammer and James Champy, 1993.

Wikinomics and Personal Creativity

2007-07-12T18:19:00.000-07:00

The book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott explores the exploding trend of all members of society to create and distribute their own products. Wikipedia, YourTube, Blogs, and the Open Source communities have all created the tools that allow everyone to be a creator, not just a consumer of products. He feels that the generation that is now between 10 and 25 will carry with them a mindset of personal creation and modification of all of the products they use. Many of our training system users seem to already have this type of mindset. But perhaps the next wave of users will have it to a higher degree. We should expect future users to stretch the composability of systems like OneSAF to their limits

The Unreasonable Man

2007-07-12T18:18:00.000-07:00

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Man and Superman, 1903, George Bernard Shaw

The Long Tail in Training Systems.

2007-07-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, explains a new side of the economics of music downloads and other digital businesses. In summary, when a product is digital and requires no physical storage, production, and shipping, then it is possible to profitably deliver millions of songs, movies, games, and software apps. We are not limited to the Top 1,000 in each category because we have to recoup costs associated with physical products.

The idea can also be applied to military training systems. We have historically focused our training systems on the people who go into combat and have done so with projects that are $50M or larger. At this price tag we can only afford to address the needs of a small portion of the military – hence the focus on those who are in harm’s way. But if we could lower the cost of training systems significantly, we could potentially acquire training systems for every single Army MOS. In the future, when every soldier has a laptop computer and every unit has a decent network connection, there could be a training application on every single Army desktop. These applications could be as ubiquitous as MS Office. To accomplish this, the training systems must be much smaller and less expensive - $1M, $100K, or even $10K to develop. If we can create valuable training systems at these prices that run in a desktop computer environment, then we may be able to serve all 400,000 soldiers in the Army.

Anderson’s original article in Wired Magazine and his Blog.

Roger Smith's "The Long Tail in Military Simulation Systems" article which explores in more detail how this can be done.

ISR Modeling Categories

2007-07-08T17:59:00.000-07:00

In preparing a recent presentation for the IO-ISR Forum at the Simulation Interoperability Workshop, I listed a dozen simulations of Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance; ordered them by time; and attempted to identify categories to characterize the evolution of ISR modeling over the last few decades. The categories that I arrived at are:

Role Player. Initially intelligence was created through the actions of role players who injected information into the training event in the form of voice phone reports, textual reports, and map overlays.
Sensor Models. The first step in modeling ISR was to create sensor models for the native combat objects in the game. These usually posted enemy ID, location, and status information to a global blackboard in the system that made it accessible to all units and players. Examples: JESS/CBS, ADSIMS/AWSIM, ENWGS/RESA.
Intel Side-car Models. The next step was to create side-car ISR models that operated unique units in a model that was separate from the combat model. This allowed separation for classification issues, independent development of ISR sims, and adoption of existing sims that were used in the testing world. But it also created dual environments that were not always well synchronized. Examples: TACSIM, NWARS, JOISIM, JECEWSI, FIRESTORM, IEWTPT.
Extensions. A few ISR simulations have been developed as extensions of the combat model. These use the same infrastructure, data, and models where possible; but add classified data and models as necessary. Examples: BICM, WIM.
Integrated. I was not able to identify any ISR simulations that are truly integrated with their combat sim parent. In all cases, the ISR simulation is developed separately and evolves its own unique features that are not common with the combat simulations. Examples: None. Though I believe ENWGS had an integrated ISR model at one point, but it was removed.

The World Needs Only 5 Computers

2007-07-06T19:52:00.000-07:00

Greg Papadopolous, the CTO of Sun Microsystems, has been getting a lot of play from the statement that the world only needs 5 computers. This plays against a (purported) famous statement by Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM, when he truly believed that there were only a few customers for big computers. Greg P. has an entirely different meaning. He sees the networking of the world as a force that will concentrate computational power into a few major centers that will serve up most of the services that people will need from computers. As examples he identifies the 5 providers of these services as Google, eBay, Amazon.com, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com.

Militarizing this idea, we could say that the Army only needs 3 computers. These would be networked “hyperscale machines” (Papadopolous’ term) that serve up: (1) Business IT, (2) Mission Operations, and (3) Training Events. As with Papadopolous’ list of 5, further digging will reveal that these 3 computers only cover 80-90% of what the Army needs to do. Perhaps there will be smaller machines for R&D and other functions. Yes, smaller. The amount of R&D computation is probably very small compared to the pooled operations in the top three categories of business, mission, and training.

Papadopolous’ original article

Simulation Products to Every Soldier in the World

2007-07-05T04:18:00.000-07:00

As computer and network resources become more reliable within military units, it will become feasible for every soldier in the Army to have a computer and a connection from which they can access and make use of a simulation products. Delivering training services to the edge of the force will require hosting most of the computation at server sites and making it accessible through a lightweight client on the soldiers’ PC. Simulation will have to be configured as a service rather than as a product that is installed on all of these computers. The desktop client application might fall into three different categories: (1) clients that are web pages and Flash content that load in real time – like the Phosphor flash-based game, (2) clients that are relatively small but need to be installed on every computer – like Google Earth, and (3) heavy clients that are the size of a full game - like Americas Army. Delivering content to these customers will require large compute and data centers that manage dozens of servers-side applications and hundreds of scenario databases. These servers can also be connected to virtual simulators to allow the soldier desktop to interact with virtual simulators like CCTT and AVCATT.

The goal is to deliver training to every soldier in the Army when he needs it, not when it is possible for him to go to a training center. IT-based solutions work well for constructive and game-based simulations. They can connect to Live and Virtual systems for collaborative training as well.

Military Simulation Wikipedia

2007-07-05T04:16:00.000-07:00

For decades the military has maintained catalogs of the simulation systems that have been developed, what their capabilities are, and who to contact to get them. The earliest version that I saw was a 2-column printed set from the late 1980’s. Since then, this catalog has gone electronic, distributed on floppy disks in the 1990s; and more recently has gone online at MSIAC. However, it is something that is easy to neglect and to let fall out of date. Perhaps we can turn authorship of the catalog over to the community at large using a Wiki. The Wikipedia has shown that such open communities tend to create documents that are accurate, detailed, and current – most of the time. The interests of the many serve to police the documents to eliminate or correct inaccuracies in the entries.

Robert Ballard on the Titanic and Future Explorations

2007-07-05T04:11:00.000-07:00

Robert Ballard, located the Titanic and discovered geothermal vents on the bottom of the ocean. He pointed out that we spend more money exploring space in one day than we spend exploring the oceans in an entire year. His work has been supported by NOAA and the Office of Naval Research and has bridged exploration and military missions.

Newly declassified fact – the search for the Titanic was a cover story for a classified mission. His team was really searching for the USS Scorpion, a nuclear submarine with nuclear weapons that was lost in 1968. The Navy was not exactly thrilled when he actually found the Titanic and brought in media attention from around the world.
The hydrothermal vents explain the chemical composition of the ocean (why it is different from fresh water) and show that life can exist without photosynthesis. They may also point to the origins of life on Earth.
Using unmanned robot submersibles he is now surveying the 50% of the U.S. land mass that is under the ocean, primarily the areas around the Hawaiian and Marshall islands. He also uncovered nearly perfectly preserved ships in the Black Sea and next year will return to try to locate and extract the preserved bodies of its crew members.

Robert Metcalfe on Military Networks

2007-07-05T04:06:00.000-07:00

Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, presented some interesting ideas at a Navy conference. He described his perspective on where the Internet is going and provided advice on how to build military networks:

The Internet is growing into Video, Mobile connection, and Embedded networks in devices. Video and Mobile connections are stressing the foundations of the Internet right now and he thinks it will take 5-10 years to build out the net so that it can properly handle all of this content. However, the growth of devices with embedded networks is more important. Last year 10 billion devices were sold with embedded computer chips, most of them do not have network connection. He believes that in the future all of these devices will be on the Internet. The current net is not ready to support this volume of traffic and TCP/IP is not an appropriate protocol for that last mile to the device. He is pushing Zigby as the protocol that will bring embedded devices to the Internet.
The Internet was created by graduate students with no interest in security. He believes that the Internet is most vulnerable because it has no authentication of users at its lowest level. Routers do not verify the origin of messages, which allows spam and viruses to spread with little record of their originators.
We do not currently monitor the status of the oceans, rather we sample it with a few missions that take data at one location at a given point in time. If we really want to understand the oceans by monitoring them, then we need an underwater Internet to make it possible for sensors to reside and report from there permanently.

Commercial/Game-based Low Cost Virtual Simulator

2007-07-04T17:11:00.000-07:00

How close are we to being able to create an entire virtual simulator using commercial and gaming technologies? If we were to sponsor a competition to create a CCTT-like or AVCATT-like module (just the crew compartments and supporting computers, not the supporting tools) that trains the same skills, but is built using low-cost commercial items, what could industry accomplish? What price range could this reach? Is it possible to build an acceptable training device like a CCTT module using game engines, their associated development environments, computer peripherals, and low cost enclosures – which can be delivered for less than $50K each?

Interoperable Architectures vs. Simulations vs. Customers

2007-07-04T17:07:00.000-07:00

Interoperability between diverse simulation systems has been a major focus since the 1990's. We have made huge strides since then. The limits that we experience in interoperability today are not due to poor designs of architectures or infrastructures. DIS, HLA, TENA, and others offer more opportunities for interoperability than we are able to exploit. Limitations in interoperability are generally due to the need to keep old (and expensive to replace) simulations in the inventory. There can be no magically engineered architecture that can pull together all of the extremely different data, model, and interface representations in dozens of existing simulations. To create a distributed simulation environment that is tightly linked (or highly interoperable) we have to create new architectures and new simulation systems that match each other. Tying old models to a new architecture or infrastructure will always be a suboptimal solution.

Staff Training via C4I System and Without a Simulation

2007-07-03T06:17:00.000-07:00

Is it possible to create and run an entire staff training exercise using only C4I systems and the tools that they have on them or that can be installed on them? Could that community create their own training environment without relying on dedicated simulation systems and tools at all? What quality of event could they create if allowed to augment their standard C4I applications with a few additional applications or interface machines drawn from the public domain? One of the reasons I am interested in exploring the future of constructive simulation is that current C4I systems have many of the same tools and the units that use them may be able to train without traditional simulations.

Game-based training system lifecycle support

2007-07-03T06:15:00.000-07:00

We see systems like DARWARS AMBUSH! pressing to become a program of record. But, with a game-based system that is burned onto a CD and largely self-explanatory, what type of lifecycle support will really be necessary for it? Perhaps these types of games can survive in the military with a much smaller organizational support footprint. Perhaps one Project Director could be responsible for 30 game-based systems deployed through the Army. What type of support does a game really need? Is it significantly different than our more traditional systems/devices?

DARWARS AMBUSH!: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARWARS

Data Mining: The 4th Way of Doing Science

2007-07-03T06:14:00.000-07:00

Peter Freeman at NSF suggests that data mining will be the 4th way of doing science. For example, in astronomy, scientists will no longer look at the heavens to discover a new planet. Instead they will look into massive databases that have been collected. New forms of analysis will be able to discover where planets should be based on this data much more reliably than by looking through a telescope.

Simulation as the 3rd Way of Doing Science

2007-07-03T06:12:00.000-07:00

Within DOE they have developed a new perspective on the importance of modeling and simulation. They call M&S “the third way of doing science”. The first way is through observation. The second is through direct experimentation. Faced with so many significant problems for which they cannot do experimentation or perform observation, they are turning to M&S as the tool to understand the behaviors of all of their systems. In their community a “simulation” is an exact, physics-based representation of the real system; a “model” is an aggregate or stochastic representation that estimates behaviors at a higher level because they do not understand exactly what is happening. M&S is the primary method of conducting energy research.

The origins of the phrase “the third way of doing science” seem to be in one of the two documents below

Idealized Design

2007-07-03T06:10:00.000-07:00

Russell Ackoff, Univ. of Pennsylvania, has written a book called Idealized Design based on his experiences at AT&T in the 1970’s and several decades of consulting work with industry. In this case “design” does not mean the early phases of a product creation. Instead, he is talking about strategic transformation of a company or business unit. Rather than looking at where the business is now and designing forward to a future goal, Ackoff teaches his clients to imagine that the organization is right now in the ideal state they are looking to attain. Once that state is defined clearly, he has them work backward from there to where they are now. He claims that the advantage is that this prevents them from (1) being stumped by current organizational problems they are facing, (2) following dead end branches that traditional forward chaining methods would lead them down. It also retains their enthusiasm for the possible future throughout the exercise and execution because people are not immediately disarmed by the current state of the organization.

The concept, minus the process, is captured in: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1540

MEMS for Weapon Orientation

2007-07-03T06:09:00.000-07:00

We have studied the current state of MEMS devices that can serve as orientation and movement sensors. These devices are currently light, consume little energy, and cost little to produce. However, their accuracy is much worse than the larger, more traditional devices. This is the profile of a disruptive technology. The new devices have inferior performance in the area that is most important to current customers, so they do not adopt the devices. However, they provide a capability at such a low power, weight, and cost that an entirely new market will open up for the devices. The revenues from this new market, as well as global R&D, will improve the technology so that eventually it will provide better performance than the established systems and drive those out of business.

More Info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology

Simulation as an IT Service

2007-07-03T06:03:00.000-07:00

Simulation systems are becoming increasingly complex. This complexity limits our ability to deliver them to facilities and units. Because large systems require significant professional expertise, large hardware investments, and continuous software updates, there are very few sites that can host these effectively. Imagine that we deliver simulation as a service instead of a product. If the system were hosted in a central, professionally staffed and equipped location, its capabilities could be made available to all soldiers in the world through our growing networks. This would make products accessible to many more units and soldiers than can use them today. The system would also be staffed with the most experienced personnel available, no matter what the location of the soldiers. I have begun investigating the feasibility of delivering simulations in this manner. This must also include determining whether existing products are architected in a manner that will allow this to be done.