NS-CTA

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Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance
type Sponsored Project
status active
homepage http://www.ns-cta.org/ns-cta-blog/
Management
sponsor US Army Research Laboratory
team Tetherless World Constellation
investigator James A. Hendler
participant Jie Bao
Tags
Internal


Contents

Overview

The NS CTA program brings together government, industry and academic institutions to perform foundational, cross-cutting research for a fundamental understanding of interactions, interdependencies, and common underlying science among social/cognitive, information, and communications networks. Prediction and control of the composite behavior of these complex interacting networks will ultimately enhance effectiveness in network-enabled warfare and counterinsurgency. To this end, NS CTA establishes four closely collaborating Network Research Centers: Information Networks Academic Research Center (INARC), Communications Networks (CNARC), Social-Cognitive Networks (SCNARC), and Interdisciplinary Research Center (IRC).

Awarded in September 2009, the program is a fundamental research effort of potentially $166M over ten years with a team of principal members in the consortium that includes Raytheon BBN Technologies (IRC lead), Penn State (CNARC lead), University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign (INARC lead), and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (SNARC lead).

Tetherless World and NS-CTA

The Tetherless World is currently involved in two research projects inside NS-CTA

Project 2.1 Semantic Information Theory

In 1948, Claude Shannon identified some of the key properties of information flowing through networks. In particular, Shannon explored fundamental limits on compressing, reliably storing, and communicating data. Modern military communication networks, as well as much of the modern IT industry, use the information theory derived from Shannon as a key mathematical backbone of their work. In this project we are exploring how to extend the information theory based in part on a model proposed by Weaver in 1949 [Weaver49], but not followed up on in the intervening years. Weaver suggested that the semantics of a communication could affect information loss, particularly that semantics could allow the reconstruction of information in noisy communication networks. We seek to model, quantitatively, the effect of semantics on information loss and to understand how these semantics thus affect information utilization at the level of information and social and cognitive networks.

Project E1: Formal Modeling of Dynamic Networks and Network Interactions

To cope with the complexity and dynamic nature of composite networks, including communication networks, social and cognitive networks and information networks, we need to understand a broad range of properties of each type of component network, and in particular, their common properties and interactions. Therefore the primary goal in this task is to identify the key factors that are necessary and sufficient to describe composite networks in the context of military missions. In this task we will focus on the formal modeling of: (1) temporal dynamics of individual networks and those of relationships and interactions between networks; (2) various types of conditional dependencies, and causality between network events; (3) probabilistic attributes of networks; (4) contextual information in composite networks and its effects in network integration.

People

Tetherless World researchers

Major Collaborators

Publication

External Links

Facts about NS-CTARDF feed
Homepage http://www.ns-cta.org/ns-cta-blog/  +
Investigator James A. Hendler  +
Participant Jie Bao  +
Sponsor US Army Research Laboratory  +
Status active  +
Team Tetherless World Constellation  +
Retrieved from "http://tw.rpi.edu/wiki/NS-CTA"
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