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Noted
energy expert Amory Lovins visits NPS.
 The
Cebrowski Institute was honored to host Amory
Lovins’ December 2006 visit to the Monterey
peninsula. More than 250 people attended a public
program to hear Lovins’ recommendations
for “Winning
the Oil Endgame” to achieve national
security goals. Earlier in the day, Lovins, a
member of the Defense Science Board, told NPS
faculty and students that it is taking about 1.4
gallons of fuel to move one gallon into a combat
theatre and that DoD is currently spending about
one-third of its budget on logistics, much of
that to move fuel. He said warfighting is now
about 15 times more fuel-intensive than in World
War II. Ken Krieg, Undersecretary of Defense for
Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, has called
the energy issue “the 5th strategic vector.”
Amory Lovins, a MacArthur Fellow and consultant
physicist, has advised the energy and other industries
for nearly three decades as well as the U.S. Departments
of Energy and Defense. He cofounded and leads
Rocky Mountain Institute,
an independent, market-oriented, nonprofit applied
research center. Much of its work is synthesized
in Natural Capitalism.
RMI spun off E
Source in 1992 and Hypercar,
Inc. in 1999.
The Cebrowski Institute sponsors cross-discipline
projects leading to innovations that strengthen
global security. Energy, a critical national security
issue in the 21st century is an emerging NPS research
focus. The Cebrowski Institute has been instrumental
in supporting The
Energy Conversation, a collaborative website
and speaker series.
Graduating
CISR Student briefs LtGen Lorenz, USAF.
Several Computer Science (CS) students,including
Annette Torrence 
(pictured) were invited to discuss their thesis
work with LtGen Stephen Lorenz, USAF, Commander
Air University, as well as Dr. Denning, Dr. Purdue
and appropriate thesis advisors. LtGen Lorenz
is a member of the NPS Board of Advisors.
Ms. Torrence is a participant in the Scholarship
for Service Program in which students are
recruited to work as research associates to study
information assurance with CISR,
a Cebrowski Institute affiliated research center.
She is working towards her MS in CS with an emphasis
in Information Assurance. Her research is focused
on investigating the use of formal methodologies
to specify high assurance systems. She received
a BS in CS at Rocky Mountain College in Billings,
MT. After she graduates in June, she is looking
forward to continuing employment with DoD at Fort
Meade. The other three students were from the
US Navy, Marine Corps and Greek Navy.
Autonomous
Coordination Lab finding.
Eric Sjoberg, a student in the Autonomous Coordination
Lab, recently developed algorithms which can autonomously
group tanks to provide optimal coverage of an
area.The goals of the Autonomous Coordination
Lab are both to understand the fundamental aspects
of how teams of agents coordinate and to utilize
this understanding to build deployable systems
that can achieve complex goals with little or
no external supervision. The research involves
both simulation and field testing on physical
robots and UAVs. Issues faced include developing
fast online learning algorithms, automatically
generating subgoals in support of the global goal,
and understanding how we can utilize only local
rules to generate the desired global behavior.
The goal here is to have the two
look-outs and the scout coordinate
to protect the area against intruders.
Tanks autonomously group
to provide
optimal coverage
of an area. Each tank
only utilizes knowledge from its two closest neighbors.
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