ACADEMIA

Natural Selection, Inc. has been awarded a $748,848 Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to develop technology to evolve courses of action for mission planning, such as is required in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operations. The contract's principal investigator is Dr. David Fogel, CEO of Natural Selection, Inc.: "There is a critical need for combat simulations to incorporate intelligently interactive agents, both for mission planning and training. The technology we are developing will allow mission planners to optimize courses of action on-the-fly, while considering what the responses of opposing forces are likely to be." The technology relies on evolutionary computing to adapt plans in light of evolved enemy courses of action (known as eCOAs) in a sequential manner, where each side anticipates what the other will do for a period of time projected into the future. "We have developed new methods of employing evolutionary algorithms to make real-time course-of-action planning and replanning feasible," said Dr. Fogel. Part of the SBIR Phase II project involves the parallelization of Natural Selection, Inc.'s evolutionary computing tools on a cluster of personal computers. "There are numerous commercial applications of this technology as well," offered Dr. Fogel. "One in particular involves improving the design of intelligent agents in entertainment software as found in massively multiplayer online games." Natural Selection, Inc. is now in the second year of a National Science Foundation SBIR Phase II grant to develop evolutionary computing and neural network technology to improve the performance of characters in entertainment software and reduce the time required to develop and test new games. Natural Selection, Inc. was founded in 1993 to address complex problems in industry, medicine, and defense. The company possesses unique expertise in computational intelligence techniques, including evolutionary computation, neural networks, and fuzzy logic. The corporation's research efforts support the discovery of new pharmaceuticals, the automated detection and discovery of important patterns and processes in bioinformatics and medical informatics, computer-assisted diagnosis, and a variety of military and industrial projects.