The wargame commodity course of action automated analysis method

This research presents the wargaming commodity course of action automated analysis method (WCCAAM) – a novel approach to assist wargame commanders in developing and analyzing courses of action (COAs) through semi-automation of the military decision making process (MDMP). MDMP is a seven-step iterative method that commanders and mission partners follow to build an operational course of action to achieve strategic objectives. MDMP requires time, resources, and coordination – all competing items the commander weighs to make the optimal decision. WCCAAM receives the MDMP’s Mission Analysis phase as input, converts the wargame into a directed graph, processes a multi-commodity flow algorithm on the nodes and edges, where the commodities represent units, and the nodes represent blue bases and red threats, and then programmatically processes the MDMP steps to output the recommended COA. To demonstrate its use, a military scenario developed in the Advanced Framework for Simulation, Integration, and Modeling (AFSIM) processes the various factors through WCCAAM and produces an optimal, minimal risk COA.

Maximizing social welfare in a competitive diffusion model

Influence maximization (IM) has garnered a lot of attention in the literature owing to applications such as viral marketing and infection containment. It aims to select a small number of seed users to adopt an item such that adoption propagates to a large number of users in the network. Competitive IM focuses on the propagation of competing items in the network. Existing works on competitive IM have several limitations. (1) They fail to incorporate economic incentives in users' decision making in item adoptions. (2) Majority of the works aim to maximize the adoption of one particular item, and ignore the collective role that different items play. (3) They focus mostly on one aspect of competition - pure competition. To address these concerns we study competitive IM under a utility-driven propagation model called UIC, and study social welfare maximization. The problem in general is not only NP-hard but also NP-hard to approximate within any constant factor. We, therefore, devise instant dependent efficient approximation algorithms for the general case as well as a (1 - 1/ e - ∈ )-approximation algorithm for a restricted setting. Our algorithms outperform different baselines on competitive IM, both in terms of solution quality and running time on large real networks under both synthetic and real utility configurations.

No Inhibitory Deficit in Older Adults' Episodic Memory

Selectively retrieving a subset of previously studied material can cause forgetting of the unpracticed material. Such retrieval-induced forgetting is attributed to an inhibitory mechanism recruited to resolve interference among competing items. According to the inhibition-deficit hypothesis, older people experience a specific decline in inhibitory function and thus should show reduced retrieval-induced forgetting. However, the results of the two experiments reported here show the same amount of retrieval-induced forgetting in younger and older adults. These results indicate that retrieval inhibition is intact in older adults' episodic recall. The findings suggest that the common view of a general inhibitory deficit in older adults needs to be updated and that older adults show intact inhibition in some cognitive tasks and deficient inhibition in others.

Attention, self–regulation and consciousness

Consciousness has many aspects. These include awareness of the world, feelings of control over one's behaviour and mental state (volition), and the notion of a continuing self. Focal (executive) attention is used to control details of our awareness and is thus closely related to volition. Experiments suggest an integrated network of neural areas involved in executive attention. This network is associated with our voluntary ability to select among competing items, to correct error and to regulate our emotions. Recent neuroimaging studies suggest that these various functions involve separate areas of the anterior cingulate. We have adopted a strategy of using marker tasks, shown to activate the brain area by imaging studies, as a means of tracing the development of attentional networks. Executive attention appears to develop first to regulate distress during the first year of life. During later childhood the ability to regulate conflict among competing stimuli builds upon the earlier cingulate anatomy to provide a means of cognitive control. During childhood the activation of cingulate structures relates both to the child's success on laboratory tasks involving conflict and to parental reports of self–regulation and emotional control. These studies indicate a start in understanding the anatomy, circuitry and development of executive attention networks that serve to regulate both cognition and emotion.