Posted on 01/09/2003 5:59:25 AM PST by Stand Watch Listen
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. -- A scientist clicks a mouse and orders his computer to locate roads on a featureless satellite image of Denver. The screen immediately fills with multicolored squiggles until an entire highway network is depicted within minutes and the computer flashes a score of 991.146 -- just shy of a perfect 1,000.What makes the exercise remarkable is that, by itself, the computer was able to determine which of its software programs were best suited to finding what it wanted within the image -- a process that Los Alamos National Laboratory officials compare to science fiction.
Here at the birthplace of the atomic bomb, workers who once sought to stop the Soviet Union by designing bigger and better nuclear warheads now are trying to deter terrorists by developing smarter and faster computer technologies.
Los Alamos' GENIE program, which can even identify hidden weapons in x-ray images of carry-on baggage, is only one of the cutting-edge projects aimed at ferreting out information quickly and accurately. The lab also is working on sophisticated computer models to determine the interconnectedness of public networks, answering such questions as what happens to telephone lines if electricity is lost. Another project -- already deployed at the Salt Lake City Olympics -- uses special sensors to provide early warning of biological weapon attacks.
Such innovations are coming at a time when Los Alamos and other national labs are being challenged not just to design anti-terrorism tools, but to make them easy for police and others in the field to use.
"We want to be able to bring back with technology what in the past we would have had to send a Ph.D. physicist out to do," said Terry Hawkins, who oversees a unit at Los Alamos working to prevent the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Lab officials also want their technological prowess to overshadow the problems that have plagued the facility in northern New Mexico's high-desert mountains. There was the political firestorm in 1999 over China's alleged theft of nuclear weapons secrets, followed by an actual fire that ravaged the town of Los Alamos in 2000. More recently, the director resigned amid allegations of corruption and mismanagement at the lab.
The University of California has managed Los Alamos for the federal government since 1943, when scientists working on the secretive Manhattan Project developed the first nuclear bomb. Anti-terrorism research and development has long been one of its main missions along with weapons development, but it has become a central focus since 9/11.
Both Los Alamos and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore, Calif., formed homeland security offices to serve as points of contact for officials at the new Cabinet-level department.
"The president has made it clear that we shouldn't be building new labs, but we should be taking advantage of the national labs and the academic labs" in fighting terrorism, Homeland Security Director and secretary-designee Tom Ridge said recently.
Among the numerous top-secret and unclassified projects under development at Los Alamos, few have generated as much interest as GENIE, an acronym for Genetic Imagery Exploitation. It has the unique ability to tailor itself to find what its users are after.
Ask humans to spot something on a satellite map, and they'll embark on a tedious process that could take days.
Ask GENIE to identify something -- a road, damage from a forest fire, almost any geographic feature -- and it uses its intelligence to assemble an initial set of software programs called "genetic algorithms" to see which are best at picking out data from a computer-generated image. Programs considered "less fit" are discarded, while the "more fit" are combined to find the target.
Satellites and other sensors "collect a flood of high-quality imagery," Los Alamos scientist Don Cobb told Congress last year. "Automatic feature extraction is key to enabling human analysts to keep up with the flow."
In one test, researchers asked GENIE to locate every PGA-caliber golf course in the United States. It finished the job in about an hour.
"It's an interesting tool with almost infinite applications," Hawkins said. "It doesn't get tired, it doesn't get fatigued like a person. And you can look at things in ways that people can't."
GENIE was brought in after 9/11 to map where ash had fallen on New York after the World Trade Center bombings. Researchers hope it can eventually be used to detect tiny spores of anthrax or other microscopic agents in a biological weapon attack.
"At the moment, you have to take something suspected as anthrax to a lab, but with GENIE, you could identify it on the spot," said Neal Harvey, one of the program's developers. "When it's aerosolized, it could recognize that and see it as an attack, not just something that's in the environment."
Researchers already have developed a separate system called the Biological Aerosol Sentry and Information System (BASIS) to detect biological attacks within a few hours. The network of sampling units continuously collects and stores airborne samples that can be rapidly analyzed in a field laboratory.
Sixteen BASIS sampling units were placed in and around Salt Lake City during last year's Olympics for five weeks at a cost of about $3 million.
The technology, scientists say, is a forerunner of other types of homeland security monitoring systems that can cover and protect large areas.
"Ultimately, we have to think in terms of a true national grid of some type for homeland security, particularly if you want to interdict these threats as opposed to responding to them," said Bob Wells, a researcher on the project.
Los Alamos teamed up with the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory on the BASIS project.
It has formed a partnership with Sandia National Laboratories, another weapons lab 80 miles south in Albuquerque, on another computer-based initiative. The National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), which is becoming part of the new Department of Homeland Security, uses computer models to study linkages among different industries -- electric power, oil and gas, banking and finance, agriculture, for instance -- to see how a breakdown in one area might affect another.
"We're not looking at vulnerabilities," said Steven Rinaldi, the program's director. "We're looking at, if something's happened, what are the downstream consequences?"
Rinaldi cited the energy industry's dependence on telecommunications: Railroad signals operate off telephone networks, and those railroads are needed to transport coal to power plants to generate electricity. Researchers are producing computer models to simulate what happens when one part of the chain is disrupted.
The center also is developing models of several cities, including the Dallas/Fort Worth region and Portland, Ore., to study how population, weather and traffic patterns might affect public networks. The results could be beneficial in directing police and firefighters after attacks.
As helpful as such models can be for homeland security, lab officials say that like all technologies, they must be continually updated if they are to stay ahead of terrorists.
"The technical challenge we have is being able to always look for increasingly small amounts of material," Hawkins said. "If the bad guys know we can see a kilogram (of something hidden), they'll bring in half a kilogram."
This doesn't make sense - 'featureless' means no features therefore no roads should be observable ...
(Just another example of what I will call dysfunctional writing.)
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