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3DIcon Meets with the Institute for Human Machine Cognition to Explore a Teaming Agreement

Earlier this month, representatives from 3DIcon spent a full day visiting the Florida Institute for Human Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Pensacola, Florida.  IHMC is home to top scientists and engineers collaboratively engaged in cutting-edge developments in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, human-machine interaction, cyber security, and computer science.  The meeting included an overview with the Associate Director of the Institute, Dr. Sharon Heise, and individual teams working on specific projects in robotics, cyber security and biomedical. 3DIcon and IHMC are exploring areas for collaboration on projects that would consider how users would interact with 3DIcon’s volumetric 3D displays, particularly in the area of cyber security.  To that end, the parties are working to develop a Teaming Agreement to formalize future efforts.  The above image is an example of a novel interactive 3D visualization of cyber data (Netflow Observatory) that is being developed by the Florida Institute for Human Machine Cognition. In this example, each particle or ‘dart’ represents one or more network connections. The top map represents the geo-location of the source IP address for the network connection and the bottom map represents the geo-location of the destination IP address. In order to show information about where the dart was coming from and going to, the endpoints of each dart’s journey through time is projected onto source and destination ‘planes’ in 3D space. The period of time represented between the top and bottom planes can be configured to any length, from weeks or days to milliseconds. Using the Netflow Observatory, a sequence of events leading up to a distributed denial-of-service attack can be portrayed in graphical clarity. The 3D visualization technology being developed at IHMC is designed so that it can be adapted to show other kinds of events (e.g., financial transactions, travel, spread of diseases, disaster-related information). (Ref: Bradshaw, J.M. L. Bunch, T. Eskridge, P.J. Feltovich, R.R. Hoffman, M. Johnson, and J. Lott. Human-agent teamwork for cyber sensemaking in network operations. Poster and paper for presentation at the Eighth Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research Workshop (CSIIRW 2013). Oak Ridge, TN: Oak Ridge National Labs, January 2013.) [Image credit: Institute for Human Cognition] “Further improvements in graphical clarity and team interaction would be expected by replacing todays 2.5D display capability with a glasses-free 3D volumetric display,” said Doug Freitag, strategic consultant to 3DIcon.  There were 1.5 million documented cyber security attacks in the United States in 2013 alone, and several high profile breaches this year, including Home Depot and Yahoo Mail. 3DIcon is exploring how its volumetric 3D displays can help security experts better predict, identify, and thwart data breaches in the future.
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