African ECD Report

African Early Childhood Development
In contrast to many other fields of social and economic development, early childhood development (ECD) lacks a system of global indicators that include all key early childhood areas: education, nutrition, health, sanitation, and child rights and protection.

We are working on meeting this urgent need for a worldwide ECD database, in conjunction with the RISE Institute and the Consultative Group for Early Childhood Care and Development.

Initial Report
We put together an initial report on 37 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The printers just returned the first printing of this initial report. I think it turned out pretty well!



We are presenting this initial report at the Fourth African International Conference on Early Childhood Development in Dakar, Senegal on November 10-13, 2009.

LCCD on Primetime TV!

Numb3rs
Our lab's work was featured on Numb3rs, a popular television crime drama. The show directly references our SOMA (Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agent) system, which is at the heart of my CAGE and CIG projects. Although the explanation was "spruced up" a bit for television, the show portrays the basic concept fairly accurately. Exciting!

Description of SOMA


Another Mention of SOMA


Episode Details
Air Date: 23 October 2009
Identifier: Season 6, Episode 5
Title: Hydra
Summary: The team attempts to rescue a kidnapped girl, but their involvement in the case brings up personal and moral issues for Liz, Amita and Charlie when they begin to suspect she might be one of the first human clones. (source)

Asset Protection

Finally submitted my first (real) academic paper this week, to the AAMAS (Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems) 2010 conference in Toronto. Hopefully it will get accepted, although their roughly 20% acceptance rate does not bode well.

A Graph-Theoretic Approach to Protect Static and Moving Targets from Adversaries
J.P. Dickerson, G.I. Simari, V.S. Subrahmanian and Sarit Kraus

The static asset protection problem (SAP) in a road network is that of allocating resources to protect vertices, given any possible behavior by an adversary determined to attack those assets. The dynamic asset protection (DAP) problem is a version of SAP where the asset is following a fixed and widely known route (e.g., a parade route) and needs to be protected. We formalize what it means for a given allocation of resources to be ``optimal'' for protecting a desired set of assets, and show that randomly allocating resources to a single edge cut in the road network solves this problem. We develop a polynomial time algorithm for SAP and experimentally show that it works effectively in practice. We also formalize DAP. Unlike SAP, we show that DAP is not only an NP-complete problem, but that approximating DAP is also NP-hard. We provide the GreedyDAP heuristic algorithm to solve DAP and show experimentally that it works well in practice, using road network data for real cities.

My (out of date) writeup on the project can be found here.