The Nuclear Engineering and Chemical Engineering Artificial Intelligence Groups at The Ohio State University have developed a diagnostic system for the heavy water production reactors at the Savannah River Site. The diagnostic module of the system uses hybrid hierarchical decomposition methodology to decompose the search space. The knowledge is arranged so that the search space is traversed similarly to how an expert would solve the problem. The system was tested on the SRS development simulator and the results show that the system can properly diagnose all the process water and cooling water malfunctions that are programmed into the simulator. The system was not validated by operators due to hardware unavailability. Since the New Production Reactor development efforts have been halted, the probability for future work on this project is unlikely. The development used a standardized Verification and Validation program to assist in the design and construction of the system. The use of this standardized procedure is referred to as a text book example of designing an expert system in the expectation that its use would provide guidance in future projects. Of the eight phases of the software development lifecycle, five of the phases were completed and documented.

Following recommendations made in Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7, which established a national policy for the identification and increased protection of critical infrastructure and key resources (CIKR) by Federal departments and agencies, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2006 developed the Enhanced Critical Infrastructure Protection (ECIP) program. The ECIP program aimed to provide a closer partnership with state, regional, territorial, local, and tribal authorities in fulfilling the national objective to improve CIKR protection. The program was specifically designed to identify protective measures currently in place in CIKR and to inform facility owners/operators of the benefits of new protective measures. The ECIP program also sought to enhance existing relationships between DHS and owners/operators of CIKR and to build relationships where none existed (DHS 2008; DHS 2009). In 2009, DHS and its protective security advisors (PSAs) began assessing CIKR assets using the ECIP program and ultimately produced individual protective measure and vulnerability values through the protective measure and vulnerability indices (PMI/VI). The PMI/VI assess the protective measures posture of individual facilities at their 'weakest link,' allowing for a detailed analysis of the most vulnerable aspects of the facilities (Schneier 2003), while maintaining the ability to produce an overall protective measures …

The research consisted of an evaluation of the existing technologies available for passive cooling with an emphasis on strategies related to the use of natural ventilation. A preliminary data base for the study was established by three major efforts: 1. An extensive literature search of the architectural press was undertaken to ascertain the degree to which passive cooling strategies in general and natural ventilation in particular are designed into buildings at the present time. 2. An investigation of existing building stock profiles was undertaken to identify the existing and potential obstacles or advantages to the implementation of natural ventilation as a passive cooling strategy. The EIA Nonresidential Buildings Energy Consumption Survey and two previous PNL studies were reviewed. 3. Components 1 and 2 were followed up with telephone interviews and site visits with the architects, building owners and operators of selected buildings from 1 and 2 above to gain more specific insights into the problems and pleasures typically associated with natural ventilation.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's New Architectures Testbed recently evaluated Exegy's Text Miner appliance to assess its applicability to high-performance, automated native language analysis. The evaluation was performed with support from the Computing Applications and Research Department in close collaboration with Global Security programs, and institutional activities in native language analysis. The Exegy Text Miner is a special-purpose device for detecting and flagging user-supplied patterns of characters, whether in streaming text or in collections of documents at very high rates. Patterns may consist of simple lists of words or complex expressions with sub-patterns linked by logical operators. These searches are accomplished through a combination of specialized hardware (i.e., one or more field-programmable gates arrays in addition to general-purpose processors) and proprietary software that exploits these individual components in an optimal manner (through parallelism and pipelining). For this application the Text Miner has performed accurately and reproducibly at high speeds approaching those documented by Exegy in its technical specifications. The Exegy Text Miner is primarily intended for the single-byte ASCII characters used in English, but at a technical level its capabilities are language-neutral and can be applied to multi-byte character sets such as those found in Arabic and Chinese. The system is …