TIELT DARPA Affiliation

TIELT is a seedling project funded (FY04-FY05) by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO). Lead by Director Ron Brachman and Deputy Director Barbara Yoon, IPTO's focus includes a thrust on cognitive systems with a strong emphasis on learning. TIELT addresses this thrust; it simplifies the process of conducting experiments with learning-embedded cognitive systems on simulated tasks.

More specifically, TIELT is a middleware component that specifies API standards for integrating cognitive systems and simulators. The simulator is expected to provide an environment in which the cognitive system can function (e.g., by providing sensors and effectors), while the cognitive system is expected to generate decisions (e.g., simulator actions, predictions to a human user concerning adversary intent). By acquiring libraries of integrated simulators and cognitive systems, TIELT can be used by a researcher to compare their cognitive system versus others on selected tasks from among the integrated simulators.

Currently, our efforts have have focused on gaming simulators and cognitive systems that learn. However, TIELT could be used with non-gaming simulators and/or decision systems that lack learning capabilities.

DARPA has recently emphasized the use of challenge problems to encourage technical development. Given this context, our goals with TIELT include:

  1. Supporting DARPA challenge problems on learning in cognitive systems.
  2. Providing cognitive systems researchers with a tool that simplifies the process of evaluating their systems on interesting simulation tasks.
  3. Application to tasks involving the system development of military training simulators concerning computer-generated forces.

We thank our IPTO Program Manager, Ted Senator, for his oversight and support of this project. Thanks also to IPTO PM Dave Gunning for supporting TIELT's initial proposal.