Ezra's Round Table / Systems Seminar: Timothy Sands (Cornell) - Deterministic Artificial Intelligence

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Description

This presentation describes methods for adaption and learning in any generic system (including electric vehicle sales and global average temperatures), while this presentation will emphasize the task of autonomously surmounting significant damage of unaided vehicles. Mathematical relationships describing the physics of motion may be asserted as deterministic self-awareness statements, and the self-awareness statements may learn in response to disturbances, noise, mismodeled or unmodeled dynamics, and other sources of errors. Deterministic artificial intelligence makes vehicles aware of themselves even when the vehicle operators may not be. Vehicles can overcome significant challenges, completing the assigned task with an additional capability to transmit its current state of health and mission status to the vehicle operator. Bio: Timothy Sands is a professor of practice at the Naval Postgraduate School and Cornell University. He conducts research in application of adaptive and learning methods, particularly to defense-related systems. During three decades in the military, he held positions executive and senior leadership positions in both military postgraduate universities (the Naval Postgraduate School and the Air Force Institute of Technology); having served as Associate Dean, Dean, Associate Provost, and Chief Academic Officer sequentially. He performed space mission design and space experimentation for the Department of Defense (DoD) Space Test Program (STP) including several space missions with NASA, the French Space Agency, and Russian space design agencies. He was the propulsion engineer of the Atlas space launch vehicle, the reliability engineer of the Centaur upper stage, and an electronic warfare engineer and operator, having flown over six-hundred hours in combat in four countries, being thrice decorated for single acts of combat gallantry and bravery in addition to other decorations for achievement and meritorious service. Dr. Sands has published over thirty refereed manuscripts including two book chapters. He has edited two books and is the sole author of a third book which was the first to be published on the topic of space-based electronic attack. He holds the degree of engineer from Columbia University, the Master of Science from Stanford University, and the Bachelor of Science from North Carolina State University; all in mechanical engineering; in addition to the Ph.D. from the Naval Postgraduate School in astronautical engineering.