SPACE ACE
NASA changed its research priorities to advancing relevant areas of computer science and turned to Tech.
Written by Josh Murray
Daniel Cooke's involvement with NASA began 10 years ago
When NASA changed its research priorities from a focus on aero and rocket engineering to advancing relevant areas of computer science, the space agency turned to Daniel Cooke. Now Texas Tech University is a key player in a national research mission, and at the helm is the Space Ace.
Cooke’s involvement with NASA began 10 years ago, when he was working at another university. NASA awarded him a small research grant to work in language design. By 1997, he received a much larger grant, and among other tasks, he ended up assisting the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. About that time, a significant shift occurred in NASA’s priorities away from aero and rocket engineering to computer science research.
In 1999, Cooke arrived at Texas Tech, and by December of that same year, Ken Ford, associate center director at Ames, was on campus asking to borrow Cooke to further NASA’s efforts in computer science. Texas Tech agreed, Cooke accepted, and the rest is somewhat of a series of events that has made Texas Tech a key player in a national research mission.
Cooke, chairperson of the Department of Computer Science, was charged with launching a national initiative to advance computer science in the present century, much like NASA had advanced aero and rocket science in the last century.
With a five-year budget valued at $350 million, Cooke and his colleagues set out to develop the technical content of the Intelligent Systems Program. The four broad areas of research include automated reasoning to advance NASA’s ability to conduct effective robotic missions. Another research area includes human-centered computing combining astronauts and robots. Additionally, the team set out to work in intelligent data understanding to find causal links in order to mine vast data stored from earth-observing satellites. And the final area was revolutionary computing, which is focused on quantum and biologically-inspired approaches to computing.
“This is a significant effort for Ames. I had the good fortune to land in a program office as a leader of extremely capable individuals. They are very good at what they do, and they are really fine people. So in addition to establishing some important colleagues, I made a lot of really good friends,” Cooke said.
Cooke said NASA officials reviewed the Intelligent Systems Program in a manner similar to the way in which the space shuttle or the space station programs were reviewed. He said the program achieved approval midway through his tenure as program manager.
“Once approved the program initiated a major effort to solicit and review a large number of research proposals. From our initial call for proposals, we received more than 500 proposals both from researchers in and outside NASA. Ultimately, we awarded 90 research projects around the country,” he said. “The projects will help meet the milestones that NASA has set to achieve critical paths in certain robotic and human missions,” he said.
Cooke’s final activity sent him to The White House’s Office of Management and Budget. The program received high marks. The OMB review highlighted the Intelligent Systems Program as a model strategic initiative for NASA.
Cooke’s work at NASA earned him the Exceptional Achievement Medal for his extraordinary service and dedication to NASA and to the Ames Research Center. NASA cited Cooke’s untiring and creative energy as the first program manager of the Intelligent Systems Program.
Henry McDonald, Ames Research Center director, said Cooke managed the often difficult transition of the new program from formulation stage to the implementation stage.
“Dr. Cooke’s vision, management skill, interpersonal style and persistence enabled the Intelligent Systems Program to quickly establish itself as a model of strategic research for NASA. NASA’s future missions in Earth and space sciences will benefit from the seeds sown by Dr. Cooke,” McDonald said.
From there, Cooke has maintained a strong relationship with NASA. He maintains a dual role as a NASA adviser, and chairperson and professor in the Texas Tech Department of Computer Science, ensuring that students and faculty will be directly involved in space research.
Just one example, Cooke served on the Mars Study Team, a group of 18 people from around the country charged with coming up with new approaches to exploring Mars.
The team studied low-energy pathways in space, the so-called interplanetary superhighway that exists between libration points throughout the galaxy. “Ultimately, parking astronauts at a space station libration point near Mars seems to be the way to go. It’s an extremely exciting way to go. There’s a much lower risk and much lower cost according to the initial estimates when you compare it to existing mission plans that involve sending the astronauts directly from Earth to Mars. The station would serve as a springboard to result in the ultimate goal: to place humans on the surface of Mars,” Cooke said.
Space-launch issues will always abound, he said, but the most stressing problems center on the need for the more autonomous spacecraft needed for long-distance exploration.
“We can’t remote control long-distance missions. And right now, all human and robotic missions are remotely controlled. That’s what mission control is doing, minute by minute,” he said.
The problem is communication delays. At the speed of light, roundtrip communication to Mars ranges from six to 45 minutes. “So you want more autonomy. You have to pull the knowledge of mission control with you. That alone is a gigantic problem,” he said.
Texas Tech scientists have had a theoretical breakthrough resulting in a prototype system able to identify correct workarounds in the event of a failure in some of the space shuttle subsystems. Workarounds represent a significant amount of the effort currently performed by mission controllers.
Michael Gelfond, Ph.D., professor of computer science, and Richard Watson, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer science, have developed a language, Answer Set Programming, which can find the work-around in a matter of minutes if there is a failure in a modeled subsystem. Cooke said the United Space Alliance, the company that operates the shuttle, is testing the language on shuttle subsystems.
Gelfond said artificial intelligence is a sub-field of computer science that allows people to determine what tasks can be automated by computers. In the beginning, people started with expert knowledge to play games such as chess or checkers, he said.
Gelfond first began to develop the theory in 1984. “It is much easier to teach a computer to play chess than how to perform or do everyday reasoning,” Gelfond said. “When I started this theory, I had no idea it would have this application.”
To develop the language, Cooke said it has taken literally decades of work that Gelfond has done in the area of common sense reasoning. “Trying to systematize and formalize common sense reasoning that humans do is a major undertaking. One of the interesting questions has to do with how far a machine’s reasoning skills can be developed,” he said.
He said Gelfond discovered the stable model semantic logic programming 14 years ago. “This model is accepted internationally. His paper on stable model semantics is in the top 10 cited papers in computer science literature,” Cooke said.
Gelfond said people in Europe and the United States use his theory to build efficient reasoning systems, allowing computers to have reasoning skills. “There are two very efficient systems now, one in Finland and one in Austria, which implement the theory. We are now building one at Texas Tech.”
“We’ve used our theories and languages to tell a computer as much about the shuttle as it needs to know to find these plans. So you can imagine that the people on the ground have transferred the common sense knowledge they have to the computer,” Gelfond said. “It’s very tricky. It comes up with a sequence of actions needed to solve the problem.”
Gelfond and the team have applied the answer set programming paradigm to developing a decision support system for shuttle control. Controllers on the ground can rely on computers to detect and solve system faults.
“Single faults almost never happen. It’s almost always multiple faults. It means, for instance, that a collection of problems have created larger problems. The people on the ground know what needs to be done. Now they do it by hand under very stressful circumstances, and they don’t have much time to do it. They want to automate it in so that the computer can solve the problem,” said Gelfond.
Joining Cooke, Gelfond and Watson are William Oldham, Ph.D., professor of computer science, Hector Hernandez, Ph.D., associate professor of computer science, and Larry Pyeatt, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer science. And thanks to excellence funding provided by the state, Texas Tech has established a Center for Advanced Intelligent Systems that, among other things, employs Michael Helm, a top-notch programmer, as described by Cooke.
“We’re putting together a team to investigate a new form of control architecture to facilitate high dependability in future missions. NASA’s current baseline involves the development of very complicated systems for advanced life support. We are focused on the creation of tools to design and implement these systems more effectively. Included in our effort are new approaches to find causal links in the data the systems acquire. Causal links leading to better data understanding are critical for automated learning and other advanced reasoning capabilities that will likely be required in future exploration systems, Cooke said, “Ultimately, what we’d like to do is look at control systems that involve more robotics.”
In what he described as sounding like science fiction, Cooke said the researchers will look to see if humans can receive direct sensory input from robots, and whether a robot can receive the intent and will of a human from remote locations.
“We’re talking about national challenges. We believe we can contribute to the national challenge. This is going to take a lot of researchers around the country a lot of time to solve these kinds of problems, but we believe we have some unique capabilities here to contribute to these solutions. And that’s why these collaborations with the agencies are so important in order for us to be in tune to what is going on,” Cooke said.
Researchers at Texas Tech’s Center for Excellence in Abilene will be looking at dependability on another dimension. The team there will look at a form of tools and methodologies necessary to transition ideas from theoretical research into flight-ready systems for NASA.
“One of the most important goals for a university is to produce knowledge. Having researchers engaged in significant research is very important for our students. We have a very good group here. It is fostering a good scientific learning climate. People who come to the university, either as a student or as a professor, come to learn,” Gelfond said. “The culture of the university is determined by its learning climate. One of the signs of the climate is that world-class researchers are working together with graduate students or undergraduate students so that people from all levels can learn together. I teach some of this material in my classes, so it is something completely new.”
Texas Tech’s Center for Advanced Intelligent Systems will blend the talents of university computer scientists, industrial engineers, psychologists, physicists, biologists and mathematicians. “Our focus is fundamental computer science and its impact on dependability and humankind’s ability to have a telepresence in future exploration missions,” Cooke said. Success will be measured by the extent to which humans remotely exploring a region will have the same experience as that of a fully suited astronaut who is actually in the region. At that point, a significant number of areas can be effectively and remotely explored before the first human footprints are placed on a distant world.Story produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing
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