Christian Manasseh

Christian Manasseh

Detecting coordination among unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) fleets operating in shared airspace and identifying the route-lead aircraft whose navigation decisions govern fleet behavior presents a fundamental speed--accuracy trade-off: fast methods enable real-time traffic management but sacrifice detection fidelity, while accurate methods may exceed the time budget for actionable airspace deconfliction. This paper presents a game-theoretic decision framework that resolves this trade-off by formulating method selection as a two-player zero-sum game between a Monitor (selecting computational methods and parameters) and Nature (selecting the unknown traffic scenario). We construct an end-to-end pipeline from trajectory surveillance data through eight candidate detection algorithms, a Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis characterizing their stochastic performance, and finally a multi-objective optimization layer that identifies Pareto-optimal method portfolios. The minimax solution provides a robust mixed strategy with a probability distribution over methods that guarantees worst-case performance regardless of scenario uncertainty. Experimental evaluation across 200 randomized configurations spanning 5--50 aircraft demonstrates that the framework recommends distinct method portfolios depending on operational priority: Koopman Phase dominates balanced (70.6%) and speed-priority (79.7%) profiles, while CRQA emerges as primary (47.4%) when route-lead identification is prioritized. The framework achieves a guaranteed game value of 0.29--0.53 (normalized utility) across all tested preference profiles, providing the first principled, scenario-adaptive methodology for computational method selection in UTM fleet monitoring operations.

Karleigh Pine, Joel Klipfel, Jared Bennett et al.

Agent-based models (ABMs) simulate the formation and evolution of social processes at a fundamental level by decoupling agent behavior from global observations. In the case where ABM networks evolve over time as a result of (or in conjunction with) agent states, there is a need for understanding the relationship between the dynamic processes and network structure. Social networks provide a natural set of tools for understanding the emergent relationships of these systems. This work examines the utility of a collection of network comparison methods for the purpose of tracking network changes in an ABM over time or between model parameters. Among the techniques examined is a novel graph pseudometric based on heat content asymptotics, which have been shown to distinguish many isospectral graphs which are not isomorphic. Additionally, we establish the use of observations about real-world networks from network science (e.g. fat-tailed degree distribution, small-world property) for ABM validation in the case where empirical population data is unavailable. These methods are all demonstrated on systematic perturbations of an original model simulating the formation of friendships in a population of 20,000 agents in Cincinnati, OH.

Christian Manasseh, Razvan Veliche, Jared Bennett et al.

Humans learn from the occurrence of events in a different place and time to predict similar trajectories of events. We define Loosely Decoupled Timeseries (LDT) phenomena as two or more events that could happen in different places and across different timelines but share similarities in the nature of the event and the properties of the location. In this work we improve on the use of Recurring Neural Networks (RNN), in particular Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, to enable AI solutions that generate better timeseries predictions for LDT. We use similarity measures between timeseries based on the trends and introduce embeddings representing those trends. The embeddings represent properties of the event which, coupled with the LSTM structure, can be clustered to identify similar temporally unaligned events. In this paper, we explore methods of seeding a multivariate LSTM from time-invariant data related to the geophysical and demographic phenomena being modeled by the LSTM. We apply these methods on the timeseries data derived from the COVID-19 detected infection and death cases. We use publicly available socio-economic data to seed the LSTM models, creating embeddings, to determine whether such seeding improves case predictions. The embeddings produced by these LSTMs are clustered to identify best-matching candidates for forecasting an evolving timeseries. Applying this method, we show an improvement in 10-day moving average predictions of disease propagation at the US County level.

Kevin Schmidt, Othalia Larue, Ray Kulhanek et al.

We describe the current state of world-class memory competitions, including the methods used to prepare for and compete in memory competitions, based on the subjective report of World Memory Championship Grandmaster and co-author Nelson Dellis. We then explore the reported experiences through the lens of the Simulated, Situated, and Structurally coherent Qualia (S3Q) theory of consciousness, in order to propose a set of experiments to help further understand the boundaries of expert memory performance.