Thomas Kunz

Zhaodan Kong, Kayhan Özcimder, Nathan Fuller et al.

The movements of birds, bats, and other flying species are governed by complex sensorimotor systems that allow the animals to react to stationary environmental features as well as to wind disturbances, other animals in nearby airspace, and a wide variety of unexpected challenges. The paper and talk will describe research that analyzes the three-dimensional trajectories of bats flying in a habitat in Texas. The trajectories are computed with stereoscopic methods using data from synchronous thermal videos that were recorded with high temporal and spatial resolution from three viewpoints. Following our previously reported work, we examine the possibility that bat trajectories in this habitat are governed by optical flow sensing that interpolates periodic distance measurements from echolocation. Using an idealized geometry of bat eyes, we introduce the concept of time-to-transit, and recall some research that suggests that this quantity is computed by the animals' visual cortex. Several steering control laws based on time-to-transit are proposed for an idealized flight model, and it is shown that these can be used to replicate the observed flight of what we identify as typical bats. Although the vision-based motion control laws we propose and the protocols for switching between them are quite simple, some of the trajectories that have been synthesized are qualitatively bat-like. Examination of the control protocols that generate these trajectories suggests that bat motions are governed both by their reactions to a subset of key feature points as well by their memories of where these feature points are located.

Thomas Kunz, Christian Fisher, James La Novara-Gsell et al.

Hardening cyber physical assets is both crucial and labor-intensive. Recently, Machine Learning (ML) in general and Reinforcement Learning RL) more specifically has shown great promise to automate tasks that otherwise would require significant human insight/intelligence. The development of autonomous RL agents requires a suitable training environment that allows us to quickly evaluate various alternatives, in particular how to arrange training scenarios that pit attackers and defenders against each other. CyberBattleSim is a training environment that supports the training of red agents, i.e., attackers. We added the capability to train blue agents, i.e., defenders. The paper describes our changes and reports on the results we obtained when training blue agents, either in isolation or jointly with red agents. Our results show that training a blue agent does lead to stronger defenses against attacks. In particular, training a blue agent jointly with a red agent increases the blue agent's capability to thwart sophisticated red agents.

Li Li, Jean-Pierre S. El Rami, Adrian Taylor et al.

This work aims to enable autonomous agents for network cyber operations (CyOps) by applying reinforcement and deep reinforcement learning (RL/DRL). The required RL training environment is particularly challenging, as it must balance the need for high-fidelity, best achieved through real network emulation, with the need for running large numbers of training episodes, best achieved using simulation. A unified training environment, namely the Cyber Gym for Intelligent Learning (CyGIL) is developed where an emulated CyGIL-E automatically generates a simulated CyGIL-S. From preliminary experimental results, CyGIL-S is capable to train agents in minutes compared with the days required in CyGIL-E. The agents trained in CyGIL-S are transferrable directly to CyGIL-E showing full decision proficiency in the emulated "real" network. Enabling offline RL, the CyGIL solution presents a promising direction towards sim-to-real for leveraging RL agents in real-world cyber networks.

Li Li, Jean-Pierre S. El Rami, Adrian Taylor et al.

Autonomous cyber agents may be developed by applying reinforcement and deep reinforcement learning (RL/DRL), where agents are trained in a representative environment. The training environment must simulate with high-fidelity the network Cyber Operations (CyOp) that the agent aims to explore. Given the complexity of net-work CyOps, a good simulator is difficult to achieve. This work presents a systematic solution to automatically generate a high-fidelity simulator in the Cyber Gym for Intelligent Learning (CyGIL). Through representation learning and continuous learning, CyGIL provides a unified CyOp training environment where an emulated CyGIL-E automatically generates a simulated CyGIL-S. The simulator generation is integrated with the agent training process to further reduce the required agent training time. The agent trained in CyGIL-S is transferrable directly to CyGIL-E showing full transferability to the emulated "real" network. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the CyGIL training performance. Enabling offline RL, the CyGIL solution presents a promising direction towards sim-to-real for leveraging RL agents in real-world cyber networks.

Muhammad Raisul Alam, Marc St-Hilaire, Thomas Kunz

This article addresses the residential energy cost optimization problem in smart grid. To date, most of the previous research only consider a partial aspect of the cost optimization problem. As a result, they fail to analyze scenarios when the interconnected components along with their properties have to be considered simultaneously. The proposed model combines these partial models into a single unified cost optimization model. Therefore, it is able to analyze scenarios which are closer to practical implementation. Furthermore, it is useful to analyze the behavior of a population (e.g., smart buildings, smart cities, etc.) and properties of the components for specific scenarios (e.g., the impact of aggregate storage capacity, etc.). It allows energy trading in microgrid which introduces a cost fairness problem. It ensures Pareto optimality among the households which guarantees that no household will be worse off to improve the cost of others. Results show that it can maintain the user preferences and can react to a demand response program by rescheduling the household loads and sources. Finally, the paper addresses the challenge of the computational complexity of the proposed model, showing that solution time increases exponentially with the problem size and proposes possible approaches to solve this.