Human factors, particularly the consoles and controls of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), have not rated a high enough focus in relation to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle mishaps. The United States Air Force has documented Predator UAV mishaps during their operation over the past 15 years. Through quantitative analysis of these mishaps this paper will demonstrate that human factors have been a prominent causal and contributing factor. We argue that UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) human factors design could learn from this unique dataset.

Much of aerospace academia is anticipating a boom in Unmanned Aircraft (UA) funding and research opportunities. The expectation is built on the premise that UAs will revolutionize aerospace, which is likely based on current trends. There is also an anticipation of an increasing number of new platforms and research investment, which is likely but must be analysed carefully to determine where the opportunities might lie. This paper draws on the state of industry and a systems engineering approach. We explore what aspects of UAs really are the results of aerospace science advances and what aspects will be rather more mundane works of engineering.

Social television, in essence, is a way to share and experience media with others. Rather than attempt to bridge physical distance by creating new social experiences, we have built a system called TakeoverTV that augments canonical social interactions by addressing three key questions: 1. How can we better support social gatherings around media in public and private places? 2. How can we enable conversation across our devices rather than forcing us to communicate through them? 3. How can we help people come to agreements about what media they want to watch together? Primarily aimed at public spaces like bars, TakeoverTV is a system that lets local users influence and interact with the movies and television programs shown on public displays. Our system collects the media preferences of all people physically present at a given location, lets users start a vote among all members of the space, and allows everyone to participate using tangible physical objects like tables in addition to smart devices. Over time, public establishments can evolve complex identities based on the preferences and votes of their patrons while generating valuable analytic data for patrons, establishment owners, content-providers, and advertisers alike.

We evolve a neural network controller for a boat that learns to maintain a given bearing and range with respect to a moving target in the Lagoon 3D game environment. Simulating realistic physics makes maneuvering boats difficult and thus makes an evolutionary approach an attractive alternative to hand coded methods. We evolve the weights of simple recurrent neural networks trained with a fitness function designed to combine multiple fitness objectives based on speed, heading, and position to create a robust maintain station behavior. Results with an enforced subpopulation neural-evolution genetic algorithm indicate that we can consistently evolve robust maintain controllers for realistically simulated boats in Lagoon.

This paper presents hardware and software mechanisms to enable concurrent direct network access (CDNA) by operating systems running within a virtual machine monitor. In a conventional virtual machine monitor, each operating system running within a virtual machine must access the network through a software-virtualized network interface. These virtual network interfaces are multiplexed in software onto a physical network interface, incurring significant performance overheads. The CDNA architecture improves networking efficiency and performance by dividing the tasks of traffic multiplexing, interrupt delivery, and memory protection between hardware and software in a novel way. The virtual machine monitor delivers interrupts and provides protection between virtual machines, while the network interface performs multiplexing of the network data. In effect, the CDNA architecture provides the abstraction that each virtual machine is connected directly to its own network interface. Through the use of CDNA, many of the bottlenecks imposed by software multiplexing can be eliminated without sacrificing protection, producing substantial efficiency improvements