Other Group Books

Group Books

Example Group

An example of a group entry page. On here you can insert your group logo, a description of the group purpose, and add on "child pages" to act as sub-sections.

Example Group Home Page (with Forum and Members Lists)

Example Knowledge Book (a type of Wiki)

Example Image Gallery (Esatblish by uploading an image and creating a new gallery for it)

Example Resources Page (establish a child page and attach files to it)

Institute for Interstellar Studies

Institute for Interstellar Studies (I4IS) Official Launch Announcement - 16-Sep-2012.

"We are pleased to announce the formation of a new research organisation dedicated to interstellar research. The Institute for Interstellar Studies (I4IS) will set out to catalyse research and entrepreneurial programs that accelerate our knowledge of science, our application of the technologies, and harmonise our cultures, so that an interstellar capable society can be created this century. Technical credibility, reliability of information and scientific excellence will be essential principles of the Institute."

An initial trial virtual worlds collaboration facility is being provided by Austin Tate to the Institute for Interstellar Studies (I4IS) to test its usefulness to the technical groups during the Institute's formation period.

This involves an I-Room meeting space for collaboration in the virtual world Second Life (with an option to open a space in an open or closed region in OpenSim). It is designed for brain storming style meetings and as an operations centre. I-Rooms are used in the I-X/I-Room research on intelligent collaborative and task support environments at AIAI, School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh.

 

Visit an I-Room now in Second Life [if you do not yet have a Second Life avatar Join here]:

VW PlatformLocationURLLauncher
Second Life

OpenVCE 3D Space - Round table for up to 25 people

http://slurl.com/secondlife/VCE/128/80/22

teleport

Other Collaboration Resources

 

I4IS Principium

Principium is the Newsletter of the Institute for Interstellar Studies.  Issue 1 was released in December 2012. Look for issues in the Principium Index.

I4IS Senior Researcher - Austin Tate

Austin Tate is the Professor of Knowledge-based Systems at the University of Edinburgh and leads its Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI). He holds degrees in Computer Studies, Machine Intelligence and e-Learning and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His research involves intelligent systems for planning and coordination amongst humans, systems and robots. He has both personal and professional interests in deep space exploration and spacecraft artificial intelligence and robotic systems. Prof. Tate has worked with both ESA and NASA on a range of projects involving autonomous spacecraft, spacecraft mission sequencing, on ground systems for Meteosats, and on assembly, integration and verification for Ariane payloads. He teaches about AI planning technology including systems on board autonomous spacecraft such as NASA's Deep Space One. Austin is a long standing Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and his name has already been carried on spacecraft and rovers to a comet, to Mars and on the Huygens Titan probe. He also has an interest in the support of collaboration and operations centre staff for distributed teams using virtual worlds technology, and he is the Coordinator for the Virtual University of Edinburgh.

I4IS -Austin Tate - To Go Boldly

KSCO Knowledge Book

KSCO Knowledge Book

 

Pacifica

Pacifica is a fictional island and the heart of a set of research, training and evaluation scenarios for Non-combatant Evacuation Operations (NEO), Logistics, etc.

More details at http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/oplan/pacifica/

MPAT

The Multinational Planning Augmentation Team (MPAT) Program is a cooperative multinational effort to facilitate the rapid and effective establishment and/or augmentation of a multinational task force headquarters. The MPAT provides responsive coalition/combined expertise in crisis action planning.

MPAT Website: http://www.mpat.org [redirects to http://community.apan.org/mpat]

OpenVCE MPAT Group Home Page (including MPAT MNF-SOP Collaboration Area)

OpenVCE MPAT Wiki

Helpful Organizations

The following organizations provide facilities to the public and enhanced facilities to logged in members which can be helpful in MPAT style operations:

Multinational Force Standard Operating Procedures (MNF-SOP)

The MNF-SOP are available via https://community.apan.org/mpat/p/sop.aspx  and copies as at 28-Mar-2011 attached here at request of Col (R.) John Bratton of MPAT Secretariat.

Japan 2011

This web page is being drafted by Austin Tate and his colleagues at the University of Edinburgh in support of Japan and its people. It is personal effort and not sponsored by any organisation. Currently the data being shown is tentative and needs to be checked with experts to ensure it is valid. Please do not rely on data here... use the authoritative original sources.

Some Maps Representing Radiation and Other Data on Japan

Other Useful Links

Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant

General information about the incident which began in March 2011 is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents

The Japanese Government regular postings of radiation data can be found at:

There is also data for Tokyo at:

Radiological Monitoring for area of Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ibaraki Prefecture is provided in regularly updated tables via:

  • http://www.mext.go.jp/english/radioactivity_level/
  • Charts in PDF form are available via "Reading of environmental radioactivity level by prefecture, Time series data (Graph)" and "Reading of environmental radioactivity level".
  • Readings from individual monitoring posts on land and off-shore in the area are also available via "Readings at Monitoring Post out of 20 Km Zone of Fukushima Dai-ichi NPP" and "Readings of Sea Area Monitoring at Post Out of Fukushima Dai-ichi NPP".

[img_assist|nid=999|title=Radiation in Daily Life|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=640|height=451]

Chart from http://www.mext.go.jp/english/radioactivity_level/ (27-Mar-2011)

Sample Chart for Interpretation (for parts of 26-Mar-2011 and 27-Mar-2011):

Interpretation Notes

  1. Row 8 indicates Ibaraki Prefecture where Fuchushima Plant is based.
  2. Charts are one page per day with one hour time slices per column.
  3. Radiation dose is provided in microsieverts (μSv) per hour (μSv)
  4. Page 3 provides a simple guide diagram for typical radiation dose rates per year.
  5. Compare per hour and year doses by *24*365 (e.g. approx. 1.14 μSv per hour = 10,000 μSv per year).

Page can be edited, sub-pages added and attachments or other information appended by logged in and validated members of the OpenVCE network.  Changes to this page are monitored by the OpenVCE.net administrators. Please respect the aim of the page in considering what information to add.

Google Maps Visualization of Fukushima Dosage Data

Note that the map below and the data it contains are for demonstration purposes only: it does not display the latest readings, and is not intended to be used for decision-making.

Based on data released on 28 March 2011 by MEXT showing cumulative and average hourly radiation dose at 10 monitoring posts around Fukushima 1 NPP.

The circles in the map are centred on the approximate location of the monitoring posts. The sizes of the circles represent the relative magnitude of the cumulative doses recorded at those posts. The colour of each circle represents the average hourly dose, with red indicating an average dose of 20 µSv/hr or more, amber an average dose of between 10 and 20 µSv/hr, and green an average dose of less than 10 µSv/hr.

Note that the source data is based on readings at the various posts over durations ranging from 1 day to 4 days, and hence the data and the representation of it below (especially the cumulative dose) are not directly comparable.

Japan 2011 Twitter Feeds

Latest Tweets on #jishin_e
<div style="background-color: FFFFFF;"><a href="http://openvce.net/custom/feeds/twitter-feed-json-openvce.html" title="twitter feed">twitter feed</a></div>

Notes on Radiation Dosage and Visualization of Radiation Data

Notes from Bruce Bennett, RAND provided to Austin Tate on 27-Mar-2011:

Personally, I like the map produced at:

To avoid confusion, the key units of radiation are (you may already know this):

Exposure:
   1 Gray (Gy) = 100 rad = 1000 mGy; 1 mGy = 100 mrad = 1000 µGy 

   1 µGy= 100 µrad = 1000 nGy

Dosage
   1 Sievert (Sv) = 100 rem = 1000 mSv; 1 mSv = 100 mrem = 1000 µSv
   1 µSv = 100 µrem

The prefix “m” is for milli and “µ” is for micro and “n” is for nano.  Be careful to use “µ” and not “m”.  

While it is a huge approximation, it is usually assumed that 1 Gy = 1 Sv, and that 1 rad = 1 rem.

It is usually assumed that a dose of around 450 rem (4.5 Sv) (some say 300-350 rem) has a 50% chance of killing people, and doses of 600 rem or higher are usually not treatable and will kill most people.  A dose of 100 rem (1 Sv) has a 50% chance of causing serious radiation sickness (vomiting, ...).  These are short-term effects.  To avoid getting anything near these numbers, nuclear plant workers are usually limited to doses of 5 rem per year, and the public exposure from nuclear radiation is limited to 100 mrem per year (this is so low because young children and fetuses are thought to be about 10 times more vulnerable to radiation than adults).  It is usually assumed that short-term radiation sickness symptoms will occur at doses of 30 to 50 rem, explaining the decision of the Japanese government to allow workers at the plant to receive doses up to 25 rem.  It is, nevertheless, not appropriate to let people cross the nuclear radiation limits unless there is a very good reason—in the United States, such a thing would be a liability nightmare.

Long-term nuclear effects (e.g., thyroid cancer) can occur at lower dosages.  This helps explain the concern for Iodine-131, which tends to accumulate in the thyroid.

In most of Japan, the background radiation dose is about 0.05 µSv/hr, which over a year would accumulate to ~500 µSv, or 50 mrem (various other forms of radiation would raise the annual dose to about 100-400 mrem).  But some places in Japan have twice as much background radiation.
  
Most of the presentations of exposure or dosage data are in terms of hourly exposures or dosages.  But the key is the cumulative dose or exposure.  To get this, we need the hourly dose over time.  For example:

 

 This leads to cumulative numbers like:

 

So this area was half-way to the 100 mrem limit by March 25.

The key would thus be to show cumulative doses and projections.  There are several problems in this:

  1. Most of the data does not begin until March 15, and yet there was serious exposure at least as early as March 14.
  2.  As these charts show, a new spike in radiation could accelerate the rate of dose increase, but that in theory should be a function of wind direction.

 The problem we have now is that we don’t have wind direction data immediately available for Japan from March 12 on—I am sure it is out there, I just have not been able to find it.  Ideally, the data we need is like that displayed at:

I am particularly interested in when the spikes occurred on March 14, 15, 16, and 21.If we only have winds over the plant, we don’t know where the radiation went downwind, whereas this information helps.  The key is determining how the hot spots developed around the plant—were they a function of the major winds or something else?

 

Notes from Bruce Bennett, RAND provided to Austin Tate on 28-Mar-2011:

MEXT has now posted cumulative doses for 10 locations over 3-5 days.  These numbers miss the hottest periods for these locations, but still show:

These doses are in µSv (middle number) and µ Sv/hr (last number in parentheses—current average dose).  So for monitor point 32, the dose of 4,813 µSv = 481 mrem, which is almost 5 times the allowable population dose.  And this cumulative does not include the hottest period, starting back on March 17.  Hopefully, people have been evacuated from this area!

This said, it is important to go back and calculate the cumulative doses, even if these can only be approximately determined (because the data is only presented twice each day, though in many cases multiple hourly readings are given).  Thus, for point 32, the data on hourly dose is:

The cumulative dose (based on averaging between doses, which given the dose pattern generally seems reasonable) is:

 There was some dose, as well, before March 16, but I don’t see readings posted before that date, and they were likely small.  On the 16th, reactor 3 had white smoke and high radiation arising about 0830, and continuing into the afternoon or so.  Based upon the other radiation readings, my guess is that there was a wind from the southeast some time between the late afternoon of the 16th and the morning of the 17th.  The slow decay of this radiation suggests that it contained a lot of iodine and cesium.  While the cumulative picture shows 4,813 µSv = 481 mrem from some time on the 23rd to some time on the 27th, the actual total by the 28th is 5 times as much.

 

SICSA

SICSA Group Home Page

SICSA Introduction

The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) is a collaboration of leading Scottish Universities. Our aim is to work together to consolidate and develop Scotland's position as an international research leader in informatics and computer science (ICS).

In Scotland, we have one of the five biggest top-quality research clusters in ICS in the world, with more than 200 world-class academic researchers. We are the foremost cluster of ICS research in the UK: about 16% of the very best research output comes from Scotland, and SICSA members hold about 20% of national ICS research funds.

Our research covers virtually all areas of computer science and informatics from low-level hardware design, through networking and middleware, to wetware, artificial intelligence, human computer interaction and social informatics. We are world leaders in both theoretical and practical aspects of the discipline and have a strong interdisciplinary tradition involving maths, engineering, psychology, the humanities and the social sciences.

SICSA will fund more than 30 academic posts across Scotland from Chairs to Research Fellowships and several posts are now available. See the jobs page for more information.

SICSA is supported by the Scottish Funding Council, and is expanding by including world-class individuals and groups that enhance our research excellence. We currently include members at:

  • Aberdeen University - Computing Science
  • Abertay University - School of Computing and Creative Technologies
  • Dundee University - School of Computing
  • University of Edinburgh - School of Informatics
  • Glasgow University - Department of Computing Science
  • Heriot-Watt University - School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
  • Edinburgh Napier University - Centre for Informatics Research
  • Robert Gordon University - School of Computing
  • St Andrews University - School of Computer Science
  • Stirling University - Department of Computing Science and Mathematics
  • Strathclyde University - Department of Computer and Information Sciences

SICSA Organisations

SICSA organisations as at 26th May 2009 are:

  • Aberdeen University - Computing Science
  • Abertay University - School of Computing and Creative Technologies
  • Dundee University - School of Computing
  • University of Edinburgh - School of Informatics
  • Glasgow University - Department of Computing Science
  • Heriot-Watt University - School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
  • Edinburgh Napier University - Centre for Informatics Research
  • Robert Gordon University - School of Computing
  • St Andrews University - School of Computer Science
  • Stirling University - Department of Computing Science and Mathematics
  • Strathclyde University - Department of Computer and Information Sciences

SIRIUS

Sirius Broad Agency Announcement
Solicitation Number: IARPA-BAA-11-03
Agency: Office of the Director of National Intelligence
Office: Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity

The goal of the Sirius Program is to create experimental Serious Games to train participants and measure their proficiency in recognizing and mitigating the cognitive biases that commonly affect all types of intelligence analysis. The Sirius Program is envisioned to begin in October 2011 and end by September 2015.

This is an open to the public web page and is often quickly indexed by search engines, please do not post bid specific, confidential or proprietary information here.

PlatformLocationURLLauncher
Second LifeSIRIUS 3D Space

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vue%20North/180/135/23/

teleport
Web Observers and Backup Use
Second LifeVenue@VCE Amphitheatrehttp://slurl.com/secondlife/VCE/64/192/23/teleport
Adobe Connect

Harmonie Web

https://adobe.harmonieweb.org/openvce/

Enter as guest

VOICCE

Virginia’s Operational Integration Cyber Center of Excellence (VOICCE)

Community Page - Under Development - VOICCE is grateful for the generous support of OpenVCE to help jumpstart this program by providing collaborative tools and facilities.

VOICCE will create a world-class "Municipal Cyber Lab" to support the Comprehensive Cyber Security Initiative.  This lab will simulate a municipality under a cyber attack.  The lab will be both physical and virtual in structure allowing many types of simulations to take place.  VOICCE will be a place to share ideas, experiences and also provide education for municipal goverments on Cyber Security and other emergency operations issues.  The program focuses on incorporating cyber attacks into the mainstream of emergency operations at the local level and creating a "virtual municipality".  The program focuses on creating simulations, learning opportunities and collaboration among all levels of government.  While VOICCE focuses of the issues of local government, the environment is open to all other related organizations involved in addressing this important issue.  Local Government Sign Up  http://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?formkey=dG85b3BPUVZkcGJidmtfNGhvS1dNQ1E6MQ

Contact: Leslie Fuentes <lfuentes@hampton.gov>

Web Portal: http://openvce.net/voicce (this page)

Second Life Workroom: Second Life VCE(248,169,24)

Press Articles

VOICCE Group

Virginia’s Operational Integration Cyber Center of Excellence

Virginia’s Operational Integration Cyber Center of Excellence  - Group Page

VOICCE HOME

Virginia’s Operational Integration Cyber Center of Excellence (VOICCE):

Create a world-class “Municipal Cyber Lab” supporting the Comprehensive National Cyber security Initiative.  This lab would simulate a municipality under a cyber attack.  Currently municipalities have very robust teams and infrastructure to support emergencies of the physical type, i.e. floods, hurricanes, fires, etc.  However, cyber attacks are usually addressed as administrative IT staffs function without the same level of attention, resources and processes that are associated physical threats. Risks to the community for cyber attacks are not identified nor incorporated in municipal emergency operations plans. This program focuses on changing the game by incorporating cyber attacks into the mainstream of emergency operations at the local level and creating a “virtual municipality” of randomly generated internet protocol addresses.  The concept would allow capabilities, processes and procedures to be developed. 

 

 

Create a node or laboratory that would allow local governments and first responders to plug into state and federal entities and participate in simulated cyber attacks.  The lab would be both physical and virtual in structure allowing many types of simulation and also be a place to share ideas amongst stakeholders across the nation.  Participants would brainstorm and identify cyber attack scenarios.  Scenarios would then be chosen to run in the physical and virtual environments in order to assess the impact of the attack on the community from a physical and virtual prospective.  Running the cyber scenarios would help identify the processes, procedures, capabilities and gaps in protection.

 

Cyber security must be addressed and understood at local governmental levels in order to provide all citizens within a community the means to continue normal life function during potential cyber attacks.  High level strategies in Federal government often fail to incorporate what the consequences of cyber attack would do to a local community.  How does the local community government prepare and respond to cyber attacks?  What resources, procedures and polices will be implemented or are in place to support local communities under cyber attack?  Cyberspace has changed the fundamental assumptions of everyday life all individuals.  With the advent of networks and interactions between machines and humans, software is now required to address a wealth of new aspects which potentially impact the ways municipalities react in cyber related incidents to serve their citizens.  Procedures, policies and capabilities which enable localities to operate in the cyber domain must be considered simultaneously with state and federal government agencies responsible for cyber security.  These aspects include: real-time communications, security, privacy and trust as well as economic, social and societal implications.  Affordability is a crosscutting concern, a major constraint in future cyber domain capabilities, designs, procedures and policies.  These all require new collaborative insights and approaches.  In a world of spontaneously evolving cyber related activities which ultimate impact all individuals, communities must be prepared to implement procedures to ensure basic services are provided during potential cyber related attacks.  Of particular interest would be a process where analyzing approaches that unify seemingly disparate levels of local, state and federal government entities responsible for implementing cyber security could take place.  The value of a collaborative (municipal cyber lab) approach is its anticipated benefit and hopefully significant improvement in producing procedures, processes and capabilities which enable better a understanding of potential cyber security architectures, for trust and affordability.  “When it comes to cyber security, government and the private sector need to recognize that an individual vulnerability is a common weakness.” Melissa Hathaway, DNI Cyber Security

 

VOICCE Resources

VOICCE HOME

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