The agency has been in partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allowing a portion of the space station for medical studies, including cancer research. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) collaborated with the City of Hope, a center for cancer research and treatment in California, to explore carbon nanotubes for the treatment of brain tumor. Last Sep. 6, JPL and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which is part of NIH, renewed their research partnership through 2021. "From a NASA standpoint, there are significant opportunities to develop new data science capabilities that can support both the mission of exploring space and cancer research using common methodological approaches," said Dan Crichton, head of JPL's Center for Data Science and Technology.

Teams of artificially intelligent planetary rovers have tremendous potential for space exploration, allowing for reduced cost, increased flexibility and increased reliability. However, having these multiple autonomous devices acting simultaneously leads to a problem of coordination: to achieve the best results, the they should work together. Due to the large distances and harsh environments, a rover must be able to perform a wide variety of tasks with a wide variety of potential teammates in uncertain and unsafe environments. Instead, this article examines tackling this problem through the use of coordinated reinforcement learning: rather than being programmed what to do, the rovers iteratively learn through trial and error to take take actions that lead to high overall system return.

This article describes the DSN scheduling wngine (DSE) component of a new scheduling system being deployed for NASA's deep space network. The DSE provides core automation functionality for scheduling the network, including the interpretation of scheduling requirements expressed by users, their elaboration into tracking passes, and the resolution of conflicts and constraint violations. It has been integrated with a web application which provides DSE functionality to all DSN users through a standard web browser, as part of a peer-to-peer schedule negotiation process for the entire network. The system has been deployed operationally and is in routine use, and is in the process of being extended to support long-range planning and forecasting, and near-real-time scheduling.

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the AAAI 2006 Fall Symposium Series, held Friday through Sunday, October 13-15, at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Washington, DC. The titles were (1) Aurally Informed Performance: Integrating Ma- chine Listening and Auditory Presentation in Robotic Systems; (2) Capturing and Using Patterns for Evidence Detection; (3) Developmental Systems; (4) Integrating Reasoning into Everyday Applications; (5) Interaction and Emergent Phenomena in Societies of Agents; (6) Semantic Web for Collaborative Knowledge Acquisition; and (7) Spacecraft Autonomy: Using AI to Expand Human Space Exploration.

The Electrical Systems Division at the NASA Kennedy Space Center has developed and deployed an agent-based tool to monitor the space shuttle's ground processing telemetry stream. The agent provides autonomous monitoring of the telemetry stream and automatically alerts system engineers when predefined criteria have been met. Sandia National Labs' Java Expert System Shell is employed as the rule engine. This article discusses the rule-based telemetry agent used for space shuttle ground processing and explains the problem domain, development of the agent software, benefits of AI technology, and deployment and sustaining engineering of the product.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is being challenged to perform more frequent and intensive space-exploration missions at greatly reduced cost. Nowhere is this challenge more acute than among robotic planetary exploration missions that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) conducts for NASA. This article describes recent and ongoing work on spacecraft autonomy and ground systems that builds on a legacy of existing success at JPL applying AI techniques to challenging computational problems in planning and scheduling, real-time monitoring and control, scientific data analysis, and design automation.

The goal of this research is to learn to control the attitude of an orbiting satellite. To this end, we are investigating the possibility of using adaptive controllers for such tasks. Laboratory tests have suggested that rule-based methods can be more robust than systems developed using traditional control theory. The BOXES learning system, which has already met with success in simulated laboratory tasks, is an effective design framework for this new exercise.