Columbus State receives its first patent

Columbus State University has received its first patent in the institution’s 58-year history.

A team of CSU researchers in the TSYS School of Computer Science developed software that produced a new tool for training military and emergency personnel to make good decisions.

It’s called CM-TDSS, the Cognitive Map-based Tactical Decision Support System. The official patent name is CMDST (Cognitive Map-based Decision Simulation for Training). CSU computer science professor Shamim Khan, the project’s principal investigator, laughed as he explained why his team came up with those names.

“If you tried to describe what it is and what it does,” he said during an interview with the Ledger-Enquirer in his office last week, “eventually you have all the words put together.”

No wonder the project team simply calls it “the system” for short.

Other members of the team are project director Wayne Summers, associate investigators Vladimir Zanev and Rodrigo Obando, post-doctoral research fellow Sebastian Khor, retired U.S. Army Col. John Fuller, the project’s manager, and George Khouri, the knowledge engineer. George Duncan, Mary House, Evan Foley, Joshua Morrell and Robert Smith were CSU students who worked on the project when it began in 2010. The Florida-based Institute for Human and Machine Cognition was a partner institution.

The team completed the project in 2012 and received the patent earlier this year.

“It’s a pretty cool feeling,” said Khan, who worked at Murdoch University in Australia before coming to CSU 10 years ago. “It shows we’re doing important research that has important, real-life applications. We’re attracting funds.”

A $1.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense helped fund the project, which opened more doors for the university’s TSYS School of Computer Science.

“It’s generated employment opportunities for our students,” Khan said. “We hired two graduate students who went on to complete their master’s degrees.”

Like a video game, the project team’s prototype models a battlefield scenario, but the CM-TDSS could be customized to train personnel for any situation that requires tactical decisions under time pressure, such as security, law enforcement and emergency response, Khan said.

“What’s new is using it for training, as opposed to just decision making,” he said. “That’s what’s novel about this project. Cognitive maps, or we call them ‘fuzzy’ cognitive maps, have been used for decision support as a decision-making aid for some time, but the idea of using it for training through simulation of actual scenarios is new.”

Fuzzy cognitive maps add layers of sophistication to the computer model, so the impact of a decision — such as slight, moderate or strong — may be factored into the system’s outcome.

“People often want exact values, but in the real world, in real-life situations when decisions are being made, exact numbers are not always practical,” Khan said in CSU’s news release.

Khan wrote the proposal to earn the federal grant, but he credits Fuller’s 27 years of military experience for providing the prototype’s necessary subject-matter expertise.

“Most new platoon leaders will report to their first unit of assignment with little, if any, real experience as tactical leaders, yet, they command units that historically come into the most contact with the enemy,” Fuller said in CSU’s news release. “And, where chaos pervades the battlefield, where combat tends to overwhelm the senses and distort reality, leaders with the greatest amount of training tend to make the best decisions.”

Now that CM-TDSS has patent protection, Khan told the Ledger-Enquirer he is contacting organizations to determine their interest in using CSU’s product. The professor hasn’t secured a customer, but he remains hopeful.

“This is completely new territory,” he said adding that the price for the system would vary greatly, depending on the number and complexity of the scenarios the customers request.

This story was originally published October 4, 2016 at 12:59 PM with the headline "Columbus State receives its first patent."