• Operations Division hosts boat operator training at Taylorsville Lake

    Employees from several U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Louisville District field offices recently
  • Flood risk management project planned for Merriam, Kansas

    On June 29, 2022, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Kansas City District, and the City of Merriam, Kansas, signed a design agreement to begin design on a series of floodwalls and levees to reduce flood risk in the Merriam community. The project will involve constructing up to 6.5-foot-tall floodwalls and 6-foot-high levees for around 1.5 miles from Shawnee Mission Parkway to Merriam Drive. It will also require modifications to the Merriam Bridge and other utility modifications.
  • MKARNS Nav Notice SWL 22-25 Notice of Safety Zone NM 118.8 - NM 119.5

    MKARNS - To ensure the safety of life and property during the Pops on the River fireworks display in Little Rock, AR, a safety zone will be established by the U.S. Coast Guard for the Arkansas River from mile marker 118.8 to mile marker 119.5.
  • Corps of Engineers hopes everyone has a safe holiday, urges water safety

    The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Paul District, is urging everyone to practice water safety on lakes and rivers, at our recreation areas, our construction sites and on the roads during the upcoming Fourth of July weekend.
  • Recommended plan for South Central Coast Louisiana project finalized

    Lt. Gen. Scott Spellmon, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers commanding general and Chief of Engineers, signed the South Central Coast, Louisiana Chief of Engineers Report specifying the recommended path forward for reducing hurricane and storm damage risk in Iberia, St. Martin and St. Mary parishes. The report has been submitted to the Administration and Congress for review and authorization.
  • USACE Vicksburg District announces new Regulatory Chief

    VICKSBURG, Miss. – The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Vicksburg District announces the selection of Kristina “Kristi” Hall as the new Regulatory Division chief. The mission of the USACE Regulatory Program is to protect the Nation's aquatic resources, while allowing reasonable development through fair, flexible, and balanced permit decisions. In her new position, Hall will oversee and manage the actions and requests that are submitted regarding the waters or wetlands within the district’s area of responsibility, as well as maintain the mitigation program to offset the losses to the aquatic environment.
  • ERDC-Vicksburg infrastructure enhancements will soon be complete

    Construction will soon be complete on the latest infrastructure enhancements to the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center’s (ERDC) main campus in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
  • Adversarial Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Military Operations

    Introduction: Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms are at the forefront of current research to help military analysts deal with triaging ever larger amounts of data from deployed sensors. These automated approaches will become increasingly embedded into the military decision making process, which makes it crucial to understand how these algorithms generate outputs and how sensitive they are to perturbations during training or classification. In other words, humans must have a ‘theory of mind’ for these sets of approaches in order to begin to trust them enough to make life or death decisions. Research in this area is known as adversarial examples for artificial intelligence / machine learning. Previous works in this domain focused on degrading classification performance with respect to added noise to new data. Some of these works achieved notable results on image data by subtly increasing noise, such that the image appeared unaltered to the human eye, but significantly impacted performance (Athalye et al. 2017). Povolny and Trivedi (2020) achieved similar results, but made a small visually obvious change to induce a degradation in performance. One notable work examined the effects of an increase in physical scale of the sensed environment (such as the large areas recorded for remote sensing platforms) on adversarial perturbations (Czaja et al. 2018). This technical note (TN) describes an initial foray into understanding how physical changes to the appearance of military vehicles resulted in performance degradation for a convolutional neural network (CNN). The military vehicles chosen were the M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle and the M1064 Mortar Carrier. As stand-ins for the actual vehicle, plastic scale models were used, each a 1/35 scale replica. The results of this research have yielded a curated training and test data set of images related to the M2 and M1064, trained models based on a combined ResNet / Inception implementation from the Keras project, and adversarial examples mocked up using the scale models with images taken by a smartphone.
  • ITL team gets their hands dirty with soil classification effort

    Soil exhibits immense diversity across the Earth’s surface, naturally developing under varying climate regimes, geological materials, landscape portfolios, time intervals and more. A U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) team is working to help remotely identify soil in an effort to enable the Department of Defense to confidently and accurately predict its potential impacts on various operations, particularly in foreign countries and access-denied areas.
  • Mobile District Protects Native American Concerns in its Projects

    One of the most unique, challenging and rewarding aspects of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Mobile District when it comes to projects, is its relationship with the different Native American Tribes throughout the country.