The 2001 competition attracted 41 entries, of which 35 met the contest's criteria for peer review and technical content and received awards. In addition to the Best Paper winner, 29 papers received $1,000 Incentive awards and 5 short papers received $250 Communication awards. In keeping with a policy instituted during the 2000 competition, one division and five departments also received $250 in honor of coauthors above the eligible AC5 level. These funds will support team-building activities.
A paper describing an innovative technique for beamforming has received
MITRE's 2001 Best Paper award. "A
Maximum-Likelihood Beamspace Processor for Improved Search and Track"
was written by Richard M. Davis of the Sensor Systems department and Ronald
L. Fante of the Sensors and Enabling Technology division, and published
in the July 2001 issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.
The paper was also the runner-up in the S.A. Schelkunoff Transactions
Prize Paper Award contest, given by the IEEE Antennas and Propagation
Society to the best paper published in the Transactions in a calendar
year.
Beamformers, incorporated in all modern radars, filter the output of an array of sensors and enhance the amplitude of a coherent signal relative to background noise and directional interference. Richard and Ron explain, "Conventional radars form a sum and two difference beams and use them in a process called monopulse to measure target angle-of-arrival (AOA). The maximum-likelihood beamspace processor (MLPB) eliminates the need to form difference beams by searching over all possible AOAs and picking the one that maximizes the probability of detecting the target. It trades a lot of RF beamforming hardware for additional software and signal processing. In addition to improved tracking accuracy, the MLBP can search a given volume of space using fewer pulses than a conventional radar."
Senior Vice President for Information and Technology David H. Lehman, who chairs the judging committee for the Best Paper Awards competition, notes that several MITRE sponsors are already investigating the MLBP technique for application in their radar systems. "The MLBP approach can help our sponsors reduce the amount of hardware they need to implement practical and efficient sensor arrays," he said. "This is especially important because today's deployed forces must become more and more mobile. I congratulate Richard and Ron for developing this valuable technique for solving a significant problem."
A full listing of the 2001 award winners, many of which include abstracts of the entries and links to the full papers, follows.
Analysis of Probability of Misleading Information for LAAS Signal in Space
Curtis A. Shively
Analyses for Elucidating Current Question Answering Technology
Marc Light, Gideon S. Mann, Ellen Riloff, Eric Breck
An Architecture Framework for Decision Support Systems (DSSs) in Air Traffic Management
Agam N. Sinha, Frank L. Willingham, Michael Hermes
Array Self-Calibration with Large Sensor Position Errors
Brian P. Flanagan, Kristine L. Bell
An Autonomous Decentralized Architecture for Distributed Data Management and Dissemination
M. Brian Blake, Patricia Liguori
Derivation of Ranging Source Integrity Requirements for the Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS)
Ronald M. Braff, Curtis A. Shively
Dynamic Bandwidth Management and Adaptive Applications for a Variable Bandwidth Wireless Environment
Mohammad Mirhakkak, Nancy L. Schult, Duncan Thomson
An Experimental Approach to Measuring the Effects of a Controller Conflict Probe in a Free Routing Environment
Karol Kerns
Expert Finding for Collaborative Virtual Environments
Mark T. Maybury, David House, Ray D'Amore, Kristine L. Bell
Extending the High Level Architecture Paradigm to Economic Simulation
James A. Calpin, Marnie R. Salisbury, John A. Vitkevich, David R. Woodward
A Four-Dimensional Probabilistic Atlas of the Human Brain
John Mazziotta, Arthur Toga, Alan Evans, Peter Fox, Jack Lancaster, Karl Zilles, Roger Woods, Tomas Paus, Gregory Simpson, Bruce Pike, Colin Holmes, Louis Collins, Paul Thompson, David MacDonald, Marco Iacoboni, Thorsten Schormann, Katrin Amunts, Nicola Palomero-Gallagher, Stefan Geyer, Larry Parsons, Katherine Narr, Noor Kabani, Georges Le Goualher, Jordan Feidler, Kenneth Smith, Dorret Boomsma, Hilleke Hulshoff Pol, Tyrone Cannon, Ryuta Kawashima, Bernard Mazoyer
An Introduction to Wide Area Augmentation System and Its Predicted Performance
M. Bakry El-Arini, Walter Poor, Ronald Lejeune, Robert Conker, James P. Fernow, Kelly Markin
Linux
Terry Bollinger
Managing Technical Change in Legacy Systems
Terry Bollinger
A Maximum-Likelihood Beamspace Processor for Improved Search and Track
Richard M. Davis, Ronald L. Fante
Mental Models of Line Drawings
Kevin Burns
Minimum Concave Transportation Problems
Bruce W. Lamar
Multilevel Secure Transaction Processing
Sushil Jajodia, Vijayalakshmi Atluri, Thomas F. Keefe, Catherine D. McCollum, Ravi Mukkamala
Near-Term Procedural Enhancements in Air Traffic Control
Wayne W. Cooper, Laurence M. Gordon, Bradley T. Hargroves, David R. Maroney, Joseph Spelman
Nonconvex Network Flow Problems
Bruce W. Lamar
Nonlinear Recursive Filter for Boost Trajectories
Michael E. Hough
On the Theory of Fuzzy Signal Detection: Theoretical and Practical Considerations
Peter A. Hancock, Anthony J. Masalonis, Raja Parasuraman
Predicting Congestion in the Northeast U.S.: A Search for Indicators
Emily K. Beaton, John F. Brennan, James S. DeArmon, J. Jeffrey Formosa, Kerry M. Levin, Shane L. Miller, Craig R. Wanke
Predicting Staff Sizes to Maintain Networks
Lon D. Gowen
Problem Resolution Support for Free Flight Operations
Daniel B. Kirk, Winfield S. Heagy, Michael J. Yablonski
Recommender Systems for Learning: Building User and Expert Models through Long-Term Observation of Application Use
Frank Linton, Hans-Peter Schaefer
Reliability Estimation for a Software System with Sequential Independent Reviews
Nancy E. Rallis, Zachary F. Lansdowne
Robust Detection of Ionospheric Irregularities
Todd Walter, Andrew Hansen, Juan Blanch, Per Enge, Tony Mannucci, Xiaoqing Pi, Larry Sparks, Byron Iijima, M. Bakry El-Arini, Roland Lejeune, Mine Hagen, Eric Altshuler, Rob Fries, Aleck Chu
Scintillation Modeling for GPS-Wide Area Augmentation System Receivers
Christopher J. Hegarty, M. Bakry El-Arini, Taehwan Kim, Swen Ericson
Software Construction
Terry Bollinger, Philippe Gabrini, Louis Martin
Towards a Framework for Managing the Information Environment
Robert W. Miller, Mary Ann Malloy, Ed Masek, J. Christian Wild, Jr.
A Uniform Component Modeling Space
Duane Hybertson
Validating a Future Operational Concept for En Route Air Traffic Control
Karen J. Viets, Celesta Ball
XML's Impact on Databases and Data Sharing
Len Seligman, Arnon S. Rosenthal
Best Paper Archives
Papers for the previous year are posted during the second half of the current year.
