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Home > Our Work > MITRE Research Program > Best Paper Awards > | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Best Paper Awards - 2003 Two papers that have already proven influential in the areas of air traffic safety and bioinformatics, respectively, have won MITRE's Best Paper Award for 2003. They are:
Winning author Jonathan Hammer leads a task force on standards in CAASD's Surveillance and Broadcast Services department, and this year also served as guest editor of an issue of Air Traffic Control Quarterly focused on the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) system. His paper contains a safety analysis of an approach spacing technique using ADS-B that may one day improve air traffic throughput for high-volume runways at major airports. ADS-B, a satellite-based tracking system that enables pilots and controllers to share and display the same information, can play a vital role in improving air traffic control productivity and safety. It provides better accuracy and coverage than radar, and also offers flight crews the ability to observe and interact with other aircraft, thereby enabling new procedures. The paper illustrates a safety methodology agreed to by industry participants in RTCA (Requirements and Technical Concepts for Aviation), a standards-setting organization that advises the FAA, and shows how to link various integrity metrics to safety. According to CAASD Chief Engineer Glenn Roberts, "ADS-B, and other broadcast services, are critical enabling technologies for improving the capacity and safety of the National Airspace System (NAS), while reducing FAA costs. In the often risk-averse world of air traffic management, safety assurance can be a show stopper, so this work successfully tackled the hard problem and a key potential roadblock. Given our sponsor's emphasis on cost savings, safety, capacity enhancement and a 'performance-based NAS'' this paper touches on all the right themes and presents a sound technical analysis. It also highlights MITRE's leadership in the aviation community." The team of Lynette Hirschman, Alex Morgan, and Alex Yeh wrote two papers that were published in 2003; the other paper received an Incentive award in the contest. According to CIIS Chief Engineer Richard Games, "We've known for sometime that biology was going to have an increasing impact on MITRE's work because of its growing application to the military, the intelligence community, and homeland security. Lynette initiated work in bioinformatics by applying MITRE's existing expertise in natural language processing to the problem of automatically extracting relevant facts from biology literature. This paper, which came out of this initiative, has influenced how researchers assess the performance of such bio-fact extraction. As a result, it significantly increased MITRE's reputation within the bioinformatics community." Lead author Lynette Hirschman notes that "When we began our research in the application of information technology to biology, we had two surprises. The first was that biologists were very eager to have tools that could automatically extract information from text. The second was that although an increasing number of researchers were reporting results in information extraction applied to biology, there were no standardized evaluations, which made it difficult to tell whether this was a solved problem and where researchers should direct their efforts. This paper came out of our need to understand both the state of the art for text mining in biology and some of the biology-specific aspects of that problem, such as naming conventions for genes (which gave rise to the title of the paper). We have since gone on to run the first Critical Assessment for Information Extraction in Biology (BioCreAtIvE), and are continuing our work on information extraction tools in this domain." Lynette, who is Director of Artificial Intelligence in the CIIS and leader of the Biotechnology Technology Area Team, also collaborates with her coauthors on their MITRE Sponsored Research projects. Alex Morgan currently leads a project on "Patterns of Pathogenicity," while Alex Yeh works on the MSR on "Reading Comprehension: Reading, Learning, Teaching." This year the committee received a total of thirty-two entries from authors representing all of MITRE's operating centers. Twenty-six papers received Incentive awards, and one shorter paper received a Communication award. "I'm glad we had so many entries this year," says Senior Vice President Dave Lehman, who chairs the Best Paper Awards committee, and then adds, "but we would always like to see more. The competition is about incentivizing publication in high-quality journals. These publications enhance our technical stature with industry, perspective employees, academia and our sponsors. It also vets and tests our ideas in the public domain." A complete list of the winners follows. Award Winners
Page last updated: November 9, 2005 | Top of page |
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