Jason Bruzdzinski's analysis of China's military development and Kevin Burns's mathematical study of so-called "normal errors" have won MITRE's 2004 Best Paper Awards. Their papers are:
Kevin Burns's paper uses a Bayesian-mathematical approach to analyze the mental models and "situation awareness" of a decision maker in the October 20, 1978 collision between the Coast Guard cutter Cuyahoga and the freighter Santa Cruz II. He addresses what cognitive psychologists call the "confirmation bias," where people tend to seek information consistent with their first impressions, thus reinforcing these impressions even when they are wrong. His results show that the collision-causing "error" was actually "normal" in that it could be explained as the product of bounded-Bayesian reasoning. This finding is important because it shows how formal methods can be used to predict human errors and thereby serve to guide the design of decision support systems.
"This year's competition brought out many strong entries, so choosing a winner was very difficult," says Senior Vice President David H. Lehman, who chairs the Best Paper Awards Committee. "In making our decision, we paid special attention to the impact of the work reported on MITRE sponsors and on the wider community. Research of this caliber represents MITRE at its best and fulfills the contest's goal of expanding awareness of MITRE's technical stature." Bruzdzinski testified about his work before the U.S. Congress in February 2004, and has presented his findings at several research conferences; a prominent Chinese military journal has referred indirectly to his research. Burns's work was featured in a course at U. Cal. San Diego and cited in a project on "Shared Situational Awareness" sponsored by the Center for Naval Analyses; it was even used by a biblical scholar to analyze the authenticity of various scriptures."
The 2004 competition attracted 45 entries. Forty-one of these papers received $1,500 Incentive awards. A complete list of the winners follows.
Liliana Ardissono, Alfred Kobsa, and Mark T. Maybury, Eds., 2004, Personalized Digital Television: Targeting Programs to Individual Viewers, New York: Springer Verlag.
Liliana Ardissono and Mark T. Maybury, Eds., 2004, International Journal of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Special Issue on User Modeling and Personalization for TV, Vol. 14, No. 1.
Emmet R. Beeker, April 2004, "Potential Error in the Reuse of Nilsson's A Algorithm for Path-finding in Military Simulations," Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 23–29.
Airlines Entry and Exit and the Impact on Air Traffic Management: An Analytical Framework for Zero Sum and Positive-Sum Outcomes
Tom Berry, Dipasis Bhadra, Jennifer Gentry, Gregory Nelson
Selective and Authentic Third-Party Distribution of XML Documents
Elisa Bertino, Barbara Carminati, Elena Ferrari, Bhavani Thuraisingham, Amar Gupta
Maximum Likelihood Approach to Joint Array Detection/Estimation
Roy E. Bethel, Kristine L. Bell
Dipasis Bhadra, Spring 2004, "Air Travel in Small Communities: An Econometric Framework and Results," Journal of the Transportation Research Forum, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 19–37.
Dipasis Bhadra and David Hechtman, July 2004, "Determinants of Airport Hubbing in the United States: An Empirical Framework," Public Works Management and Policy, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 26–50.
Airline Networks: An Econometric Framework to Analyze Domestic US Air Travel
Dipasis Bhadra, Pamela Texter
M. Brian Blake, September 2004, "A Specification Language and Service-Oriented Architecture to Support Distributed Data Management," Software—Practice and Experience, Vol. 34, pp. 1091–1117.
John F. Brennan, Joseph M. Hollenberg, and Mark W. Huberdeau, April–June 2004, "White Paper on Transcontinental (Transcon) Options: Using the Flow Evaluation Area (FEA) Capability for Severe Weather Reroutes," Journal of Air Traffic Control, Vol. 46, No. 2, pp. 15–18.
Evolving a Corporate Software Quality
Marc-Alexis Côté, Witold Suryn, Robert A. Martin, Claude Y. Laporte
Joseph Creekmore, Jeffrey Woodard), David Clites, Bryan George, and David Mireles, October 2004, "Compression of Underwater Signals, (U)" (S), U.S. Navy Journal of Underwater Acoustics, Vol. 55.
Evaluating Inter-Organizational Information Systems
Jill L. Drury, Jean Scholtz
Joshua D. Guttman, 2004, "Authentication Tests and Disjoint Encryption: A Design Method for Security Protocols," Journal of Computer Security, Vol. 12, pp. 409–433.
The Faithfulness of Abstract Protocol Analysis: Message Authentication
Joshua D. Guttman, F. Javier Thayer, Lenore D. Zuck
James K. Hazy, Brian F. Tivnan, and David R. Schwandt, February 2004, "The Impact of Boundary Spanning on Organizational Learning: Computational Explorations," Emergence, Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 86–123.
Multichannel Customer Contact Management
Paul Herceg, David Madison
Mark W. Huberdeau and Jennifer Gentry, April–June 2004, "Use of the Collaborative Convective Forecast Product in the Air Traffic Control Strategic Planning Process," Journal of Air Traffic Control, Vol. 46, No. 2, pp. 9–14.
Duane Hybertson, 2004, "Using a Specification Approach to Facilitate Component Testing," in Testing Commercial-off-the-Shelf Components and Systems, Sami Beydeda and Volker Gruhn, eds., New York: Springer Verlag, pp. 213–237.
Nanotube-Substrate Interactions: Distinguishing Carbon Nanotubes by the Helical Angle
Aleksey N. Kolmogorov, Vincent H. Crespi, Monika H. Schleier-Smith, James C. Ellenbogen
On the Design and Management of Heterogeneous Networks: A Predictability-Based Perspective
Randall Landry, Kevin Grace, Ali Saidi
Young C. Lee and Swen Ericson, Spring 2004, "Analysis of Coast Times Upon Loss of GPS Signals for Integrated GPS/Inertial Systems," Air Traffic Control Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 27–51.
Young C. Lee, John C. Moody, Jr., and James K. Reagan, Fall 2004, "Effectiveness of the Ground-Based Transceiver (GBT) Parrot System for Monitoring GPS Integrity for Alaska ATC 'Radar-Like Services' Using ADS-B," Air Traffic Control Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 253–274.
Mark T. Maybury, Ed., 2004, New Directions in Question Answering, Cambridge, MA: AAAI/MIT Press.
Personalcasting: Tailored Broadcast News
Mark T. Maybury, Warren R. Greiff, Stanley M. Boykin, Jay Ponte, Chadwick A. McHenry, Lisa Ferro
Keith F. McDonald and Rick S. Blum, July 2004, "Robust Techniques in Space-Time Adaptive Processing," in Applications of Space-Time Adaptive Processing, Richard Klemm, ed., London: Institution of Electrical Engineers.
Alexander A. Morgan, Lynette Hirschman, Marc Colosimo, Alexander S. Yeh, and Jeff B. Colombe, 2004, "Gene Name Identification and Normalization Using a Model Organism Database," Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Vol. 37, pp. 396–410.
Eric Myberg, John Burger, Scott Mardis, and David Ferrucci, 2004, "Software Architectures for Advanced Question Answering," in New Directions in Question Answering, Mark T. Maybury, ed., Cambridge, MA: AAAI/MIT Press, pp. 19–29.
Kun I. Park, 2004, QoS in Packet Networks, New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Arnon Rosenthal, Len Seligman, and Scott Renner, December 2004, "From Semantic Integration to Semantics Management: Case Studies and a Way Forward," ACM SIGMOD Record, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 44–50.
Availability Enhancements for CAT IIIB LAAS
Curtis A. Shively, Thomas T. Hsiao
Kenneth P. Smith, Sushil Jajodia, Vipin Swarup, Jeffrey Hoyt, Gail Hamilton, Donald Faatz, and Todd Cornett, August 2004, "Enabling the Sharing of Neuroimaging Data Through Well-Defined Intermediate Levels of Visibility," Neuroimage, Vol. 22, pp. 1646–1656.
A Paradigm for Quality of Service in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks Using Synchronous Signaling and Node States
John A. Stine, Gustavo de Veciana
Bhavani Thuraisingham, September 2004, "Managing and Mining Multimedia Databases," International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 739–759.
Secure Sensor Information Management and Mining
Bhavani Thuraisingham
Bhavani Thuraisingham, 1 March 2004, "Security and Privacy Issues for Sensor Databases," Sensor Letters, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 37–47.
Michael Tran, 2004, "Performance Evaluations of the New GPS L5 and L2 Civil (L2C) Signals, NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation, Vol. 51, No. 3, pp. 199–212.
James L. Vann, 2004, "Resistance to Change and the Language of Public Organizations: A Look at 'Clashing Grammars' in Large-Scale Information Technology Projects," Public Organization Review, Vol. 4, pp. 47–73.
Yueh-Shiou Wu, Lynne Hamrick, Tamara Karakis, and Michele Merkle, December 2004, "Performance Metrics for Oceanic Air Traffic Management," Air Traffic Control Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 315–338.
Holly A. Yanco, Jill L. Drury, and Jean Scholtz, 2004, "Beyond Usability Evaluation: Analysis of Human–Robot Interaction at a Major Robotics Competition," Human–Computer Interaction, Vol. 19, pp. 117–149.
Best Paper Archives
Papers for the previous year are posted during the second half of the current year.
