Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Steve Huffman, who chairs the Best Paper Awards Committee, noted "This paper breaks new ground by applying probabilistic methods and deferred-decision theory to create air traffic management techniques that are more agile in adapting to changing conditions, such as weather. Techniques such as this will be critical to providing the decision support tools necessary to transform the air traffic controller's job from one of low-level tactical command and control to the higher-level strategic traffic flow management role envisioned for the NextGen air transportation system."
"We were very surprised and greatly honored to win the MITRE Best Paper award," say Craig and Dan. "Given the astonishing technical contributions MITRE makes every day, it is an amazing feeling to be recognized in this way. We feel fortunate to work at a company that provides opportunities and a great environment for groundbreaking research, especially for ideas that seem crazy at first blush."
The authors describe their paper as a first step toward applying decision-making theory to a traditionally manual problem: how to plan air traffic in the face of uncertain weather forecasts and uncertain traffic demand forecasts. For example, thunderstorms reduce the capacity of airports and airspace to handle traffic, but it is quite difficult to predict the precise development and movement of storms. This leads to conservative decision-making, which travelers experience in the form of extended delays.
Craig's and Dan's research introduced quantitative models of forecast uncertainties and a decision-tree framework for evaluating the effectiveness of more or less aggressive traffic flow planning strategies. Strategies are evaluated using Monte Carlo simulation techniques so that the range of possible outcomes given a particular management strategy can be simulated and studied. The eventual goal is to provide automated tools that will help traffic managers make effective and timely decisions when severe weather occurs, thus reducing the disruption to air travel.
When Craig and Dan wrote the first paper on this topic in 2005, the response of the aviation research community was divided between interest and skepticism. The paper was nearly rejected by the 2005 USA/Europe Air Traffic Management Research Seminar, but ended up winning the best presentation award. Three years later, researchers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Metron Aviation, and several universities are all studying probabilistic air traffic management, and NASA recently awarded several new academic research grants on the topic. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has also recognized the value of this work and views it as an element of the future operational traffic management automation system. As a result, the project has transitioned from MITRE Sponsored Research funding to direct funding as part of the FAA work program.
In a paper presented at the AIAA [American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics] Guidance, Navigation, and Control conference in August 2008, Craig and Dan have augmented the research discussed in their winning paper by introducing an uncertainty model for weather forecasts. The next steps will be to study more traffic and weather situations in order to generalize the findings about decision strategies, and to develop a general-purpose version of the algorithm that eventually could be applied in a real-time decision support system.
Forty-two other papers received Incentive awards in the 2007 competition, while three short papers received Communications awards. A complete list of the winners follows.
Adelman, Leonard, Paul Lehner, Brant A. Cheikes, and Mark Taylor, May 2007, "An Empirical Evaluation of Structured Argumentation Using the Toulmin Argument Formalism," IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics — Part A: Systems and Humans, Vol. 37, No. 3, 340-347.
Balli, Umut, Haisang Wu, Binoy Ravindran, Jonathan Stephen Anderson, and E. Douglas Jensen, March 2007, "Utility Accrual Real-Time Scheduling under Variable Cost Functions," IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 56, No. 3, 385-401.
Best, Steven R., 2007, "Small Antennas," Antenna Engineering Handbook, 4th ed., John Volakis, ed., New York: McGraw Hill.
Bhadra, Dipasis, Summer 2007, "Air Traffic Performance by Market Segments," Journal of the Transportation Research Forum, Vol. 46, No. 2, 47-60.
Bhadra, Dipasis, and Roger Schaufele, 2007, "Probabilistic Forecasts for Aviation Traffic at FAA's Commercial Terminals: Suggested Methodology and Examples," Transportation Research Record, Aviation 2007, 37-46.
Bonaceto, Craig and Kevin J. Burns, 2007, "A Survey of the Methods and Uses of Cognitive Engineering," Expertise Out of Context, Robert Hoffman, ed., New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 29-75.
Booker, Lashon B., 2007, "Adaptive Value Function Approximations in Classifier Systems," Learning Classifier Systems, Tim Kovacs et al., eds., Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 219-238.
Bradshaw, Charles F., Lev Titarchuk, and Sergey Kuznetsov, July 10, 2007, "Correlations Between X-Ray Spectral Characteristics and Quasi-Periodic Oscillations in Scorpius X-1," Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 663, 1225-1231.
Brodzik, Andrzej K., June 2007, "Characterization of Zak Space Support of the Finite Chirp," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 53, No. 6, 2190-2203.
Brodzik, Andrzej K., April 2007, "Quaternionic Periodicity Transform: an Algebraic Solution to the Tandem Repeat Detection Problem," Bioinformatics, Vol. 23, No. 6, 694-700.
Burns, Kevin J., 2007, "Dealing with Probabilities: on Improving Inferences with Bayesian Boxes," Expertise Out of Context, Robert Hoffman, ed., New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 263-280.
Burns, Kevin J., 2007, "EVE's Entropy: A Formal Gauge of Fun in Games," Advanced Intelligent Paradigms in Computer Games, Norio Baba, Lakhmi C. Jain, and Hisashi Handa, eds., Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 153-173.
Cho, Hyeonjoong, Chewoo Na, Binoy Ravindran, and E. Douglas Jensen, July 2007, "On Scheduling Garbage Collector in Dynamic Real-Time Systems with Statistical Timing Assurances," Journal of Real-Time Systems, Vol. 36, No. 1 & 2, 34-46.
Cho, Hyeonjoong, Binoy Ravindran, and E. Douglas Jensen, March 2007, "Space-Optimal, Wait-Free Real-Time Synchronization," IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 56, No. 3, 373-384.
Das, Shamik, Alexander J. Gates, Hassen A. Abdu, Garrett S. Rose, Carl A. Picconatto, and James C. Ellenbogen, November 2007, "Designs for Ultra-Tiny, Special-Purpose Nanoelectronic Circuits," IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-I: Regular Papers, Vol. 54, No. 11, 2528-2540.
Ellenbogen, James C., Carl A. Picconatto, and Jacob S. Burnim, 5 April 2007, "Classical Scaling of the Quantum Capacitances for Molecular Wires," Physical Review A, Vol. 75, 042102
Elsaesser, Christopher, and Frank J. Stech, 2007, Detecting Deception, Computational Approaches to Reading the Opponent's Mind, Alexander Kott and William M. McEnerney, eds., New York: Chapman & Hall/CRC, 101-124.
Ginsberg, Allen, William D. Horne, and Jeffrey D. Poston, 2007, "The Semantic Side of Cognitive Radio," Cognitive Networks: Towards Self-Aware Networks, Qusay H. Mahmoud, ed., New York: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 247-270.
Heckman, Kristin E., and Mark D. Happel, August 24, 2007, "(U) Mechanical Deception Detection: A Short Review," Journal of Intelligence Community Research and Development.
Henry, Michael K., Alexey V. Gorshkov, Yaakov S. Weinstein, Paola Cappellaro, Joseph Emerson, Nicolas Boulant, Jonathan S. Hodges, Chandrasekhar Ramanathan, Timothy F. Havel, Rudy Martinez, and David G. Cory, December 2007, "Signatures of Incoherence in a Quantum Information Processor," Quantum Information Processing, Vol. 6, No. 6, 431-444.
Higgs, Brandon, Mojdeh Mohtashemi, Jennifer Grinsdale, and L. Masae Kawamura, 12 December 2007, "Early Detection of Tuberculosis Outbreaks Among the San Francisco Homeless: Trade-Offs Between Spatial Resolution and Temporal Scale," PloS ONE, Issue 12.
Hitzeman, Janet, 2007, "Text Type and the Position of a Temporal Adverbial within the Sentence," Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events, G. Katz, J. Pustejovsky, and F. Schilder, eds., Dagstuhl Research Online Publication Server.
Lee, Young C., Winter 2007, "Two New RAIM Methods Based on the Optimally Weighted Average Solution (OWAS) Concept," Navigation, Vol. 54, No. 4, 333-345.
Lee, Younkyong, Mayssam Sayyadian, AnHai Doan, and Arnon S. Rosenthal, January 2007, "eTuner: Tuning Schema Matching Software Using Synthetic Scenarios," The VLDB Journal, International Journal on Very Large Data Bases, Vol. 16, No. 1, 97-122.
Loehr, Daniel, 2007, "Aspects of Rhythm in Gesture and Speech," Gesture, Vol. 7, No. 2, 179-214.
Martin, Robert A., March 2007, "Being Explicit About Security Weaknesses," CrossTalk: Journal of Defense Software Engineering, Vol. 20, No. 3, 4-8.
Maybury, Mark T., 2007, "Natural Language Processing: System Evaluation," Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd ed., Vol. 8, Keith Brown, ed. (Oxford: Elsevier), 518-523.
Maybury, Mark T., 2007, "Yorick Alexander Wilks: A Meaningful Journey," Words and Intelligence II: Essays in Honor of Yorick Wilks, Khurshid Ahmad, Christopher Brewster, and Mark Stevenson, eds., Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 1-38.
Mitola, Joseph III, 2007, "Cognitive Radio Architecture," Cognitive Networks: Towards Self-Aware Networks, Qusay H. Mahmoud, ed., New York: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 147-202.
Mitola, Joseph III 2007, "Cognitive Radio Architecture," Cognitive Radio, Software Defined Radio, and Adaptive Wireless Systems (Signals and Communication Technology), Huseyin Arslan, ed., Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, 43-107.
Mohtashemi, Mojdeh, Ken Kleinman, and W. Katherine Yih, 20 December 2007, "Multi-Syndrome Analysis of Time Series Using PCA: A New Concept for Outbreak Investigation," Statistics in Medicine, Vol. 26, No. 29, 5203-5224.
Page, Ernest S., Jr., 2007, "Theory and Practice for Simulation Interconnection: Interoperability and Composability in Defense Simulation," Handbook of Dynamic Systems Modeling, Paul A. Fishwick, ed., New York: CRC Press, 16-1-16-11.
Peterson, Matthew,and Marc Colosimo, 31 October 2007, "TreeViewJ: An Application for Viewing and Analyzing Phylogenetic Trees," Source Code for Biology and Medicine, Vol. 2, No. 7.
Rolfe, Brigitte M., 2007, "Toward Nanometer-Scale Sensing Systems: Natural and Artificial Noses as Models for Ultra-Small, Ultra-Dense Sensing Systems," Advances in Computers: Nanotechnology, Marvin V. Zelkowitz, ed., London: Academic Press, 104-167.
Rushanan, Joseph J., Spring 2007, "The Spreading and Overlay Codes for the L1C Signal," Navigation, Vol. 54, No. 1, 43-52.
Slate, Robert, December 2007, "China's National Intellectual Property Strategy: Implications for U.S. National Security," Defense Intelligence Journal, Vol. 16, No. 2, 29-56.
Stech, Frank J. and Christopher Elsaesser, 2007, "Midway Revisited: Detecting Deception by Analysis of Competing Hypotheses," Military Operations Research, Vol. 12, No. 1, 35-55.
Stine, John A., March/April 2007, "A Cautionary Tale on Testing and Evaluating Tactical Wireless Mobile ad hoc Networks," ITEA Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1, 53-62.
Stine, John A., 2007, "Cooperative Contention-Based MAC Protocols and Smart Antennas in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks," Distributed Antenna Systems: Open Architecture for Future Wireless Communications, Honglin Hu, Yang Zhang, and Jijun Luo, eds., Boca Raton, FL: Auerbach Publications, 201-240.
Weinstein, Yaakov S., and C. Stephen Hellberg, 15 March 2007, "Scalable Architecture for Coherence-Preserving Qubits," Physical Review Letters, Vol. 98, 110501-1-110501-4.
Wellner, Ben, Matt Huyck, Scott Mardis, John Aberdeen, Alex Morgan, Leonid Peshkin, Alex Yeh, Janet Hitzeman, and Lynette Hirschman, September/October 207, "Rapidly Retargetable Approaches to De-Identification in Medical Records," Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Vol. 14, No. 5, 564-573.
Wu, Haisang, Binoy Ravindran, and E. Douglas Jensen, October 2007, "Utility Accrual Real-Time Scheduling Under the Unimodal Arbitrary Arrival Model with Energy Bounds," IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 56, No. 10, 1358-1371.
Yanco, Holly A., Brenden Keyes, Jill L. Drury, Curtis W. Nielsen, Douglas A. Few, and David J. Bruemmer, August 2007, "Evolving Interface Design for Robot Search Tasks," Journal of Field Robotics, Vol. 24, No. 8/9, 779-799.
