Publications

This paper presents a benefits assessment methodology for an air traffic control tower advanced automation system called the Tower Flight Data Manager (TFDM), which is being considered for development by the FAA to support NextGen operations. The standard FAA benefits analysis methodology is described, together with how it has been...

Many aviation safety studies involve estimating near mid-air collision (NMAC) rate. In the past, it has been assumed that the probability that an NMAC leads to a mid-air collision is 0.1, but there has not yet been a comprehensive study to serve as a basis for this estimate. This paper...

Whenever machine learning is used to prevent illegal or unsanctioned activity and there is an economic incentive, adversaries will attempt to circumvent the protection provided. Constraints on how adversaries can manipulate training and test data for classifiers used to detect suspicious behavior make problems in this area tractable and interesting...

TCAS behavior in New England airspace is being monitored and analyzed, making use of an omni-directional 1030/1090 MHz receiver. The receiver system, located in Lexington, MA, and operated by M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory, is used to record Resolution Advisories (RAs). Omni-directional receptions make it possible to examine the air-to-air messages exchanged...

Before unmanned aircraft can fly safely in civil airspace, robust airborne collision avoidance systems must be developed. Instead of hand-crafting a collision avoidance algorithm for every combination of sensor and aircraft configuration, we investigate the automatic generation of collision avoidance algorithms given models of aircraft dynamics, sensor performance, and intruder...

Mitigating thunderstorm wind-shear threats for aircraft near the ground has been an important issue since the 1970s, when several fatal commercial aviation accidents were attributed to wind shear. Updating the knowledge base for airport wind-shear exposure and effectiveness of detection systems has become critical to the Federal Aviation Administration as...

We have designed and implemented a general-purpose cryptographic building block, called GROK, for securing communication among groups of entities in networks composed of high-latency, low-bandwidth, intermittently connected links. During the process, we solved a number of non-trivial system problems. This paper describes these problems and our solutions, and motivates and...

MIT Lincoln Laboratory has developed the Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT), which provides automated convective weather guidance to air traffic managers of the NYC metro region. Prior studies of RAPT have shown high-accuracy guidance from forecast weather, but further refinements to prevent forecast misclassification is still desirable. An attribute set...

Nuisance attribute projection (NAP) has become a common method for compensation of channel effects, session variation, speaker variation, and general mismatch in speaker recognition. NAP uses an orthogonal projection to remove a nuisance subspace from a larger expansion space that contains the speaker information. Training the NAP subspace is based...

For adaptive optics systems, there is a growing demand for wavefront sensors that operate at higher frame rates and with more pixels while maintaining low readout noise. Lincoln Laboratory has been investigating Geiger·mode avalanche photodiode arrays integrated with CMOS readout circuits as a potential solution. This type of sensor counts...