Publications

Refine Results

(Filters Applied) Clear All

Establishing a risk-based separation standard for unmanned aircraft self separation

Published in:
11th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations (ATIO) Conf., 20-22 September 2011.

Summary

Unmanned Aircraft Systems require an ability to sense and avoid other air traffic to gain access to civil airspace and meet requirements in civil aviation regulations. One sense and avoid function is self separation, which requires that aircraft remain well clear. An approach is proposed in this paper to treat well clear as a separation standard, thus posing it as a relative state between aircraft where the risk of collision first reaches an unacceptable level. By this approach, an analytically-derived boundary for well clear can be derived that supports rigorous safety assessment. A preliminary boundary is proposed in both time and distance for the well clear separation standard, and recommendations for future work are made.
READ LESS

Summary

Unmanned Aircraft Systems require an ability to sense and avoid other air traffic to gain access to civil airspace and meet requirements in civil aviation regulations. One sense and avoid function is self separation, which requires that aircraft remain well clear. An approach is proposed in this paper to treat...

READ MORE

A field demonstration of the air traffic control Tower Flight Data Manager prototype

Published in:
HFES 2011, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 55th Annual Mtg., 19-23 September 2011, p. 61-65.

Summary

The development and evaluation process of the Tower Flight Data Manager prototype at Dallas Ft. Worth airport is described. Key results from the first field evaluation are presented, including lessons learned about making electronic flight information acceptable to controllers. Iteration of the field evaluation methods are discussed for practitioner benefit.
READ LESS

Summary

The development and evaluation process of the Tower Flight Data Manager prototype at Dallas Ft. Worth airport is described. Key results from the first field evaluation are presented, including lessons learned about making electronic flight information acceptable to controllers. Iteration of the field evaluation methods are discussed for practitioner benefit.

READ MORE

Concept of operations for the Integrated Departure Route Planning (IDRP) tool

Published in:
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report ATC-379

Summary

A concept of operations for the Integrated Departure Route Planner (IDRP) tool is proposed to address issues in the area of departure route management. By combining information about weather and departure demand, IDRP can both identify potential demand/capacity imbalances and recommend a rerouting option, if appropriate. To effectively implement IDRP into the operational environment, a twophase approach is suggested. The first phase appends IDRP functionality onto the CIWS/RAPT platform, combining departure demand information with the convective weather information, creating a live prototype. This initial phase allows a gradual introduction of functionality into an existing display and enables the gathering of operational data to appropriately evolve IDRP to phase 2. The second phase involves introducing airline route preferences, along with any operational improvements discovered during the initial phase.
READ LESS

Summary

A concept of operations for the Integrated Departure Route Planner (IDRP) tool is proposed to address issues in the area of departure route management. By combining information about weather and departure demand, IDRP can both identify potential demand/capacity imbalances and recommend a rerouting option, if appropriate. To effectively implement IDRP...

READ MORE

Noncontact optical detection of explosive particles via photodissociation followed by laser-induced fluorescence

Published in:
Opt. Express, Vol. 19, No. 19, 12 September 2011, pp. 18671-18677.

Summary

High-sensitivity (ng/cm2) optical detection of the explosive 2,4,6- trinitrotoluene (TNT) is demonstrated using photodissociation followed by laser-induced fluorescence (PD-LIF). Detection occurs rapidly, within 6 laser pulses (~7 ns each) at a range of 15 cm. Dropcasting is used to create calibrated samples covering a wide range of TNT concentrations; and a correspondence between fractional area covered by TNT and PD-LIF signal strength is observed. Dropcast data are compared to that of an actual fingerprint. These results demonstrate that PD-LIF could be a viable means of rapidly and remotely scanning surfaces for trace explosive residues.
READ LESS

Summary

High-sensitivity (ng/cm2) optical detection of the explosive 2,4,6- trinitrotoluene (TNT) is demonstrated using photodissociation followed by laser-induced fluorescence (PD-LIF). Detection occurs rapidly, within 6 laser pulses (~7 ns each) at a range of 15 cm. Dropcasting is used to create calibrated samples covering a wide range of TNT concentrations; and...

READ MORE

A photon-counting detector for exoplanet missions

Published in:
SPIE Vol. 8151, Techniques and Instrumentation for Detection of Exoplanets V, 5 September 2011, 81510K.

Summary

This paper summarizes progress of a project to develop and advance the maturity of photon-counting detectors for NASA exoplanet missions. The project, funded by NASA ROSES TDEM program, uses a 256x256 pixel silicon Geiger-mode avalanche photodiode (GM-APD) array, bump-bonded to a silicon readout circuit. Each pixel independently registers the arrival of a photon and can be reset and ready for another photon within 100 ns. The pixel has built-in circuitry for counting photo-generated events. The readout circuit is multiplexed to read out the photon arrival events. The signal chain is inherently digital, allowing for noiseless transmission over long distances. The detector always operates in photon counting mode and is thus not susceptible to excess noise factor that afflicts other technologies. The architecture should be able to operate with shot-noise-limited performance up to extremely high flux levels, >106 photons/second/pixel, and deliver maximum signal-to-noise ratios on the order of thousands for higher fluxes. Its performance is expected to be maintained at a high level throughout mission lifetime in the presence of the expected radiation dose.
READ LESS

Summary

This paper summarizes progress of a project to develop and advance the maturity of photon-counting detectors for NASA exoplanet missions. The project, funded by NASA ROSES TDEM program, uses a 256x256 pixel silicon Geiger-mode avalanche photodiode (GM-APD) array, bump-bonded to a silicon readout circuit. Each pixel independently registers the arrival...

READ MORE

A new perspective on GMM subspace compensation based on PPCA and Wiener filtering

Published in:
2011 INTERSPEECH, 27-31 August 2011, pp. 145-148.

Summary

We present a new perspective on the subspace compensation techniques that currently dominate the field of speaker recognition using Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). Rather than the traditional factor analysis approach, we use Gaussian modeling in the sufficient statistic supervector space combined with Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis (PPCA) within-class and shared across class covariance matrices to derive a family of training and testing algorithms. Key to this analysis is the use of two noise terms for each speech cut: a random channel offset and a length dependent observation noise. Using the Wiener filtering perspective, formulas for optimal train and test algorithms for Joint Factor Analysis (JFA) are simple to derive. In addition, we can show that an alternative form of Wiener filtering results in the i-vector approach, thus tying together these two disparate techniques.
READ LESS

Summary

We present a new perspective on the subspace compensation techniques that currently dominate the field of speaker recognition using Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). Rather than the traditional factor analysis approach, we use Gaussian modeling in the sufficient statistic supervector space combined with Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis (PPCA) within-class and shared...

READ MORE

Language recognition via i-vectors and dimensionality reduction

Published in:
2011 INTERSPEECH, 27-31 August 2011, pp. 857-860.

Summary

In this paper, a new language identification system is presented based on the total variability approach previously developed in the field of speaker identification. Various techniques are employed to extract the most salient features in the lower dimensional i-vector space and the system developed results in excellent performance on the 2009 LRE evaluation set without the need for any post-processing or backend techniques. Additional performance gains are observed when the system is combined with other acoustic systems.
READ LESS

Summary

In this paper, a new language identification system is presented based on the total variability approach previously developed in the field of speaker identification. Various techniques are employed to extract the most salient features in the lower dimensional i-vector space and the system developed results in excellent performance on the...

READ MORE

Sinewave representations of nonmodality

Summary

Regions of nonmodal phonation, exhibiting deviations from uniform glottal-pulse periods and amplitudes, occur often and convey information about speaker- and linguistic-dependent factors. Such waveforms pose challenges for speech modeling, analysis/synthesis, and processing. In this paper, we investigate the representation of nonmodal pulse trains as a sum of harmonically-related sinewaves with time-varying amplitudes, phases, and frequencies. We show that a sinewave representation of any impulsive signal is not unique and also the converse, i.e., frame-based measurements of the underlying sinewave representation can yield different impulse trains. Finally, we argue how this ambiguity may explain addition, deletion, and movement of pulses in sinewave synthesis and a specific illustrative example of time-scale modification of a nonmodal case of diplophonia.
READ LESS

Summary

Regions of nonmodal phonation, exhibiting deviations from uniform glottal-pulse periods and amplitudes, occur often and convey information about speaker- and linguistic-dependent factors. Such waveforms pose challenges for speech modeling, analysis/synthesis, and processing. In this paper, we investigate the representation of nonmodal pulse trains as a sum of harmonically-related sinewaves with...

READ MORE

Automatic detection of depression in speech using Gaussian mixture modeling with factor analysis

Summary

Of increasing importance in the civilian and military population is the recognition of Major Depressive Disorder at its earliest stages and intervention before the onset of severe symptoms. Toward the goal of more effective monitoring of depression severity, we investigate automatic classifiers of depression state, that have the important property of mitigating nuisances due to data variability, such as speaker and channel effects, unrelated to levels of depression. To assess our measures, we use a 35-speaker free-response speech database of subjects treated for depression over a six-week duration, along with standard clinical HAMD depression ratings. Preliminary experiments indicate that by mitigating nuisances, thus focusing on depression severity as a class, we can significantly improve classification accuracy over baseline Gaussian-mixture-model-based classifiers.
READ LESS

Summary

Of increasing importance in the civilian and military population is the recognition of Major Depressive Disorder at its earliest stages and intervention before the onset of severe symptoms. Toward the goal of more effective monitoring of depression severity, we investigate automatic classifiers of depression state, that have the important property...

READ MORE

Latent topic modeling for audio corpus summarization

Published in:
INTERSPEECH 2011, 27-31 August 2011, pp. 913-916.

Summary

This work presents techniques for automatically summarizing the topical content of an audio corpus. Probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) is used to learn a set of latent topics in an unsupervised fashion. These latent topics are ranked by their relative importance in the corpus and a summary of each topic is generated from signature words that aptly describe the content of that topic. This paper presents techniques for producing a high quality summarization. An example summarization of conversational data from the Fisher corpus that demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach is presented and evaluated.
READ LESS

Summary

This work presents techniques for automatically summarizing the topical content of an audio corpus. Probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) is used to learn a set of latent topics in an unsupervised fashion. These latent topics are ranked by their relative importance in the corpus and a summary of each topic...

READ MORE