Briefs

Dallas, Texas (July 9, 2008) -- Computer scientists at The University of Texas at Dallas are developing technology that will sift through mountains of aviation data in search of ways to further enhance flight safety.

Part of a new three-year, $1 million NASA-funded project being done in collaboration with researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the work focuses on more than three decades of what are called "anomalous aviation events," or incidents that deviated from normal flight operations.

Using data-mining techniques that are increasingly popular in searching for kernels of relevant information within enormous amounts of data -- crime statistics or genomics data, for instance -- researchers at the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT Dallas hope to identify subtle patterns of aviation events that could foreshadow future catastrophe.

"It's essential to automatically mine large amounts of aviation safety reports in order to understand anomalous events and improve safety," said Dr. Latifur Khan, an associate professor of computer science and principal investigator for the UT Dallas portion of the research. "With the rapid growth of the aviation industry worldwide and the increasing power and complexity of aircraft, spacecraft and other aviation systems, data related to aviation safety is growing rapidly, making large-scale manual exploration unrealistic. It's crucial to develop data-mining systems to analyze these aviation reports to help prevent future incidents."

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