Improved Air Traffic Control with Cooperative Surveillance Techniques

Stephan Schulz from Comsoft GmbH, Germany, will talk about Air Traffic Control, 2008-08-06 at NICTA in Canberra:

NICTA LC SEMINAR

Improved Air Traffic Control with Cooperative Surveillance Techniques

Stephan Schulz (Comsoft GmbH)

DATE: 2008-08-06
TIME: 16:00:00 - 17:00:00
LOCATION: NICTA - 7 London Circuit

ABSTRACT:
Aircraft in controlled airspace are flying under the direction of air traffic controllers, which are responsible for safe, orderly, and expeditious traffic flow. In particular, maintaining proper aircraft separation is not left to individual pilots, but subject to air traffic control.

To support controllers in their task, surveillance systems are used to provide an air situation picture. The quality of the air situation picture determines both the workload of the controller and the safe separation limits of aircraft, and hence significantly influences the safe capacity of the air space. Most of todays surveillance systems are based on rotating antenna radars. However, radars are expensive to build and operate. They have a relatively low update rate and limited scalability.

New surveillance techniques rely on cooperative aircraft to overcome this disadvantage. Multilateration systems use a scalable array of small, low-cost sensors to determine aircraft position and parameters from the time difference of arrival of aircraft transponder signals. They achieve high accuracy, can provide updates several times per second, and provide secondary information about the aircraft based on the content of the received messages.

An even more radical departure from classical radar is Automated Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast. With ADS-B, the aircraft determines its own position using a global navigation satellite system. It broadcasts this position and auxiliary information, typically several times per second. The signal can be received by a low-cost ADS-B ground station with a simple omni-directional antenna. Thus, a small, passive sensor can provide a high-quality air situation picture.

BIO:
Stephan Schulz studied computer science and physics at the University of Kaiserslautern and graduated (Dipl. Inform.) in 1995. In the same year he joined the Automated Reasoning Group at the Technical University Munich. In 2000 he obtained a Ph.D. in computer science for his work on learning search control strategies for first-order deduction. He has contributed to the development of several high-performance deduction systems. Dr. Schulz is best known for developing E, one of the most friendly theorem provers for first-order equational logic. He taught at TU Munich, the University of Miami, and the University of the West Indies.

In 2005 he joined Comsoft GmbH, a German provider of solutions in he field of air traffic control, where he now is responsible for research and development of future surveillance technologies.

Wireless Local Positioning Systems

NICTA are hosting a seminar on Wireless Local Positioning Systems by Reza Zekavat, from Michigan Technological University, 26 June 2008 in Canberra:

NICTA WSP SEMINAR

Wireless Local Positioning Systems
Reza Zekavat (Michigan Technological University)

DATE: 2008-06-26
TIME: 13:00:00 - 14:00:00
LOCATION: NICTA - 7 London Circuit



ABSTRACT:
Wireless systems capable of positioning mobiles remotely in complex mobile environments have emerging applications in homeland security, law enforcement, defense command and control, multi-robot coordination, and traffic alert such as vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-pedestrian collision avoidance. These systems promise to dramatically reduce the society's vulnerabilities to catastrophic events and improve the quality of life. The talk presents a novel wireless local positioning system (WLPS) recently patented by Michigan Tech University (MTU).

The proposed WLPS has two main components: 1) a base station deployed in a mobile (e.g., vehicles, robots or handhelds) that serves as a Dynamic Base Station (DBS); and 2) a transponder (TRX) installed in wireless mobile handhelds, robots and vehicles that act as Active Targets. Unique identification (ID) codes are assigned to each TRX. DBS transmits periodic ID request (IDR) signals in its coverage area. Transponders reply to IDR signals as soon as they detect them. Depending on applications, each mobile in the coverage field may be equipped with only DBS, only TRX, or both. Such a framework offers attractive features: (i) high probability-of-detection performance via active as opposed to passive targets, (ii) low-cost TRX made of simple transceivers, and, (iii) infrastructure-less operation via dynamic as opposed to static base stations.

BIO:
Dr. Seyed A. (Reza) Zekavat received his B.S. degree from Shiraz University, Iran, in 1989, M.S. degree from Sharif University of Technology, Iran, in 1993, and Ph.D. from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado in 2002. He has over 10 years of teaching and research experience both in the United States and abroad. He has published more than 75 journal and conference papers, and has co-authored two books and invited chapters published by Kluwer Academic Publishers and Springer. His research interests are in wireless communications at the physical layer, dynamic spectrum allocation methods, radar theory, blind separation and beam forming techniques, feature extraction, and Curriculum Development. His current research is supported by the National Science Foundation and many Other Agencies through several active grants totaling over $1,500,000. He is also an active technical program committee member for several IEEE international conferences. At Michigan Tech, he has founded two research laboratories on wireless systems, and is currently principal advisor for several PhD students.

National ICT Center Opening in Canberra

NICTA will be opening their new national ICT center building in Canberra next month, with a free seminar on "Semantic Technologies for Business and Government", 13 November . Unfortunately NICTA prepared the invitation as a PDF file which is 9 times larger than it need be, so here is text version of the details:

Semantic Technologies for Business and Government
A half-day seminar in Canberra co-ordinated by NICTA’s e-Government Project

Abstract

We live in an age of information overload, surrounded by masses of digital data, but lacking the tools to process it based on its meaning or semantics. Consequently, a lot of human time and effort is spent manually transforming and processing data when porting it from one application or data store to another, or when aggregating it into a form suited for analysis and execution. Semantic Technologies represent a new wave in computing which aims to make the meaning of data and services explicit and machine processible for improved interoperability, searching and querying.
This seminar will focus on the core concepts and issues of semantic technologies, covering these topics:

• Overview of semantic technologies — Semantic Web, Web2.0, Ontologies, Metamodels and Metadata creation, Modelling Languages, OWL, Knowledge Sharing and Utilization;
• Overview of current tools, languages, and notations;
• Applicability to government services, processes, and infrastructure;
• Case studies of the use of semantic technologies in government;
• Survey of industry opinion in Australia on the future of semantic technologies.

Rather than comparing vendor technologies or detailing specific languages and notations, the seminar will focus on presenting the core technical ideas and approach of semantic technologies, providing attendees with a firm basis for further investigation and evaluation.

Intended Audience

This seminar is designed for senior technical staff and business managers in government, involved in business transformation, digital preservation and record keeping, knowledge management, enterprise planning and enterprise architecting,
inter-agency interoperability, and organisational process improvement. It will also be of interest to representatives of the ICT industry involved in enabling these activities.

Format of the Seminar

9:00 Registration
9:15–10:30 Session 1:
Overview of Semantic Technologies (Anne Cregan and Paul Brebner, NICTA).
Government case study (Don Bartley, ABS).
10:30–11:00 Morning Tea
11:00–12:00 Session 2:
Case Study 2 Industry Survey — Towards the Semantic Web: Standards and Interoperability across Document Management and Publishing Supply Chains (Anni Rowland-Campbell, Fuji-Xerox and RMIT).
12:00–12:30 Panel Session.
Includes the above presenters plus representatives from AGIMO.
12:30–13:30 Light Lunch and Networking

Bookings for this free event are essential

Please RSVP by no later than 6 November, 2007:
Phone: (08) 8302 3928
Fax: (08) 8302 3115
Email: industryeducation@nicta.com.au

Seminar Room NICTA Building 7 London Circuit Canberra ACT

Date: Tuesday, 13th November 2007 9:00am--1:30pm

From: Semantic Technologies for Business and Government, NICTA, 2007

ps: While NICTA's PDF files are too big, they are not as bad as National Archives of Australia invitations. The invitation I was emailed for their National Speaker's Corner, was 5.2 Mbytes, which is 200 times larger than it need be. By doing so NAA is wasting public money and contributing to the greenhouse effect.

To see how to do elelctronic documents, and therefore government, more efficiently, there are still some places on my course available.

Australian Smart Roads

On Wednesday the National ICT Australia (NICTA) displayed the results of some of its research at Parliament House in Canberra. Demonstrations of the Smart Transport and Roads Project were particularly impressive. This is being tested in Sydney to reduce traffic congestion.

Looking at the demonstration of the Real Time Traffic Sensing and Surveillance it occurred to me that this could be useful for the Australian Defence Force in Iraq.

NICTA was established in 2002 to do ICT research and now has laboratories in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. I attended one of the consultation meetings in 2001 on how the project should be run and it is good to see that some of the proposals for making the center distributed have worked out. About $AU1B has been invested by the Australian community in NICTA and it is good to finally see some tangible output start to appear.

While NICTA put on a good demonstration, there is still room for improvement. Several of the plasma screens used had an incorrect aspect ratio set. As a result everyone in the videos looked fat and graphics distorted. This is a common mistake made with digital signage, but not one ICT experts should make.

Also NICTA needed to put more than a minim of dull text on their web site. The smart roads project involves interesting use of graphics and video, but that is not evident on the web site, nor is there evidence of research results, such as scientific papers, conference presentations, open source software, or patents. That would take some effort to do, but much less than a glitzy demonstration at Parliament House. NICTA need to convince more than just the Parliamentarians that the investment made so far has been worthwhile and should be continued.

Defence Future Capability Technology Centre

The Australian Defence and Education departments are funding a "Defence Future Capability Technology Centre" (DFCTC) to work on defence research projects with industry and universities from mid 2008. Applications for participation close on 14 September 2007.

The centre will be similar to the existing Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs) run by the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST). There will be $30m funding over 7 years from the Commonwealth. There was no mention of National ICT Australia (NICTA) in the announcement, it might provide a useful model for research and has programs in Defence related areas underway.

Themes for DFCTC are:

1. Integrated Battlespace and Systems Integration: technologies to enhance situation awareness, decision support tools, information assurance, management, and representation, robust and high capacity communication networks, including network centric capabilities; human factors and the human-machine interface, identity management and continuous tracking, complex systems modelling and simulation; applicable to the air, surface, underwater and land environments.
2. Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive (CBRNE) Defence: CBRNE defence technologies encompass a wide spectrum of science applied to new and emerging threats to national security; including CT. CBRNE includes technologies to detect and defeat CBRNE threats, effects mitigation, bio-threat countermeasures, personnel protection systems, diagnostic and adaptive systems, casualty prevention and management.
3. Autonomous Systems and Robotics: unmanned air, ground, surface and underwater vehicle systems, including networks of autonomous systems in complex environments, cooperative behaviour, sensor-to-effector connectivity, micro-sensor and mobile energy source technology. Defence applications provide for enhanced surveillance and force projection while reducing manpower requirements and exposure to hazardous environments.
4. Materials Sciences: active and high-temperature materials, micro- and nano-technology, micro-engineered mechanical structures (MEMs), advanced armour, smart and interactive material systems, organic electronics, photonics. Applications of materials sciences to Defence capability may reduce power and weight requirements, increase protection, increase durability and enhance operational effectiveness of people and platforms.
5. Electronic Warfare Self Protection: platform tailored solutions incorporating multi-spectral capability, electronic support versus electronic attack; integration with other sensors and existing and planned command and control systems; able to operate autonomously in disparate environments, and exploiting new materials capabilities.
6. High Energy Electromagnetics: high energy lasers, microwaves, and electromagnetic pulse weapons, including enabling technologies such as power supplies, command and control, battlefield safety, mobility and protection. Applications include lethal and non-lethal weapons. ...
   

Adapted from: "Innovation Drives Future Defence Capability - Defence Future Capability Technology Centre", DSTO, 14 August 2007

Much of this research, such as that on explosives, electronic warfare and electromagnetics will be defence specific, but the other areas have commercial application. As an example, technologies for battlespace management are similar to those used in business, particularly with the adoption of common Internet and web tools. Recently I suggested that containerized "smart rooms" could be tested as outback classrooms, before being deployed in 2012 on the new amphibious ships HMAS Canberra and HMAS Adelaide. Robotic systems for the ships are also applicable to industry applications as well as the military.

See also:

• DFCTC Guidelines For Applicants (PDF, 119kb)
• DFCTC Stage 1 - Instructions for Applicants (PDF, 32kb)
• DFCTC Stage 1 - Application Form (Word Document, 308kb)
• Tender Press Advertisement (PDF, 738kb)

ps: In 1999, just after leaving the Defence Department I gave a speech proposing that Australian defence research should be contracted out, much the same way it is in the USA and there should be more work on web based command and control. This was well received by the MPs and a Cabinet Minister present. The Department Science and Technology Organization (DSTO) responded with a media release criticizing the proposal. But it is good to see Defence has now adopted much of my suggestion, including some of the areas for research.

Einstein's fridge an example for NICTA?

I wrote about an IT Innovation Seminar, in Canberra: The Challenges of Research in ICT:

What can we learn from the Past - with a focus on the case of INRIA, France ... Professor Alain Bensoussan ... University of Texas ... 6 December, 2006 ...

Professor Bensoussan talked about the role of government funded IT research organisations, such as INRIA (the French research body he headed), in supporting national goals for industry development. He argued that INRIA had been successful in producing good fundamental research.

Professor Bensoussan is in Australia talking to NICTA and his comments were very relevant to NICTA. Like France, Australia had a blend of government and private organisations involved in research. It has provincial and national governments with diverging interests in economic development. It has to come to terms with the globalisation of industry and of research and development.

Professor Bensoussan argued Australia was well placed as a western country in Asia to take advantage of opportunities in Asia, China and India. Having visited China and India, I have seen those opportunities, but how do we make them happen?

What was less convincing in Professor Bensoussan's talk was his argument as to the value of organisations such as INIRA and NICTA to their national sponsors. He argued the US "Stanford Model" of spinoffs from research into companies did not fit with the European approach to R&D. However, he was unable to point to a successful alternative in Europe, with IT research funded by government leading to industrial development.

This points to a major weakness in the Government strategy behind the development of NICTA. Essentially NICTA follows the European model: fund good research and hope it is of economic benefit somehow, some time. The result is likely to be the same as in the French case: the rest of the world will thank Australia for contributing to the overall increase in knowledge and then commercially exploit our research to sell products back to us.

We should not be surprised if NICTA fails to produce any economic benefit for Australia, if we fail to plan how to obtain such benefit. One alternative model is the "Cambridge Phenomenon", which I saw on a visit to the University of Cambridge (England). This model has the university actively involved in investment in startup ventures based on the university research. But it also has informal connections between the researchers and industry. A contributing factor is the limited tenure of the researchers, so they are forced to go out and set up a company after a time.

Whatever the model, we need one. All those conducting research at NICTA using government money need to be asked the question I ask every PHD candidate giving a seminar at the ANU: "How are we going to make money out of this?".

ps: Perhaps we can draw inspiration from Albert Einstein. While doing fundamental research he patented a refrigerator, which was licensed to European appliance makers, who paid royalties.