Air Safety Data Mining Research Ongoing

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, 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 UT Dallas hope to identify subtle patterns of aviation events that could foreshadow future catastrophe. The primary source for air safety information is the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) database. UT Dallas researchers will be addressing two primary questions involving this aviation data: What anomalies are associated with a given aviation event, and why did the event occur. These issues are complicated, though, by the "noise” inherent in the data, which stems from typos and grammatical mistakes as well as the use of abbreviations and jargon not widely used outside the aviation industry.