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How Data Science Powered the Search for MH370 (hpe.com)
"In the absence of physical evidence, scientists are employing powerful computational tools to attempt to solve the greatest aviation mystery of our time: the disappearance of flight MH370." Slashdot reader Esther Schindler shared this article from HPE Insights:
Satellite communications provider Inmarsat announced it had found recorded signals in its archives that MH370 had sent for another six hours after it disappeared. The plane had been aloft and flying for that whole time -- but where had it gone? As Inmarsat scientists examined the signals, they saw that what they had was not data such as text messages or location information. Rather, the signals contained metadata: information about the signal itself. This was recorded as the satellite automatically contacted the plane's communications system every hour to see if it was still logged on. Bafflingly, whoever had taken the plane hadn't used the satcom system to communicate with the outside world, but had switched it off and then on again, leaving it able to exchange hourly "pings" with the satellite. Some of the metadata related to extremely subtle variations in the frequency of the signal. "We're talking about changes as big as one part in a billion," says Inmarsat scientist Chris Ashton.
Nobody had tried to use this kind of data to try to locate an airplane before. At first, Ashton's team didn't know if the attempt would work. But painstakingly, over the course of weeks, the team figured out how the movement of the plane, the orbital wobble of the satellite, and the electronics within the satcom system all interacted to create the data values that had been received. "We had to create the model from scratch," Ashton says. Their work revealed that the plane had flown into the remote southern Indian Ocean. They didn't know where exactly. But since there are no islands in that part of the world, it was impossible that anyone could have survived. For the first time in history, hundreds of people were declared legally dead based on mathematics alone.
Then mathematician Dr. Neil Gordon led a team from the Defense Science and Technology Group "to extract a path from a subset of the Inmarsat data called the Burst Timing Offset. This measured how quickly the aircraft responded each time the satellite pinged it, and was used to determine the distance between the satellite and the plane." They ultimately generate "a probabilistic 'heat map' of the plane's most likely resting places using a technique called Bayesian analysis. These calculations allowed the DSTG team to draw a box 400 miles long and 70 miles across, which contained about 90 percent of the total probability distribution.
Nobody had tried to use this kind of data to try to locate an airplane before. At first, Ashton's team didn't know if the attempt would work. But painstakingly, over the course of weeks, the team figured out how the movement of the plane, the orbital wobble of the satellite, and the electronics within the satcom system all interacted to create the data values that had been received. "We had to create the model from scratch," Ashton says. Their work revealed that the plane had flown into the remote southern Indian Ocean. They didn't know where exactly. But since there are no islands in that part of the world, it was impossible that anyone could have survived. For the first time in history, hundreds of people were declared legally dead based on mathematics alone.
Then mathematician Dr. Neil Gordon led a team from the Defense Science and Technology Group "to extract a path from a subset of the Inmarsat data called the Burst Timing Offset. This measured how quickly the aircraft responded each time the satellite pinged it, and was used to determine the distance between the satellite and the plane." They ultimately generate "a probabilistic 'heat map' of the plane's most likely resting places using a technique called Bayesian analysis. These calculations allowed the DSTG team to draw a box 400 miles long and 70 miles across, which contained about 90 percent of the total probability distribution.
"Their work revealed that the plane had flown into the remote southern Indian Ocean. They didn't know where exactly."
Amazing stuff.
all that science worked well!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Trump is headed for the agar jar of history. Jared is going too. #Lock her up
If Shia Labeouf were on the plane, 4chan could have found it in less than 24 hours.
Perhaps you shouldn't gloat about how great your Data Science is, if you haven't actually achieved your one goal.
MY BALLS!!! Suck 'em, nerds!
Well the information at hand. After the plane disappeared the phones still worked for a couple of days after, so definitely not underwater and close to a tower, so not in the seas either. The pilot had various training programs and a really odd one for landing at all places Diego Garcia. A plane was spotted not far from there flying really low and not much more came of that but airliners do not just wander about the place, expensive piece of kit and only so many. The only wreckage now found was bits of the plane, but unique bits in the way the would float in water, vertically and pretty much nothing visible above water, very hard to spot and nothing else publicly declared. Now those bits floated on set currents and where they ended indicates they did not come from where the searched in fact, somewhere in the Diego Garcia area, rather than any where near Australia. Now Australia plays with very, very long range over the horizon radar and they can see much further than they will ever claim and they should have been able to see that plane in the location they had searched and have been able to accurately locate where it went down, if it was there (not typical radar). Now put that all together and see how the bits fit. The plane went down, sounds like much closer to Diego Garcia (a US/UK spy plane and drone base, stolen from a native population who were dumped else where with nothing), the luggage did not get waterlogged and so someone must have picked it up and it must have ended up near a mobile phone tower and the only wreckage to show up was what would have been extremely difficult to find if you were purposefully cleaning it up using boats to pick up and drones to spot and of course you need lots of people for the clean up, dishonourable people with no integrity.
So it kind of looks like based on the little evidence at hand, the pilot try to fly and land at Diego Garcia, was spotted by long range radar out of Australia who informed the US and the US shot it down when it got to Diego Garcia. The Australia government peeved in being caught up in the mess, demanded it be kept secret and set up a search side show to give the US time to clean up it's mess. So they grabbed the luggage floating on water but being the typical lead addled fuck wits they are forgot the mobile phones and brought them within range of the towers on the island and stored them in a shed until the luggage and the phones could be destroyed. Basically "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" http://philosiblog.com/2012/05.... It seems to fit the best based upon the evidence at hand.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Not very useful if they can't find the actual airplane.
At first, Ashton's team didn't know if the attempt would work.
And now he knows that it did not work. Still, it gets written up as if they'd found the Titanic.
Everybody would not be needing to comb over minute pieces of data and vast esoteric computations if service providers had behaved better.
The satellite service was capable of gathering the gps data from the plane instantaneously and throughout its flight path. But the satellite company was charging for it, and Malaysian authorities did not want to pay for it presumably because it cost too much.
If the gps location service had been available for this flight, one can't help but wonder if there was a possible intervention that could have been undertaken when the plane would have been discovered wildly off course, and even though it appears the crash was not survivable, the quick crash site discovery and possible apprehension of possible criminals involved (if there are any).
As it is, everybody was chintzy all the way around at the expense of the safety of the flying public.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Ironically of all the complete shitshows calling themselves news outlets these days, the worst of them all actually started self destructing long before TDS was ever a thing.
(Or maybe it's actually not surprising, since it just means is they had a head start)
I am curious to find out if the blackbox is intact and if any further information about the how or why of it going missing can be discovered.
This is certainly one of the mysteries of this generation. Was it simply a pilot's unhinged suicide taking along 300 pool souls with them? Was it some massive conspiracy to capture the plane for some other purpose? Was it a massive psyop to help distract from something else going on in the world at the time?
The world may never know.
Where were the editors? HPE's not Slashdot's.
Then mathematician Dr. Neil Gordon led a team from the Defence Science and Technology Group...
Given that this is a proper noun the article's spelling is incorrect even in the US. The rest of the world is constantly making allowance for US spelling but it seems that the favour is not being returned.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
While the theoretical model has been carefully studied (See for example, http://epubs.siam.org/doi/pdf/... ), I'm not aware if any entity ever validated the model by actually flying an aircraft along one of the potential flight paths and comparing the ping times and doppler offsets from the theoretical model with an actual flight path. Does anyone know if that was ever done? Second best would be to compare the metadata from some other known flight with that flight's actual path.
Jeff Wise has long claimed that MH370 was hijacked by Putin and flown North, in an elaborate "spoof".
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
Nevermind your opinion of the Daily Mail - in this case, it nailed the story.
CNN has been shit for a lot longer than that.
Why are humans so arrogant that they *actually believe* their computer models are anywhere remotely close to being accurate.
I'm willing to wager that, using data science, we will never find one piece of wreckage from that plane in the next 20 years.
finite element analysis --hard
word problems --easy
That's the epoch you chose? I'll admit, they've been on the decline, but I hope you don't seriously believe it started there.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
I'd be a whole lot more impressed about the performance of "Big Data" if the submarine ROVs had found any trace of the aircraft. Right now, what they have is a big fat NOTHING. Some control surfaces washed up on islands a thousand miles away are not indicative of the performance of any sort of data analysis.
Solves nothing.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
MH370 brought to you by your evil Moslem pilot. Filthy Moslem scum. Nuke them all.
Umm, hold up, folks.
Don't declare victory until the airframe is found.
.
Kriston
Anyone keep reading these headlines and thinking it's the new Intel chipset?
This post comes too early. First find the damn thing, then boast about how this or that method helped finding it.
Is it too much to expect Slashdot stories to have the tense of the verb consistent ?
i.e. did this happen previously or is it still happening ?
"How Data Science *Powered* the Search for MH370"
"scientists *are employing* powerful computational tools"
EDITORS, EDIT !
How about declared dead after they couldn't find the plane for over 9 months and no one had established contact?
This article is a load of crap. It's an example of how these data models have failed to achieve anything useful. Firstly after almost 2 years they announced that they were looking in the wrong place: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/... and also that they were confident that after spending $200m the plane was not in the search area they established. https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
Good work big data!
Hey, the new new new bunch thought up a new trick. Isn't it cute?
That is merely a bit more special RF signal analysis engineering and not so much different from other radio-location tasks, although you usually have more data. Calling this "Data Science" is nonsense.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A triumph of analysis! They never found anything...
This is straightforward modeling and signal analysis - a lot of work, and having done such things myself in the past, I'm sure there's a lot of "what was the likely behavior of box X, when it's something we actually didn't measure during manufacturing".
But data science it isn't.
That's is all we want to see.
This science didn't down. Very good job, obviously.
Chris is the one in control here. He sticks his leg out for us to hump because it gives him pleasure.
We're helpless victims just like you. Ask chris.
The method of using satellite-centric data couod (?) be tested by looking at same data for a plane of a known flight.
Also, using term data silence for this make data science a term that can be used for any process that uses data to do something...
c0t
There was a similar aircraft where the oxygen bottle for the pilots broke its valve top and shot out the side of the aircraft like a rocket, putting a decent-sized hole in the fuselage (A foot or two in diameter). Turning off all the electronics breakers is consistent with fighting an electrical fire. So the theory would be - the pilots' oxygen bottle, in the radio bay below them, starts leaking, producing an oxygen-rich environment underneath them in the electrical hold - an electrical spark then results in a fire, so they immediately turn off the electrics. The oxygen bottle then fails and departs the aircraft putting a big hole in the fuselage; the pilots put on their masks and begin emergency procedures, turn the aircraft around about 180 and program the heading back to the nearest airport on the Malay peninsula. It would take a while for the pilots to realize they have no oxygen, by which point they are probably passing out, before they can program the autopilot for a lower flight level, a rather complex task for an oxygen-starved brain. I'm not sure I believe the Malaysians or Indonesians claiming on somewhat shakey grounds that they tracked the aircraft meandering - possibly that's an excuse for not having good radar data. Most likely, it follows the course set toward the nearest airport, keeps going over the Malay peninsula and Aceh, and out into the ocean. The passengers have 15 minutes or so of oxygen in those drop-down masks, so by the time they realize there's a problem in the cockpit they probably can't do anything about it, and also pass out. The aircraft flies on with it's programmed direction, everyone either passed out or dead or frozen, until it runs out of fuel. Does it stay level until it stalls, or gracefully glide down at greater than stall speed? Do some of the occupants wake up when the aircraft is low enough, only to watch it hit the water in the middle of nowhere?
I'm so impressed. With all this sophisticated data science they know exactly where it is. The only problem is that they haven't found the airplane. They know where it is. They really do. It's just that they haven't found it. Another :"WIN" for science!
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Having worked a lot in aviation (even specifically with Inmarsat) I really doubt these results, even beyond the statement that they created this model from scratch (and thus unverified/untested). Navigation isn't even very accurate in planes, so much so that you have things like NAT tracks ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) which establish fixed routes across the Atlantic where there is little radar coverage, GPS is not complete ( see RAIM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) and often inaccurate. They need the fixed tracks so that planes don't run into eachother and actually make it across, almost blind. Over land, airports and whatnot broadcast an analog signal that basically says what's nearby and where they are, and based on these a plane can normally tell where it is. The point is -- planes generally don't know where they are, and if they do it's because of a combination of equipment, so the inmarsat ping doesn't contain something like "I received this at XXX N by YYY E". To think that you could track a plane at all with things such as latency to a signal is either the biggest breakthrough in avionic nav ever, or a load of crock.
Can't get enough CREIMER????
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Anonymous Cashews:
https://slashdot.org/~Anonymous+Cashews
I Tape Fat Cashews:
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Lilly, you already posted this comment today. Stop trying to stir up shit around here.
I just want to know why you post IP and mailad trying to mess up with me. I only made small joke on blog. Crazy asshole