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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...
If Shia Labeouf were on the plane, 4chan could have found it in less than 24 hours.
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"
CNN has been shit for a lot longer than that.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?