Defining, Applying, and Coordinating Data Science at MITRE
For a long time I have thought I was a statistician, interested in inferences from the particular to the general, wrote mathematician….
Down for the Count
When I read Howard Gershen’s riff on counting with his fingers, what came to mind instantly was theory of mind in the way that I heard Alan Alda explain it at George Washington University as a guest speaker for the Smithsonian. We know that words and pictures work...
Remote Tower Idea Gains Traction in Aviation Industry
Tony Colavito leads MITRE’s remote tower efforts—using real-time camera feeds to replicate or enhance the panoramic view air traffic controllers have from an airport tower. MITRE is exploring its application to a variety of airport operations in both the United States...
Managing Language Chaos
Echoing Lewis Carroll, a colleague reminded me once that words mean whatever we choose to have them mean—a practice that might work if we lived in isolation from one another and if nothing that we said or did mattered. Alas, language, like personal devices, seems to...
Knowledge Visualization Part I: Recognizing the Value of Empathic Delivery
Herbert Simon wrote that “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information...
MITRE Hackathon Examines the Impact of Emerging Mobile Technologies
The 42 staffers and interns who participated in MITRE’s 2017 Hackathon aimed to connect around problems not projects. and connect they did, using Discuss@MITRE, Github, Hackathon.io, Slack, our internal wiki (MITREpedia)–and these are just the tools. The...
Digital Notebooks for Emergency First Responders: A Conversation with the Winning Team of the MITRE Hackathon
(L-R) Michael Lull, Kevin Long, Grant Pan, Joey Menzenski, and Jared Ondricek show off their award after a 24-hour marathon of hacking (team member not pictured: Jeff Stein). On February 24, 2017, MITRE sponsored an internal hackathon at its McLean, Virginia campus...
Reason for Hope
I was recently reminded of a quote by John Adams: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence”.
When Intoxicado ≠ Intoxicated: Avoiding False Friends and Critical Consequences in Machine Translation
In Madam Bovary, Gustave Flaubert observed that “Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.” Referring to the painful misconceptions that arise when we use...
Tackling the Technical Challenge of Getting Lost and Found Indoors
Knowledge sharing and collaboration is a big tent, and any number of ways to practice the craft are available to our staff. One of MITRE’s geospatial teams chose to take their interest in sharing positioning data for reasons of public safety to a convention center in...
Getting the Word Out and Bringing Back the News
MITRE staff are lifelong learners—it’s not hard to engage us in conversation online or in person or both at the same time. Somewhere in the swirl of activity, however, someone needs to capture the connections and outcomes, of course. For MITRE’s Center for Advanced...
Chasing down medical data is so 20th century. When medical data follows us, our care improves and so does the system that delivers it.
Have you ever filled out medical forms for yourself or a family member by hand and more than once? I can hear you sighing yes. So you already understand the potential goodness of having your data follow you in the form of a safe, accurate electronic record. Still,...
Don’t present—Collaborate! —in Workspaces Designed to Inspire the Contemporary Knowledge Workforce
Even the perpetually frustrated cartoon character Dilbert might take heart if he were to find himself in a workspace that actually supported creativity in a flexible, casual environment designed for human beings. The fantasy is becoming reality as office design...
Cost FACTS: Using a Social Media Platform to Create a Dynamic Tool for MITRE’s Cost Community and Beyond
If you’ve ever remodeled your kitchen, you know (perhaps to your horror) the potential difference between an estimate and the final bill. It’s why experienced homeowners often warn, “Take that estimate and double it!” Fortunately for taxpayers, there are a number of...
Flying Friendlier Skies: Turning Raw Meteorological Measurements Into Meaningful Visualizations that Can Advance Aviation Safety
If you’ve ever experienced weather-related turbulence while traveling on a plane, you know it can be a frightening experience. Understanding how weather events impact air operations can help pilots avoid potentially dangerous situations. The MITRE Corporation’s Center...
Intranet Organization Pages Make Data Easy to Find and Hard to Miss
MITRE’s intranet team stays on top of trends like responsive design. They also keep us responsive to one another so that we can engage in the reachback that helps us answer our customers’ questions. In this post, the authors describe how MITRE’s Organization Pages...
With Patient Toolkit, Sharing Improves Caring
MITRE’s Patient Toolkit mobile app enables chronically ill patients to better manage knowledge about their conditions, track their symptoms and medications, and communicate what they know to their healthcare providers. MITRE has a simple process to enable...
Using Immersive Visualization to Make Strategic Choices
Cognitive assistance isn’t mainstream yet, but decision support tools that enable decision-makers to understand tradeoffs in multiple dimensions are available. Shawn Chin and Rick Haberlin, who built one such tool, make the case that “engagement requires visualization...
Developing an Integrated View of Analysis is Still a Challenge
Scott Lucas’s rich contribution to an ongoing conversation about how to help our sponsors understand and think about their data adds the caveat that good decisions don’t just come from the data itself, but from what organizations do with it and how they share their...