A Radar Tracking Approach to Data Mining

(Statistics and Data Mining II)

Automated decision problems are frequently encountered in statistical data processing and data mining. An heuristic filter or heuristic classifier typically has a limited set of input data from which to arrive at a set of conclusions and make a decision: REJECT, ACCEPT, or UNDETERMINED. In such cases, pre-processing the [...]

Disaster Management for Web-Hosted Data

(Technology Infrastructure Series)

In case you’re taking seriously guarantees about uptime, reliability, or backups advertised by website hosting companies, you should know that most guarantees of service are an idealized concept, especially if you use a low-cost web hosting service. Now, this doesn’t mean you should avoid low-cost web hosts. What you should do [...]

The Analysis of Visitor Statistics: Data Mining in-the-Small

(Statistics and Data Mining I)

For a variety of reasons, meaningful website visitation and visitor behavior statistics are an elusive data set to generate. This article introduces the visitor statistics problem, and describes seven challenges that must be overcome by statistical and data analysis techniques aiming for accurate estimates. Along the way, we’ll encounter [...]

The Advance of Sensor Networks and Autonomous Systems

The past five years have seen the emergence of a growing array of autonomous swimming, flying, and rolling vehicles, each highly sensored and capable of real-time communication with processors external to themselves. Practical designs are now commercially available for each of the four primary areas of our environment: terrestrial, marine (subsea, surface, and amphibian), [...]

The Advance of Marine Micro-ROVs

A Versatile Tool for Marine Operations, and a Portable Undersea Platform for Small Sensors

Micro-ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles) are becoming increasingly capable even as their size and cost drop, opening up new possibilities for the application of undersea inspection, imaging, and measurement.

In this article, I’ll discuss four reasons why Micro-ROVs should be a routinely used part [...]

Sensors and Systems

… Integrating Sensors into the Ubiquitous Computing Stack

“Smart dust”, tiny leaf sensors, wearable computing — these and a host of other sensors that make measurements and communicate without requiring human intervention can now be readily integrated into dispersed systems to provide ambient intelligence, situational awareness, and the capability for adaptive behaviors or intelligent process automation. [...]

Knowledge Engineering

…and the Emerging Technologies of the Next Decade

Between Mathematics, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Statistics, is emerging an area of effort concerned, not just with using data or information gathered slowly over months or years, but with its real-time acquisition, interpretation and analysis, and its real-time use in appropriate decision-making, automatic adjustment, and [...]