AI Enabled Maneuver Identification via the Maneuver Identification Challenge

Artificial intelligence (AI) has enormous potential to improve Air Force pilot training by providing actionable feedback to pilot trainees on the quality of their maneuvers and enabling instructor-less flying familiarization for early-stage trainees in low-cost simulators. Historically, AI challenges consisting of data, problem descriptions, and example code have been critical to fueling AI breakthroughs. The Department of the Air Force-Massachusetts Institute of Technology AI Accelerator (DAF-MIT AI Accelerator) developed such an AI challenge using real-world Air Force flight simulator data. The Maneuver ID challenge assembled thousands of virtual reality simulator flight recordings collected by actual Air Force student pilots at Pilot Training Next (PTN). This dataset has been publicly released at Maneuver-ID.mit.edu and represents the first of its kind public release of USAF flight training data. Using this dataset, we have applied a variety of AI methods to separate "good" vs "bad" simulator data and categorize and characterize maneuvers. These data, algorithms, and software are being released as baselines of model performance for others to build upon to enable the AI ecosystem for flight simulator training.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables, accepted to and presented at I/ITSE

Evaluating Visual Data Analysis Systems: A Discussion Report

International audienceVisual data analysis is a key tool for helping people to make sense of and interact with massive data sets. However, existing evaluation methods (e.g., database benchmarks, individual user studies) fail to capture the key points that make systems for visual data analysis (or visual data systems) challenging to design. In November 2017, members of both the Database and Visualization communities came together in a Dagstuhl seminar to discuss the grand challenges in the intersection of data analysis and interactive visualization. In this paper, we report on the discussions of the working group on the evaluation of visual data systems, which addressed questions centered around developing better evaluation methods, such as " How do the different communities evaluate visual data systems? " and " What we could learn from each other to develop evaluation techniques that cut across areas? ". In their discussions, the group brainstormed initial steps towards new joint evaluation methods and developed a first concrete initiative — a trace repository of various real-world workloads and visual data systems — that enables researchers to derive evaluation setups (e.g., performance benchmarks, user studies) under more realistic assumptions, and enables new evaluation perspectives (e.g., broader meta analysis across analysis contexts, reproducibility and comparability across systems)

A Reflection on Seven Years of the VAST Challenge

We describe the evolution of the IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge from its origin in 2006 to present (2012). The VAST Challenge has provided an opportunity for visual analytics researchers to test their innovative thoughts on approaching problems in a wide range of subject domains against realistic datasets and problem scenarios. Over time, the Challenge has changed to correspond to the needs of researchers and users. We describe those changes and the impacts they have had on topics selected, data and questions offered, submissions received, and the Challenge format