Defining Success in Air Force Infrastructure Asset Management through Use of the Delphi Method

Asset Management has a history of policy mandates within the US Government dating back to 1990’s. In order to accomplish these many directives, the Air Force Civil Engineer community has adopted a mindset and framework commonly referred to as Asset Management. Despite numerous references and guidance to establish Asset Management principles, the Air Force has not yet developed a clear and concise way to define or measure overarching success in Asset Management. This research effort focuses on closing the knowledge gap between issued policy and implementation. It examines Asset Management implementation efforts in other government agencies, private industries, and in various countries around the world. Combining this information with interviews from Subject Matter Experts at various levels of the Air Force Civil Engineering structure, this research identifies: current implementation limitations, key elements that constitute and promote success, barriers to success, military-unique opportunities for success, internal success identifiers, ways to promote continuous improvement, and the essential behaviors within Air Force Asset Management. Using this information and recommendations from the Air Force SMEs, suggestions are presented for measuring and incentivizing Asset Management success within an organization. Some of the major findings of this study were the need to develop both a clear definition of what asset management is and an official SAMP for the Air Force. Other findings of this research effort included: the importance of leadership buy-in; complete and accurate facility inventory; and understanding of asset management principles at all levels of the organization

Advanced Manned Launch System (AMLS) study

To assure national leadership in space operations and exploration in the future, NASA must be able to provide cost effective and operationally efficient space transportation. Several NASA studies and the joint NASA/DoD Space Transportation Architecture Studies (STAS) have shown the need for a multi-vehicle space transportation system with designs driven by enhanced operations and low costs. NASA is currently studying an advanced manned launch system (AMLS) approach to transport crew and cargo to the Space Station Freedom. Several single and multiple stage systems from air-breathing to all-rocket concepts are being examined in a series of studies potential replacements for the Space Shuttle launch system in the 2000-2010 time frame. Rockwell International Corporation, under contract to the NASA Langley Research Center, has analyzed a two-stage all-rocket concept to determine whether this class of vehicles is appropriate for the AMLS function. The results of the pre-phase A study are discussed

A scrutable adaptive hypertext

Fuelled by the popularity and uptake of the World Wide Web since the 1990s, many researchers and commercial vendors have focussed on Adaptive Hypermedia Systems as an effective mechanism for disseminating personalised information and services. Such systems store information about the user, such as their goals, interests and background, and use this to provide a personalised response to the user. This technology has been applied to a number of contexts such as education systems, e-commerce applications, information search and retrieval systems. As an increasing number of systems collect and store personal information about their users to provide a personalised service, legislation around the world increasingly requires that users have access to view and modify their personal data. The spirit of such legislation is that the user should be able to understand how personal information about them is used. There literature has reported benefits of allowing users to access and understand data collected about them, particularly in the context of supporting learning through reflection. Although researchers have experimented with open user models, typically the personalisation is inscrutable: the user has little or no visibility in to the adaptation process. When the adaptation produces unexpected results, the user may be left confused with no mechanism for understanding why the system did what it did or how to correct it. This thesis is the next step, giving users the ability to see what has been personalised and why. In the context of personalised hypermedia, this thesis describes the first research to go beyond open, or even scrutable user models; it makes the adaptivity and associated processes open to the user and controllable. The novelty of this work is that a user of an adaptive hypertext system might ask How was this page personalised to me? and is able to see just how their user model affected what they saw in the hypertext document. With an understanding of the personalisation process and the ability to control it, the user is able to steer the personalisation to suit their changing needs, and help improve the accuracy of the user model. Developing an interface to support the scrutinisation of an adaptive hypertext is difficult. Users may not scrutinise often as it is a distraction from their main task. But when users need to scrutinise, perhaps to correct a system misconception, they need to easily find and access the scrutinisation tools. Ideally, the tools should not require any training and users should be able to use them effectively without prior experience or if have not used them for a long time, since this is how users are likely to scrutinise in practice. The contributions of thesis are: (1) SASY/ATML, a domain independent, reusable framework for creation and delivery of scrutable adaptive hypertext; (2)a toolkit of graphical tools that allow the user to scrutinise, or inspect and understand what personalisation occurred and control it; (3) evaluation of the scrutinisation tools and (4) a set of guidelines for providing support for the scrutinisation of an adaptive hypertext through the exploration of several forms of scrutinisation tools

Understanding Random Forests: From Theory to Practice

Data analysis and machine learning have become an integrative part of the modern scientific methodology, offering automated procedures for the prediction of a phenomenon based on past observations, unraveling underlying patterns in data and providing insights about the problem. Yet, caution should avoid using machine learning as a black-box tool, but rather consider it as a methodology, with a rational thought process that is entirely dependent on the problem under study. In particular, the use of algorithms should ideally require a reasonable understanding of their mechanisms, properties and limitations, in order to better apprehend and interpret their results. Accordingly, the goal of this thesis is to provide an in-depth analysis of random forests, consistently calling into question each and every part of the algorithm, in order to shed new light on its learning capabilities, inner workings and interpretability. The first part of this work studies the induction of decision trees and the construction of ensembles of randomized trees, motivating their design and purpose whenever possible. Our contributions follow with an original complexity analysis of random forests, showing their good computational performance and scalability, along with an in-depth discussion of their implementation details, as contributed within Scikit-Learn. In the second part of this work, we analyse and discuss the interpretability of random forests in the eyes of variable importance measures. The core of our contributions rests in the theoretical characterization of the Mean Decrease of Impurity variable importance measure, from which we prove and derive some of its properties in the case of multiway totally randomized trees and in asymptotic conditions. In consequence of this work, our analysis demonstrates that variable importances [...].Comment: PhD thesis. Source code available at https://github.com/glouppe/phd-thesi

Third International Symposium on Space Mission Operations and Ground Data Systems, part 2

Under the theme of 'Opportunities in Ground Data Systems for High Efficiency Operations of Space Missions,' the SpaceOps '94 symposium included presentations of more than 150 technical papers spanning five topic areas: Mission Management, Operations, Data Management, System Development, and Systems Engineering. The symposium papers focus on improvements in the efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of data acquisition, ground systems, and mission operations. New technology, methods, and human systems are discussed. Accomplishments are also reported in the application of information systems to improve data retrieval, reporting, and archiving; the management of human factors; the use of telescience and teleoperations; and the design and implementation of logistics support for mission operations. This volume covers expert systems, systems development tools and approaches, and systems engineering issues

The guiding process in discovery hypertext learning environments for the Internet

Hypertext is the dominant method to navigate the Internet, providing user freedom and control over navigational behaviour. There has been an increase in converting existing educational material into Internet web pages but weaknesses have been identified in current WWW learning systems. There is a lack of conceptual support for learning from hypertext, navigational disorientation and cognitive overload. This implies the need for an established pedagogical approach to developing the web as a teaching and learning medium. Guided Discovery Learning is proposed as an educational pedagogy suitable for supporting WWW learning. The hypothesis is that a guided discovery environment will produce greater gains in learning and satisfaction, than a non-adaptive hypertext environment. A second hypothesis is that combining concept maps with this specific educational paradigm will provide cognitive support. The third hypothesis is that student learning styles will not influence learning outcome or user satisfaction. Thus, providing evidence that the guided discovery learning paradigm can be used for many types of learning styles. This was investigated by the building of a guided discovery system and a framework devised for assessing teaching styles. The system provided varying discovery steps, guided advice, individualistic system instruction and navigational control. An 84 subject experiment compared a Guided discovery condition, a Map-only condition and an Unguided condition. Subjects were subdivided according to learning styles, with measures for learning outcome and user satisfaction. The results indicate that providing guidance will result in a significant increase in level of learning. Guided discovery condition subjects, regardless of learning styles, experienced levels of satisfaction comparable to those in the other conditions. The concept mapping tool did not appear to affect learning outcome or user satisfaction. The conclusion was that using a particular approach to guidance would result in a more supportive environment for learning. This research contributes to the need for a better understanding of the pedagogic design that should be incorporated into WWW learning environments, with a recommendation for a guided discovery approach to alleviate major hypertext and WWW issues for distance learning

Supporting multimedia user interface design using mental models and representational expressiveness

This thesis addresses the problem of output media allocation in the design of multimedia user interfaces. The literature survey identifies a formal definition of the representational capabilities of different media.as important in this task. Equally important, though less prominent in the literature, is that the correct mental model of a domain is paramount for the successful completion of tasks. The thesis proposes an original linguistic and cognitive based descriptive framework, in two parts. The first part defines expressiveness, the amount of representational abstraction a medium provides over any domain. The second part describes how this expressiveness is linked to the mental models that media induce, and how this in turn affects task performance. It is postulated that the mental models induced by different media, will reflect the abstractive representation those media offer over the task domain. This must then be matched to the abstraction required by tasks to allow them to be effectively accomplished. A 34 subject experiment compares five media, of two levels of expressiveness, over a range of tasks, in a complex and dynamic domain. The results indicate that expressiveness may allow media to be matched more closely to tasks, if the mental models they are known to induce are considered. Finally, the thesis proposes a tentative framework for media allocation, and two example interfaces are designed using this framework. This framework is based on the matching of expressiveness to the abstraction of a domain required by tasks. The need for the methodology to take account of the user's cognitive capabilities is stressed, and the experimental results are seen as the beginning of this procedure

Proceedings of the 1993 Conference on Intelligent Computer-Aided Training and Virtual Environment Technology, Volume 1

These proceedings are organized in the same manner as the conference's contributed sessions, with the papers grouped by topic area. These areas are as follows: VE (virtual environment) training for Space Flight, Virtual Environment Hardware, Knowledge Aquisition for ICAT (Intelligent Computer-Aided Training) & VE, Multimedia in ICAT Systems, VE in Training & Education (1 & 2), Virtual Environment Software (1 & 2), Models in ICAT systems, ICAT Commercial Applications, ICAT Architectures & Authoring Systems, ICAT Education & Medical Applications, Assessing VE for Training, VE & Human Systems (1 & 2), ICAT Theory & Natural Language, ICAT Applications in the Military, VE Applications in Engineering, Knowledge Acquisition for ICAT, and ICAT Applications in Aerospace

Computer aided learning for entry level accountancy students

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