DATAWorks Sessions Archive

No set of experimental data is perfect and researchers are aware that data from experimental studies invariably contain some margin of error. This is particularly true of studies with human subjects since human behavior is vulnerable to a range of intrinsic and extrinsic influences beyond the variables being manipulated in a controlled experimental setting. Potential sources of error may lead to wide variations in the interpretation of results and the formulation of subsequent implications. This talk will discuss specific sources of error and bias in the design of experiments and present systematic ways to overcome these effects. First, some of the basic errors in general experimental design will be discussed, including human errors, systematic errors and random errors. Second, we will explore specific types of experimental error that appear in human subjects research. Lastly, we will discuss the role of bias in experiments with human subjects. Bias is a type of systematic error that is introduced into the sampling or testing phase and encourages one outcome over another. Often, bias is the result of the intentional or unintentional influence that an experimenter may exert on the outcomes of a study. We will discuss some common sources of bias in research with human subjects, including biases in sampling, selection, response, performance execution, and measurement. The talk will conclude with a discussion of how errors and bias influence the validity of human subjects research and will explore some strategies for controlling these errors and biases

Co-authors: Adam L. Pintar, Blaza Toman, and Dennis Leber. A task of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) is the evaluation of radiation and nuclear (rad/nuc) detection systems used to detect and identify illicit rad/nuc materials. To obtain estimated system performance measures, such as probability of detection, and to determine system acceptability, the DNDO sometimes conduct large scale field tests of these systems at great cost. Typically, non adaptive designs are employed where each rad/nuc test source is presented to each system under test a predetermined and fixed number of times. This approach can lead to unnecessary cost if the system is clearly acceptable or unacceptable. In this presentation, an adaptive design with Bayesian decision theoretic foundations is discussed as an alternative to, and contrasted with, the more common single stage design. Although the basis of the method is Bayesian decision theory, designs may be tuned to have desirable type I and II error rates. While the focus of the presentation is a specific DNDO example, the method is applicable widely. Further, since constructing the designs is somewhat compute intensive, software in the form of an R package will be shown and is available upon request.

Estimating the probability distribution of an extremum (maximum or minimum), for some fixed amount of time, using a single time series typically recorded for a shorter amount of time, is important in many application areas, e.g., structural design, reliability, quality, and insurance. When designing structural members, engineers are concerned with maximum wind effects, which are functions of wind speed. With respect to reliability and quality, extremes experienced during storage or transport, e.g., extreme temperatures, may substantially impact product quality, lifetime, or both. Insurance companies are of course concerned about very large claims. In this presentation, a method to estimate the distribution of an extremum using a well-known peaks-over-threshold (POT) model and Monte Carlo simulation is presented. Since extreme values have long been a subject of study, some brief history is first discussed. The POT model that underlies the approach is then laid out. A description of the algorithm follows. It leverages pressure data collected on scale models of buildings in a wind tunnel for context. Essentially, the POT model is fitted to the observed data and then used to simulate many times series of the desired length. The empirical distribution of the extrema is obtained from the simulated series. Uncertainty in the estimated distribution is quantified by a bootstrap algorithm. Finally, an R package implementing the computations is discussed.

More often than not, the data we analyze for the military is plagued with statistical issues. Multicollinearity, small sample sizes, quasi-experimental designs, and convenience samples are some examples of what we commonly see in military data. Many of these complications can be resolved either in the design or analysis stage with appropriate statistical procedures. But, to keep our work useful, usable, and transparent to the military leadership who sponsors it, we must strike the elusive balance between explaining and justifying our design and analysis techniques and not inundating our audience with unnecessary details. It can be even more difficult to get military leadership to understand the statistical problems and solutions so well that they are enthused and supportive of our approaches. Using literature written on the subject as well as a variety of experiences, we will showcase several examples, as well as present ideas for keeping our clients actively engaged in statistical methodology discussions.

The importance of the nuclear balance vis-a-vis our principal adversary has been the subject of intense but unresolved debate in the international security community for almost seven decades. Perspectives on this question underlie national security policies regarding potential unilateral reductions in strategic nuclear forces, the imbalance of nonstrategic nuclear weapons in Europe, nuclear crisis management, nuclear proliferation, and nuclear doctrine. The overwhelming majority of past studies of the role of the nuclear balance in nuclear crisis evolution and outcome have been qualitative and focused on the relative importance of the nuclear balance and national resolve. Some recent analyses have invoked statistical methods, however, these quantitative studies have generated intense controversy because of concerns with analytic rigor. We apply a multi-disciplinary approach that combines historical case study, international relations theory, and appropriate statistical analysis. This approach results in defensible findings on causal mechanisms that regulate nuclear crisis resolution. Such findings should inform national security policy choices facing the Trump administration.

Under current FAA regulations, civilian aircraft may not operate at supersonic speeds over land. However, over the past few decades, there have been renewed efforts to invest in technologies to mitigate sonic boom from supersonic aircraft through advances in both vehicle design and sonic boom prediction. NASA has heavily invested in tools and technologies to enable commercial supersonic flight and currently has several technical challenges related to sonic boom reduction. One specific technical challenge relates to the development of tools and methods to predict, under uncertainty, the noise on the ground generated by an aircraft flying at supersonic speeds. In attempting to predict ground noise, many factors from multiple disciplines must be considered. Further, classification and treatment of uncertainties in coupled systems, mutlifidelity simulations, experimental data, and community responses are all concerns in system level analysis of sonic boom prediction. This presentation will introduce the various methodologies and techniques utilized for uncertainty quantification with a focus on the build up to system level analysis. An overview of recent research activities and case studies investigating the impact of various disciplines and factors on variance in ground noise will be discussed.

Due to the immense potential use cases, configurations, and threat behaviors, thorough and efficient cyber testing is a significant challenge for the defense community. In this presentation, Phadke will present case studies where STO was successfully deployed for cyber testing, resulting in higher assurance, reduced schedule, and reduced testing cost. Phadke will also discuss importance first focusing on the engineering and science analysis, and only after that is complete, implementing statistical methods.

Nearly all land, air, and sea maneuver systems (e.g. vehicles, ships, aircraft, and missiles) are becoming more software-reliant and blending internal communication across both Internet Protocol (IP) and non-IP buses. IP communication is widely understood among the cybersecurity community, whereas expertise and available test tools for non-IP protocols such as Controller Area Network (CAN) and MIL-STD-1553 are not as commonplace. However, a core tenet of operational cybersecurity testing is to asses all potential pathways of information exchange present on the system, to include IP and non-IP. In this presentation, we will introduce a few non-IP protocols (e.g. CAN, MIL-STD-1553) and provide a live demonstration of how to attack a CAN network using malicious message injection. We will also discuss how potential cyber effects on non-IP busses can lead to catastrophic mission effects to the target system.

Teams of people with many different talents and skills work together at NASA to improve our understanding of our planet Earth, our Sun and solar system, and the Universe. The Earth System is made up of complex interactions and dependencies of the solar, oceanic, terrestrial, atmospheric, and living components. Solar storms have been recognized as a cause of technological problems on Earth since the invention of the telegraph in the 19th century. Solar flares, coronal holes, and coronal mass ejections (CME’s) can emit large bursts of radiation, high speed electrons and protons, and other highly energetic particles that are released from the sun, and are sometimes directed at Earth. These particles and radiation can damage satellites in space, shutdown power grids on earth, cause GPS outages, and have serious health concerns to humans flying at high altitudes on earth, as well as astronauts in space. NASA builds and operates a fleet of satellites to study the sun and a fleet of satellites and aircraft to observe the Earth system. NASA’s Computer Models combine the observations with numerical models, to understand how these systems work. Using satellite observations alongside computer models we can combine many pieces of information to form a coherent view of Earth and the Sun. NASA research helps us understand how processes combine to affect life on Earth: this includes severe weather, health, changes in climate, and space weather. The Scientific Visualization Studio wants you to learn about NASA programs through visualization. The SVS works closely with scientists in the creation of data visualizations, animations, and images in order to promote a greater understanding of Earth and Space Science research activities at NASA and within the academic research community supported by NASA.

Problems faced in defense and aerospace often go well beyond textbook problems presented in academic settings. Textbook problems are typically very well defined, and can be solved through application of one “correct” tool. Conversely, many defense and aerospace problems are ill-defined, at least initially, and require an overall strategy to attack, one involving multiple tools and often multiple disciplines. Statistical engineering is an approach recently developed for addressing large, complex, unstructured problems, particularly those for which data can be effectively utilized. This session will present a brief overview of statistical engineering, and how it can be applied to engineer solutions to complex problems. Following this introduction, two case studies of statistical engineering will be presented, to illustrate the concepts.

Certification by analysis (CBA) involves the supplementation of expensive physical testing with modeling and simulation. In high-risk fields such as defense and aerospace, it is critical that these models accurately represent the real world, and thus they must be verified, validated and provide measures of uncertainty. While machine learning (ML) algorithms such as deep neural networks have seen significant success in low-risk sectors, they are typically opaque, difficult to interpret and often fail to meet these stringent requirements. Recently, a Department of Energy (DOE) report was released on the concept of scientific machine learning (SML) [1] with the aim of generally improving confidence in ML and enabling broader use in the scientific and engineering communities. The report identified three critical attributes that ML algorithms should possess: domain-awareness, interpretability, and robustness. Recent advances in physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are promising in that they can provide both domain awareness and a degree of interpretability [2, 3, 4] by using governing partial differential equations as constraints during training. In this way, PINNs output physically admissible, albeit deterministic, solutions. Another noteworthy deep learning algorithm is the generative adversarial network (GAN), which can learn probability distributions [5] and provide robustness through uncertainty quantification. A limited number of works have recently demonstrated success by combining these two methods into what is referred to as a physics-informed GAN, or PIGAN [6, 7]. The PIGAN has the ability to produce physically admissible, non-deterministic predictions as well as solve non-deterministic inverse problems, potentially meeting the goals of domain awareness, interpretability, and robustness. This talk will present an introduction to PIGANs as well as an example of current NASA research implementing these networks. REFERENCES [1] Nathan Baker, Frank Alexander, Timo Bremer, Aric Hagberg, Yannis Kevrekidis, Habib Najm, Manish Parashar, Abani Patra, James Sethian, Stefan Wild, Karen Willcox, and Steven Lee. Workshop report on basic research needs for scientific machine learning: Core technologies for artificial intelligence. Technical report, USDOE Office of Science (SC) Washington, DC (United States), 2019. [2] Maziar Raissi, Paris Perdikaris, and George Karniadakis. Physics-informed neural networks: a deep learning framework for solving forward and inverse problems involving nonlinear partial differential equations. Journal of Computational Physics, 378:686-707, 2019. [3] Alexandre Tartakovsky, Carlos Ortiz Marrero, Paris Perdikaris, Guzel Tartakovsky, and David Barajas-Solano. Learning parameters and constitutive relationships with physics informed deep neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.03398, 2018. [4] Julia Ling, Andrew Kurzawski, and Jeremy Templeton. Reynolds averaged turbulence modelling using deep neural networks with embedded invariance. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 807:155-166, 2016. [5] Ian Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, and Yoshua Bengio. Generative adversarial nets. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pages 2672-2680, 2014. [6] Liu Yang, Dongkun Zhang, and George Karniadakis. Physics-informed generative adversarial networks for stochastic differential equations. arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.02033, 2018. [7] Yibo Yang and Paris Perdikaris. Adversarial uncertainty quantification in physics-informed neural networks. Journal of Computational Physics, 394:136-152, 2019.

Introduction: Information Operations (IO) are a key component of our adversaries’ strategy to undermine U.S. military power without escalating to more traditional (and more easily identifiable) military strikes. Social media activity is one method of IO. In 2017 and 2018, Twitter suspended thousands of accounts likely belonging to the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA). Clemson University archived a large subset of these tweets (2.9M tweets posted by over 2800 IRA accounts), tagged each tweet with metadata (date, time, language, supposed geographical region, number of followers, etc.), and published this dataset on the polling aggregation website FiveThirtyEight. Methods: Machine Learning researchers at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) downloaded Clemson’s dataset from FiveThirtyEight and analyzed both the content of the IRA tweets and their accompanying metadata. Using unsupervised learning techniques (Latent Dirichlet Allocation), IDA researchers mapped out how the patterns in the IRA’s tweet topics evolved over time. Results: Results showed that the IRA started tweeting in/before February 2012, but ramped up significantly in May/June 2015. Most tweets were in English, and most likely targeted the U.S. The IRA created new accounts after the first Twitter suspension in November 2017, with each new account quickly establishing an audience. Between at least January 2015 and October 2017, the IRA’s English tweet topics evolved over time, becoming tighter, more specific, more negative, and more polarizing, with the final pattern emerging in late 2015. Discussion: The United States government must expect that our adversaries’ social media activity will continue to evolve over time. Efficient processing pipelines are needed for semi-automated analyses of time-evolving social media activity.