NASA SBIR 2014 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Scientific Systems Company, Inc.
500 West Cummings Park, Suite 3000
Woburn, MA 01801 - 6562
(781) 933-5355

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Ssu-Hsin Yu
ssu-hsin.yu@ssci.com
500 West Cummings Park Suite 3000
Woburn, MA 01801 - 6562
(781) 933-5355 Extension :231

CORPORATE/BUSINESS OFFICIAL (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Michael McComas
contracts@ssci.com
500 West Cummings Park, Suite 3000
Woburn, MA 01801 - 6562
(781) 933-5355 Extension :256

Estimated Technology Readiness Level (TRL) at beginning and end of contract:
Begin: 3
End: 5

Technology Available (TAV) Subtopics
Identification of Sequences of Atypical Occurrences in Massive Heterogeneous Datasets Representing the Operation of a System of Systems is a Technology Available (TAV) subtopic that includes NASA Intellectual Property (IP). Do you plan to use the NASA IP under the award?
No

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
The increased system complexity resulting from interaction of human and automated systems in aviation programs introduces new challenges that need to be addressed. Many notable flight incidents can be wholly or partially attributed to crew error, either due to inexperience with the aircrafts automated control systems or in response to component failures or adverse conditions. Flight safety experts can piece together information and data from multiple sources to identify the cause after an accident or incident has occurred whether it is due to human errors, machine failures or a combination of both. It is therefore reasonable to expect that much of the information is already dispersed in various databases and, with the right tools, flight safety experts can identify deficiencies and factors that may provide indicators or serve as precursors of accidents. Such actionable knowledge will lead to better training, design and/or onboard systems to ensure safety. In response to this need, SSCI proposes to build Analytics to Improve Reliability & SAfety in Flight Environments (AIRSAFE), a software toolbox that assists flight safety analysts in discovering key factors and their interactions among a large number of potentially relevant factors, testing one's hypothesis on the key factors to safety, and identifying previous incidents that support the hypothesis. The software toolbox is built on our previous and on-going efforts, such as DARPA's XDATA program, in BigData machine learning.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
The AIRSAFE system will be most directly applicable to NASA programs whose goals is to improve the safety and reliability of air/space travel and transportation. Currently, these programs include the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), the Aviation Safety program and the Integrated Systems Research program. However, beyond the air safety applications, the algorithms developed for AIRSAFE can be used in wide variety of BigData applications of interest to NASA.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
The AIRSAFE software itself will be of great use to agencies such as the NTSB, commercial airlines, the U.S military and the commercial space industry. In addition, the real-time, automated, information extraction and analysis tools will be applicable in number of industries where human-machine interaction is becoming prevalent such as healthcare, energy, transportation, etc.