Briefly, who are we?

The core SARBayes group is an affiliation of researchers, responders, and programmers based around Monash University in Melbourne, Australia who are interested in applying the best research to land search and rescue. None of us gets to do SARBayes work full-time yet, unfortunately. We also have a halo of close contacts who are not in Melbourne.

Credits

Funding etc.

Monash Data Mining Center

MDMC has funded data collection, summer projects for software development, and provides the web server for sarbayes.org.

U.S. National Science Foundation

Grant No. 9906565 funded Charles' postdoctoral research in causal modeling and inference (May 2000 - May 2002). Although it should be obvious, "Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation."

School of Computer Science & Software Engineering, Monash University

They give us offices and computers, fund summer projects, and even encouraged us to offer a third-year project.

Partner Organisations

Victorian Police S & R

VICPOL S&R made it possible to collect national data. Without their help this would be merely an academic exercise. They provide guidance, reality-checking, and help to represent the project to the various state police.

Emergency Systems Technology Pty., Ltd.

Rik of EST is an engineer and experienced search manager. So he is our principal contact for estimating and constructing models. He also developed The Search System, a computer program predicting mobility, survivability, and direction travelled based on earlier research.

Predecessors and External Collaborators

• Analysis of lost-person behavior owes a great deal to Dennis Kelley, Tim J. Setnicka, William G. Syrotuck, and no doubt many others.
• Robert Koester of dbs-SAR has provided Virginia SAR data and assistance with using that data, as well as valuable feedback on many things.
• J.R. Frost has provided many hours helping us to understand search theory, optimum resource allocation, and how to apply these to land SAR.
• Alan R. Washburn likewise has helped with resource allocation, including letting us see his FORTRAN source code.

Software and Algorithms

• MML was invented by Chris Wallace, and continues to be developed by the MML research group at Monash University.
• Alan Washburn created the multiple-resource allocation algorithm in SORAL.
• Netica is developed by Norsys, Inc.

Webslinger

David Stokes has designed and maintained the new website. No programmers were harmed in the creation of this website.

People

Charles Twardy

After arriving at Monash in 2000 to work on his fellowship on causal modeling, Charles turned to estimating lost-person behavior as a good hands-on project for learning how to work with causal networks. He created SARBayes in 2000 after meeting with Rik and Rob and getting backing from Rob for Australian data collection. So many talented people have become involved since then that Charles' main role now is coordination and inspiration. c_t_w_a_r_d_y at sarbayes.org

Sgt. Rob Gatt

Rob is a Sergeant with Victoria Police Search & Rescue. He was about to call universities about collecting and analysing lost-person data when Charles called. His efforts keep the project alive at the national level.

Rik Head

Rik has been a volunteer with Bushwalker Search & Rescue for over 20 years, and writes their manual. He has designed his own software for search, which is used by the Victoria Police. When he's not working on Search, Rik runs Emergency Systems Technology Pty Ltd. Among other things, Rik has provided several of the project's expert models, and helped us to refine our techniques for knowledge elicitation. r_i_k_h at c3plus.com.au

David Albrecht

David is a senior lecturer in the School of Computer Science \& Software Engineering at Monash, and a mathematician by training. Without him we would not have a working implementation of the Washburn algorithm, and we would have much uglier C++ code and design. Yay David! firstname.lastname @ infotech.monash.edu.au

Cheryl & Dean Morahan

Dean and Cheryl set up and maintain the Access version of the lost-person database, keep in contact with all the state police departments, and enter and check all of the data as it comes in. Dean is an experience SAR responder, and the whole family are avid campers.

Adam Golding

Adam joined SARBayes as an honours student where he did ran the first Artificial Intelligence models on lost-person data, and created a prototype program to use those models to create probability maps. He continues to develop the program on his own time. The program, once and perhaps future called just SARBayes may become part of the AGM effort.

Gareth Thompson and Michael Eldridge

Gareth and Michael were part of the original AGM team from the third-year project on resource allocation. That project was so successful we hired them for a summer project to create SORAL, which they did. They have continued to help as they have time, and remain a part of the AGM team.

André Oboler

André is the other part of AGM, and we were able to hire him over the 2002--2003 summer to get SORAL ready for public release. André is a software engineer and will probably replace this with his own bio. (No, those two comments were not related.)

Peter Moulder

Peter provided the first CVS server for SARBayes, for which we are very, very grateful. We've migrated to our own server now (thanks Sarah and Glen) but no doubt will still have to ask him questions every now and then.