"Evaluating LPB Models" Published

The "Evaluating Lost Person Behavior" paper is now officially available in the online edition of Transactions in GIS.

The "Evaluating Lost Person Behavior" paper is now officially available in the online edition of Transactions in GIS.

Sava, E., Twardy, C., Koester, R., & Sonwalkar, M. (2016). Evaluating Lost Person Behavior Models. Transactions in GIS, 20(1), 38–53. http://doi.org/10.1111/tgis.12143

It's been available as a preprint for about 6 months, as mentioned in this post.  See the previous post for a summary of the paper, and closing credits.
So, what's been happening in the meantime? Well, for context:
  • Charles left the university to be a data scientist (contractor) at the Defense Suicide Prevention Office
  • Eric did a senior thesis on optimal UAV path planning for SAR, then graduated and took a McDonnell fellowship offer at Washington U.
  • Elena continues her graduate work at Penn State.
  • Mukul is still doing GIS and systems programming for H3C.

Second, what are we working on? Mainly, we are doing some data analysis a DHS SBIR awarded to Bob Koester (dbS Productions) for initial SAR response.   Along those lines:

  • Eric has been working on a motion model based on diffusion equations.  He is assisted by intern Justin Spiegel who is taking a slightly different approach.
  • Graduate student Shreyas Raut and intern Jonathan Lee have been working on a survival analysis using statistical and machine learning methods.
  • Financial support has been provided in part by a DHS SBIR to Bob Koester at dbS Productions, in part by Charles' research funds from the successful SciCast project, and in part by mentoring internships. SciCast ended mid-2015, though the research funds continued to be available for SciCast until January 2016.

Expect posts on these soon!

 

Author: ctwardy

Charles Twardy started the SARBayes project at Monash University in 2000. Work at Monash included SORAL, the Australian Lost Person Behavior Study, AGM-SAR, and Probability Mapper. At George Mason University, he added the MapScore project and related work. More generally, he works on evidence and inference with a special interest in causal models, Bayesian networks, and Bayesian search theory, especially the analysis and prediction of lost person behavior. From 2011-2015, Charles led the DAGGRE & SciCast combinatorial prediction market projects at George Mason University, and has recently joined NTVI Federal as a data scientist supporting the Defense Suicide Prevention Office. Charles received a Dual Ph.D. in History & Philosophy of Science and Cognitive Science from Indiana University, followed by a postdoc in machine learning at Monash.