Mitre Corporation

About: Mitre Corporation is a company organization based out in Bedford, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Air traffic control & National Airspace System. The organization has 4884 authors who have published 6053 publications receiving 124808 citations. The organization is also known as: Mitre & MITRE.

Multimedia summaries of broadcast news

Abstract: Increasing amounts of text, audio, and video content has fueled efforts to provide direct, content based access to these materials Summaries are often necessary to enable timely relevancy assessments, information extraction, or information analysis from source material Whereas text summarization research is receiving increasing attention, comparatively few investigators have examined video summarization We report on the extension of a broadcast news access system to provide multimedia summaries We briefly overview our system for video analysis, focusing on our novel integration of image, speech and language processing techniques to support automated video summarization We outline algorithms for proper name and keyphrase extraction, story segmentation, and key frame extraction which together underpin our current ability to automatically summarize video We describe the systems ability to generate multimedia video summaries tailored to a user query We discuss evaluation metrics for measuring the (quality) value of these summary artifacts

Pattern in escalations in insurgent and terrorist activity.

Abstract: In military planning, it is important to be able to estimate not only the number of fatalities but how often attacks that result in fatalities will take place. We uncovered a simple dynamical pattern that may be used to estimate the escalation rate and timing of fatal attacks. The time difference between fatal attacks by insurgent groups within individual provinces in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and by terrorist groups operating worldwide, gives a potent indicator of the later pace of lethal activity.

Collaborative Writing Is Hard to Support: A Field Study of Collaborative Writing

Abstract: This paper documents the results of a field test of Instant Update, a collaborative writing tool by a geographically dispersed department at the MITRE Corporation. Thirty-six participants were given Instant Update software and free training and support in exchange for their cooperation with data collection. These participants spent a great deal of time writing and communicating with each other about their written work. They began the pilot test with enthusiasm, using Instant Update for many types of documents and anticipating many benefits. After three months of experience they rated the actual benefits they received from the software lower than they had expected. Their usage became much more refined. They continued to use it for some types of documents, but stopped for others. The collaborative writing software was used successfully to create joint documents that have a consistent format and are produced on a regular basis (such as weekly activity reports) and for documents that provide access to shared information (such as a vacation calendar). It was used less successfully for the production of documents that require a complex work flow and have a changing group of contributors. We concluded that although collaborative writing is difficult to support and the currently available collaborative writing tools need to be improved before they can meet the needs of most co-writers, they are adequate for some types of tasks. Documents that are well defined and are created by experienced users who can cooperate well can benefit from the currently available tools.

Time management in the DoD high level architecture

Abstract: Recently, a considerable amount of effort in the U.S. Department of Defense has been devoted to defining the High Level Architecture (HLA) for distributed simulations. This paper describes the time management component of the HLA that defines the means by which individual simulations (called federates) advance through time. Time management includes synchronization mechanisms to ensure event ordering when this is needed. The principal challenge of the time management structure is to support interoperability among federates using different local time management mechanisms such as that used in DIS, conservative and optimistic mechanisms developed in the parallel simulation community, and real-time hardware-in-the-loop simulations.

Classification of discourse coherence relations: an exploratory study using multiple knowledge sources

Abstract: In this paper we consider the problem of identifying and classifying discourse coherence relations. We report initial results over the recently released Discourse GraphBank (Wolf and Gibson, 2005). Our approach considers, and determines the contributions of, a variety of syntactic and lexico-semantic features. We achieve 81% accuracy on the task of discourse relation type classification and 70% accuracy on relation identification.