Papers

Disk Storage to Support Statistical Analysis Operations

  January 1, 2005      Analytics
Parrish, A., S. Vrbsky, B. Dixon and W. Ni

Database techniques generally require the reading of complete rows of data (traditionally referenced as “records”) in order to get at a single attribute that might be of interest. Further, if filtering is required (not all records are of interest), a further computational step is needed on each record to determine if it qualifies. Transposition of the data enables this to be accomplished with a single read operation, followed by a single filter-pointer operation producing essentially instantaneous results. This method has proven successful in producing real-time instantaneous results when applied to well over millions of records.

CARE: An Automobile Crash Data Analysis Tool

  June 1, 2003      Analytics, Motor Vehicles, Traffic Safety
Parrish, A., B. Dixon, D. Cordes, S. Vrbsky and D. Brown, IEEE Computer, vol. 36, no. 6, June 2003, pp. 22-30.

This paper presents an early (2003) review of CARE that was published in IEEE Computer, the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society. The major points made in the paper include:

• The causes for CARE’s early success were twofold: (1) its simplicity of use, enabling safety practitioners with basic computer literacy skills to easily obtain information from it with a minimum of training; and (2) its efficiency, providing virtual instantaneous presentation of results for even the largest of databases (several hundred thousand records).
• That CARE had been implemented in a number of states.
• That CARE had received the 1995 NHTSA Administrator’s Award for innovation.
• That other applications were being made of CARE in addition to highway safety, namely databases were being mined at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and NASA.