Tracking the location of a road-constrained radioactive source with a network of detectors
Not Available
Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Archer, Dan.
Not Available
In FY2018 through FY2020, NA-22, the Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Research and Development Program, funded a Data Science project to develop and implement statistical methodology to effectively host data competitions with the goal of leveraging the opportunity provided by crowdsourcing. By accessing and engaging expertise from a broader research community, there is an opportunity to attract innovative solutions from a variety of different research disciplines to advance the ability to solve important non-proliferation problems. This report summarizes the key results of this project after hosting two data competitions focused on urban radiation detection. The first competition was focused on attracting participants from the U.S. national laboratories, while the second, hosted by TopCoder, was open to the broader international community and awarded prize money to the top 10 competitors. At the start of the project, there was strong interest from NA-22 to explore and develop the capability to host data competitions as a means of leveraging the broader community to solve important nuclear nonproliferation problems. Having a standard data set on which to compare different approaches based on clearly defined criteria was desirable to be able to evaluate the state of solutions for important problems. Initially, it was not clear that it would even be possible logistically and bureaucratically to host a competition with an international field of competitors and to award the prize money needed to attract solutions from top competitors. Happily, a path to host the competitions was ultimately found that allowed this powerful accelerator of improvements to be leveraged.
This article presents an analysis of the method of construction and results for a classifier intended to identify vehicles using low-frequency acoustic data collected by a dis-tributed sensor network. This data is collected as part of a venture intended to explore data analytics and multisensor fusion techniques for the monitoring of activities at a test bed nuclear facility located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We describe the associated target signature and design a classifier based on a multilayer perceptron, followed by an analysis of its results. We discuss how overall accuracy is not the only consideration in constructing this classifier, and how for this application, it is actually desirable to operate at a lower level of accuracy in exchange for a reduction in the false alarm rate, as well as how this relates to the actual deployment of the classifier in practical use.