Project

In recent times, data has emerged as the most valuable commodity, earning the moniker of “the new oil”. The flip side of this abundance of data is that analyzing and understanding this data has become an exponentially complicated task. Under these circumstances it becomes important to develop knowledge discovery tools that can digest this vast amounts of data into actionable intelligence. Such a tool will significantly reduce the time it takes to solve problems of interest to ARDEC and its customers.

This research task is broken up into two parts both using artificial intelligence to examine literature.The first portion of this task involves the development of a natural language processing (NLP) based tool that will understand the trends emerging in scientific literature in scientific areas related to the problems of interest to the sponsor. This tool will help inform the sponsor SME’s about the next possible wave of research in their own areas of interest. The tool will also analyze the scientific material provided by the sponsor and in the public domain to

• find specific papers that address this problem in the literature
  
• a list of methodologies that have been applied to a specific problem (as defined by ARDEC).
• extract information regarding the efficacy of these methodologies from the literature, if explicitly available.

The second portion involves the development of a prototype research portal that can identify, read, and summarize the systems research literature of interest to the broad community of researchers across SERC’s member universities.

We will begin by focusing on the User Experience. Using the SERC Research Council members as a user group, as well as selected DoD representatives, we will survey their interests and needs. Using these results, we will determine the user experience (UX) that each member seeks. Given the desired UX, we will then focus on the user group’s preferences for the user interface (UI). for research purposes. We have jointly developed portals for several sponsors, including MITRE and the National Academy of Medicine. This research partnership has enabled a range of important contributions.

Northern light has been a research partner for almost 20 years. They have donated a license to Stevens.

We will prototype a SE research portal on the Northern Light platform, which will include content aggregation, text analytics, and machine learning capabilities. We will evaluate this prototype with the SERC user group defined earlier. The findings will be used to refine and extend the prototype.

The UX and UI findings will inform our configuration of the Northern Light Single Point platform to meet these expectations.

• SERC-2019-TR-016-Systems Engineering Methods Business and Analytics

• Conference Paper - Non-Technical Sources of Technical Debt and the Software Maintenance Readiness Framework (SMRF)
• Conference Paper - Early Phase Cost Models for Agile Software Processes in the US DoD
• Conference Paper - Life Cycle Resilience Depends on Maintainability
• Dissertation - Utilizing a Model-Based Systems Engineering Approach to Develop a Combat System Product Line
• Poster - RT-137 Ilities Tradespace and Affordability Resource Analysis Based on System Architecture Behaviour
• Poster - RT-137 System Qualities Tradespace and Affordability
• Poster - RT137 ITAP: SysML Building Blocks for Cost Modeling
• Poster - Engineered Resilient Systems: Tradespace Tools Research
• Poster - COSYSMO 3.0: An Extended, Unified Cost Estimating Model for Systems Engineering