Public officials with the authority to order hurricane evacuations face a difficult trade-off between risks to life and costly false alarms. The evacuation decision must be made on the basis of imperfect information, in the form of a forecast. Ideally, the decision should also be informed by measures of uncertainty and estimates of the value of waiting for updated, and more accurate, forecasts....

Despite several years of intensive study, intrusion detection systems still suffer from a key deficiency: A high rate of false alarms. To counteract this, this paper proposes to visualise the state of the computer system such that the operator can determine whether a violation has taken place. To this end a very simple anomaly detection inspired log reduction scheme is combined with graph visua...

A problem in biosurveillance is how frequently to update controlled vocabularies that identify various data elements such as laboratory tests and over-the-counter healthcare products. More frequent updates improve completeness of data captured over time, but introduction of new codes into a surveillance system may cause false alarms when codes are aggregated into analytic categories. We studied...

In support of the ARPA-sponsored Critical Mobile Target (CMT) program, MIT Lincoln Laboratory has developed a complete, end-to-end, 2-D SAR automatic target recognition (ATR) system. This baseline ATR system performs three basic functions: First, a CFAR (constant false alarm rate) detector locates candidate targets in a SAR image on the basis of radar amplitude. Next, a target-size matched filt...

We examined the extent to which transfer of training is impacted by target probability and physical similarity of training and transfer stimuli. Participants performed a luggage screening task where they trained on three base rates of weapon presence as follows: 100%, 50% and 20%; at transfer, participants detected the same weapons (Study 1) or novel weapons (Studies 2 and 3) at a base rate of ...

Blood glucose management systems are an important class of Medical Cyber-Physical Systems that provide vital everyday decision support service to diabetics. An artificial pancreas, which integrates a continuous glucose monitor, a wearable insulin pump, and control algorithms running on embedded computing devices, can significantly improve the quality of life for millions of Type 1 diabetics. A ...

We introduce QuantTree Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (QT-EWMA), a novel change-detection algorithm for multivariate datastreams that can operate in nonparametric and online manner. QT-EWMA be configured to yield target Run Length (ARL\(_0\)), thus controlling the expected time before false alarm. Control over alarms has many practical implications is rarely guaranteed by algorithms moni...

Online-monitoring systems in intensive care are affected by a high rate of false threshold alarms. These are caused by irrelevant noise and outliers in the measured time series data. The high false alarm rates can be lowered by separating relevant signals from noise and outliers online, in such a way that signal estimations, instead of raw measurements, are compared to the alarm limits. This pa...