What I do

Hello everyone.

Well, another quiet weekend for me. I went to a folk/funk/jazz gig that our church hosted on Friday night and then Saturday was Christmas shopping downtown. A friend and I also accidented upon a carolling service at the cathedral. It was actually for the hospital staff, but we didn’t know that until after the service started, which was a little awkward (not the service, us). I was thinking about being a pathologist if anyone asked, but thankfully no one did. It was very nice, but they use different tunes for a couple of songs, which was a bit of a culture-shock for me (I think culture shock can sometimes be worse when you are lulled into thinking everything is the same, when it actually isn’t, as opposed to places where you expect things to be different).

It occurred to me recently that I haven’t really told you much about what I’m studying over here (and it’s not pathology). At first, this was because I didn’t quite know myself, but now I’m pretty well settled down on a research topic. I’m in the Department of Automatic Controls and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, and within the huge subject area our department covers, I’m researching future air traffic control technologies.

Consider this analogy:

Imagine a group of blindfolded people walking around in a room (I don’t know why; they just are). Everybody has somewhere to go; the bathroom, a hallway, etc, and every single person also has a piping-hot cuppa’ tea in their hands that they really, really don’t want to spill.

How can we keep them from bumping into each other? Well, one method might be to have one fellow take off his blindfold, stand on a chair in the room and shout out if he sees that two people are about to bump. This will work pretty well for a while, but if we keep adding more and more people to the room, eventually our bump-sentinel will simply not be able to keep track of everyone. A second volunteer? Maybe for a while, but pretty soon the room is just hopping with activity and even two observers can’t keep up.

A second method would be to require everyone in the room to shout out loud once every few seconds, just like in the swimming-pool game Marco Polo, but where you say ‘polo’ even without being asked. This way, the blindfolded people could listen for others near them and turn away to avoid spilling their tea. This method lets you safely admit significantly more people in the room than before, but it also raises a whole host of new questions: How often should folks shout? Should they also say where they are going? What happens if someone forgets to shout? What happens if two people shout at the same time and their voices get garbled? The list goes on...

Basically, this is where Air Traffic Control finds itself today. Controllers have done an incredible job at keeping airplanes from bumping into each other, but as demand continues to grow (just consider China and India entering the market) the number of flights will soon grow beyond what is humanly possible to keep separated.

Obviously we can’t simply say ‘no more flights.’ The only way forward will be to allow computers to take some of the load off of the human controllers (some have even proposed removing human controllers completely, but that won’t happen for a long time). We have the technology to do this and engineers are well underway at laying the foundations of this new system. The challenge is ensuring that the new air traffic control system is at least as safe, if not more safe, than what we have right now, and it must do this for two to three times the current number of aircraft.

My research falls under this umbrella, and it’s actually a really exciting time to be a part of the effort because the whole idea is still very young. Nearly every option is still on the table and there are a lot of details that have yet to be decided upon. What algorithms should be used to route aircraft? What is the backup plan? What happens when...

More specifically, my research will involve taking some of these new ideas and putting them into a flight simulator. From there we can analyse what happens when we purposely ‘break’ certain things (It’s not a good practice to tell everyone the exact details at this point, sorry). The fun thing about this project is that my work will be very interdisciplinary, covering everything from networks and communications, to computer science, to probability and statistics.

So in a nutshell, that’s what I do. I think it’s pretty awesome. Up until now I’ve been reading over past research just trying to come up to speed, but now I’m beginning to transition to the real thing, which is exciting (for me). I’ll be sure to keep you posted on how it’s going.

Bye for now,

Will

P.S. I will probably write next week, but after that I’ll take a 2ish week break from writing for Christmas.

Current Book: King Leopold’s Ghosts

Current Music: Jars of Clay

Current Bible Reading: Deuteronomy