Trendlines
DATA MANAGEMENT IT TO PUMP YOU UP By Matt Villano
Stories by Sandy Kendall
Trendlines: The New, Hot and Unexpected
SYSTEMS FLYING BLIND By Phil Scott Since the middle of the 20th century, when someone first dragged a radar receiver to an airport control tower, pilots have been taking orders from the ground. "Controllers tell pilots where traffic is, and they tell them to speed up, slow down and to turn," says Amy Pritchett, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Industrial and Systems Engineering in Atlanta. "Typically, pilots have been unable to know exactly where and how they fit into the traffic flow."
Trendlines
REMOTE ACCESS WHEEL TIME CONNECTIONS By Amy Helen Johnson
IT in the Big World
The rutted streets shake the United Nations-escorted van that methodically travels up and down every lane, street and avenue in Pec, Kosovo, in the Republic of Yugoslavia. From the van, four pairs of unblinking electronic eyes take in the broken windows, the burned cars and the stucco walls dotted with bullet holes, and commit it all to memory. Digital memory. The City Server, a GPS satellite-tracking vehicle, has digital cameras mounted front, back, on both sides, and on each corner, eight in all. For six weeks in the fall of 1999 it cruised every street of Kosovo's war-torn villages and towns, taking a picture every 3 meters. The digital cameras streamed data into an onboard computer to produce a seamless, close-up mural of the war zone. Later, the images will be matched to existing GPS-coded maps and satellite imagery to confirm the exact location of the destruction-a pictorial butcher's bill for the civil war in Kosovo.