Introduction
New Vision for Vehicle Safety
Few would debate that airbags and other safety-related technologies save lives and minimize injuries. The statistic is clear-the annual death toll rate has remained relatively flat during the last decade. But it is also clear that the driving environment is growing ever more complex.
The solution might be to use available sensor and computing technologies not only to save lives and minimize injuries, but also to prevent crashes, not just mitigate their consequences. The burning issue is how these technologies can work together, and in a larger context how the increasingly integrated system of vehicle technologies, infrastructure, and human drivers will efficiently interact.
Our two cover articles look at elements of this new concept of vehicle safety-a vision in which we leave behind our acceptance of current driver behavior and emphasis on vehicle crashworthiness, and move to a new frontier of driver safety incentives aimed at vehicle crash prevention. James Foley, Susan Proper, and Eric Traube address vehicle safety from the perspective of an increasingly complex vehicle-driver interface. The human interface issues inherent in a sophisticated vehicle cockpit give rise to daunting interface design challenges. How do we keep the driver at the forefront of an integrated system design?
In the second theme article, Rodney Lay looks at the problem from the perspective of how government, vehicle manufacturers, and drivers might work individually and collectively to improve vehicle safety. This is the policy vision-in which intelligent transportation systems become a strategic weapon in the public interest to combat vehicle safety.
In the rest of this issue, Sigma editor Don D'mato provides glimpses of information technology work throughout Noblis-systems and software integration, human factors, biometrics, applications models, system performance analysis, information security, and telecommunications.
From their work in meteorological modeling and geospatial systems, Noblis' Ken Carey and Barry Stamey, with the help of Harry Wang from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and John Billet from the National Weather Service, report on research to further our capabilities in predicting and visualizing coastal flooding. Todd Couts offers 10 lessons from his recent field experiences to improve the integration of commercial off-the-shelf software into legacy systems. Brad Ulery, Denise Masi, Harold Korves, and Steve McCabe examine the feasibility of using integrated models to explore and weigh alternative biometric designs. In "In Depth," Michael Stern examines the Federal Public Key Infrastructure Architecture established to secure electronic transactions among government agencies and between citizens and the government.
" Sigma Spotlight," our brief look at a single ongoing project, summarizes technology that Noblis recently developed to enable concept-based information extraction and modeling from large sets of text documents. Finally, "In Addition" points to other articles on a variety of topics by Noblis authors.
Returning readers will notice that this issue of Sigma is not dedicated to one theme. We will return to that format in our next issue, but from time to time we will include a variety of articles in one issue, as we have done here. The articles in this issue reflect the breadth of information technology challenges that Noblis addresses in the public interest.
H. Gilbert Miller, Ph.D.
Corporate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
hgmiller@noblis.org