The Ground System Architectures Workshop (GSAW) provides a forum for the world’s space-related ground system experts to collaborate with other ground system users, developers, and researchers through tutorials, presentations, working groups, panel discussions, and technical exhibits.

Over 600 members from 130 organizations in the ground system community registered for the four-day March event to discuss this year’s theme of “Opportunities in Data Exploitation.”

Brig Gen Donna D. Shipton, Vice Commander of the United States Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, addressed challenges in the ground system field of making data meaningful and giving the right data to the right user at the speed of need.

There were key opportunities that came out of the plenary sessions:

• Machine learning—Based on addressing an objective function, such as accuracy prediction, an option that is not as smart as humans, but faster and cheaper
• Artificial intelligence (AI)—The realization that only an estimated 13% of AI projects make it to production. Lack of definitions to discover, deploy, manage, and secure models introduces inertia and distrust
• The minimum viable process—Practical tool for winnowing legacy systems engineering practices to an optimized, scaled, agile systems development approach
• Cloud-based satellite operations—Lift-and-shift legacy programs, transporting digitized RF waveform to a data center where demodulation can take place, instantiating capabilities
• on demand
• Learned from 1 billion ground system log messages—“The messages scroll so fast we can’t read them—but if they stop scrolling, we have a big problem” (it was suggested to seek help from an intern)
• Learned how to prepare mission data for future analysis—Advances in “big data” mining techniques help monitor and highlight interesting changes with minimal effort 

To end with a quote from the meeting (originally from philosopher Jean Baudrillard), we may already be living “in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.” 

News and proceedings are available on the event website at http://gsaw.aero.org.

For more information, contact Chris Wallisch.