Touch Down: GE’s Quest to Know When Your Flight Will Land

Why do some flights arrive early while others touch down hours late? It’s a riddle that consumes frequent flyers and airlines alike. It can result in headaches and missed connections, not to mention the millions in losses each year when a plane is not in the right place at the right time. GE and partners Alaska Airlines and Kaggle decided to find out, and opened the question to hundreds of data wizards from around the world.

This morning, they announced the results of the Flight Quest challenge to use data and software to reduce air travel delays. A similar challenge called Hospital Quest, where GE and Kaggle partnered with the Ochsner Health System, focused on improving healthcare.

Developers and data scientists from 58 countries submitted more than 3,000 ideas competing for a total prize pool of $600,000 in cash awards.



The economic stakes are high. A recent study of congestion at New York City airports found that “current and projected levels of congestion in New York contribute to expensive delays, loss of productivity, wasted fuel, and pollution of the environment to a degree that should not be tolerated.” Boeing estimates the number of airplanes in service will double between 2011 and 2031, from 20,000 to 40,000.

The top prize winners of the Flight Quest challenge come from Team Gxav &* based in Singapore. Xavier Conort, Cao Hong, Clifton Phua, Ghim-Eng Yap and Kenny Chua built a mathematical model that helps improve runway and gate arrival time estimates by as much as 40 percent over industry standards.

In some cases, the winners had scarcely ever set foot on a plane. Second-place finisher Pawel Jankiewicz noted that all of the data about wind speed, air speed and other variables are just numbers that feed into algorithms. “It starts to talk to me,” Jankiewicz said of the data. “I must know what it means.”

Team Gxav &*’s improved algorithms have the potential to save travelers more than five minutes at the gate and could translate to significant savings for airlines. A one-minute reduction per departure could save an average-sized airline 1,700 hours per year, the equivalent of reducing crew costs by $1.2 million and fuel costs by $5 million.


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“Improved accuracy can help us avoid gate congestion, and minimize delays for passengers and crews,” says Gary Beck, vice president for flight operations at Alaska Airlines. “It means less wait time and better efficiency for ground crews ... [and] more efficient use of our aircraft, which saves fuel and helps us offer low fares.”

The Hospital Quest winner was an app called Aidin, helping patients find the best post-acute care available. It was designed by New Yorkers Mike Galbo, Russ Graney, and Janan Rajeevikaran. Their software taps the discharge management process and automatically generates lists of care providers after patients leave the hospital. This reduces administrative tasks for social workers and allows them to devote more time to patients.

The healthcare system wastes many billions every year due to inefficiencies. “At Ochsner, innovating the way we deliver patient care to maintain the highest quality and improve the patient experience is critical," says Warner Thomas, president and CEO of Ochsner Health System. "The Hospital Quest was an opportunity to identify new ways to empower patients, eliminate wait times and increase communication– before, during and after a patient's stay." Thomas said that as a Quest judge, he was "incredibly impressed with the insight, creativity and realism behind the submissions."

The complete list of winners for both Quests is available online.

Going Dutch: GE Starts Testing Giant “Intelligent” Wind Turbine in the Netherlands

Wieringermeer is why the Dutch call their country the Netherlands. The area sits on a polder of reclaimed coastal flatland 13 feet below the sea level, sheltered by a series of dikes keeping out the cold, grey swells of the North Sea. The tallest hill in Wieringermeer is a terp, a modest man-made mound built by locals as a refuge during flooding. (Storms and, in 1945, German bombs have repeatedly breached the dikes and briefly turned the farmland into sea again.) That terp, however, now has a tall new neighbor.

GE has erected nearby one the world’s largest and most efficient high-output wind turbines. GE says that the turbine, which the company calls 2.5-120 (that’s for 2.5 megawatts in output and 120 meters (395 feet) in rotor diameter, is 25 percent more efficient and generates 15 percent more electricity than comparable GE models.

The turbine performs so well because of its size, but also because of the way it works with data.

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How to build a wind turbine.
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Size obviously matters. The rotor is so large that the wind whips the blade tips at different speeds when one is 650 feet high and another 25 stories below. This could be a problem, but GE engineers found a way to alter the pitch of the blades as they spin. “Think about it like sails on a sailboat,” says Vic Abate, vice president of GE’s renewable energy business. “The fuel is free and you take this fuel and you concentrate it so that machine can produce more power more often.” This comes handy when the wind is not blowing so much.

But the turbine is not just big, it’s also got brains. Dozens of sensors inside the rotor, the generator, and on the blades gather tens of thousands of data points every second, and feed them to powerful algorithms for analysis.

GE’s Industrial Internet software can bring the entire wind farm together and make the turbines signal to each other like a flock of birds. They can even talk to other wind farms, compare data about wind speeds and wind direction, and store excess power in batteries to cover spikes in demand. “With this technology you are able to say to a utility, I am going to give you 70 megawatts over the next 15 minutes and with 99 percent accuracy,” Abate says.

The site where GE is testing the new turbine is operated by ECN, a Dutch independent research institute for renewable energy. GE expects to complete the testing in the fall of 2013.

The Machines Are Talking: New O’Reilly Report Says the Industrial Internet Turns Machines into Vast, Intelligent Systems, Boosts Efficiency and Innovation

A new generation of jet engines, locomotives, MRIs and other big machines loaded with sensors generating gigabytes of data and linked in networks will become more efficient to operate, easier to deploy, and more accessible to innovators, according a new report on the industrial internet published by O’Reilly Media and sponsored by GE. “The barriers between software and the physical world are falling,” the report says. “It’s becoming easier to connect big machines to networks, to harvest data from them, and control them remotely.”

The report points out that “the same changes in software and networks that brought about decades of Silicon Valley innovation are now reordering the machines around us.” It says that new, web-like software interfaces can manage the underlying complexity of machine data, “making it possible for innovators without specialized training to contribute improvements to the way the physical world works.”

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The Power of One Percent: Networks of "brilliant iron," like this aeroderivative gas turbine, could save power companies $66 billion over the next 15 years by cutting fuel use by just 1 percent.
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Speeding up trains by just 1 mph could save a railroad $200 million in annual capital and operating expenses.
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Two years ago, GE tapped Silicon Valley talent and opened a $1 billion research center in San Ramon in the Bay Area. Engineers at the center are writing code to harvest data from GE machines, build machine networks, and turn big iron like turbines and locomotives into brilliant iron. “Any machine that registers state data can become a valuable sensor when it’s connected to a network, regardless of whether it’s built for the express purpose of logging data,” the reports says. “Once a system of machines is brought together on a network, it’s easy to add new types of intelligence to the system, and to encompass more machines as the scope of optimization expands.”

One such network profiled in the report is the grid. Dennis Sumner, senior electrical engineer at Fort Collins Utilities in Colorado told O’Reilly that a $36 million investment in advanced electricity meters could pay off in 11 years just from operational savings. But since the meters can read electricity usage every 15 minutes, a 2,880-fold increase compared to human meter-readers, they also provide the utility with tremendous resolution and tools to detect outages immediately. “Previously, we didn’t know what was going on at the customer level,” Sumner said. “Imagine trying to operate a highway system if all you have are monthly traffic readings for a few spots on the road.”

Utilities blending power from traditional generation with renewables need to know how much wind electricity they can count on and when. Many wind turbines are already packed with sensors and can talk to each other like a flock of birds. “We have advanced forecasting algorithms that give us power output predictions based on the data they are receiving,” says Vic Abate, vice president of GE’s renewable energy business. “With this technology you are able to say, I am going to give you 70 megawatts over the next 15 minutes and with 99 percent accuracy.” Customers like Boston’s First Wind have already signed up for such technology.

Norfolk Southern is using GE’s Trip Optimizer software as “a kind of autopilot for locomotives,” and Movement Planner software as an “advisor and controller.” Deborah Butler, Norfolk Southern’s chief information officer, told O’Reilly that her railroad has seen a 6.3 percent reduction in fuel usage and 10 to 20 percent increases in velocity from the software.

This is just the start. Besides crunching data from locomotives and signals, Norfolk Southern has used helicopters to map its rail network. “We know where every tree is growing beside the track,” she said. “We aren’t even beginning to use that data in the way we could.”

The full report is available online.

Some Like It Cold: Where Jet Engines Must Endure Icing to Take the Cake

Cold iron: This GEnx engine is powering through a test in minus 8 F weather, ingesting 2,800 lbs of wind, water, and ice per second.

Spring may have sprung, but the forecast for Winnipeg, Canada, still calls for more ice, and that’s just how Kevin Kanter likes it. Kanter tests GE jet engines and runs them through icy gales, hail and other extremes of winter weather, as required by aviation regulators. “It’s frigid here,” Kanter says. "We get two extra months of winter testing."

GE opened the $50 million engine testing site in Winnipeg last February. Workers at the location are just finishing the first full season of winter testing. The newest GE jet engines, including engines from the GEnx family, had to endure the human equivalent of running a marathon in Siberia through clouds of freezing water, blinding wind and ice crystals. All this so you can relax on your next winter flight, and to earn an FAA certification.

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How bad is the ordeal? Imagine seven fans, 250 horsepower each, blowing 2,800 pounds of cold air per second. Then mix the 60 mph gale with thousands of gallons of water spraying from 125 high-power nozzles. The engines most power through this mean icing cloud as cold as minus 8 F at idling and take-off speeds to meet regulatory standards.

The work at the Winnipeg testing site does not stop even as the frozen plains begin to thaw (a new $2.5 million upgrade means that the local team can now test the year-round). “We have the highest level of new engine development in the history of GE Aviation,” says Kanter, whose full job title is general manager for design and systems integration at GE Aviation.

Kanter says that "so far the facility has been fantastic. When you are dealing with temperatures this low, pipes can freeze and other things can go wrong. But we used a lot of foresight during the design, put a heated platform under the engine and heaters in the right locations. It paid off.”

Photographer Noah Kalina recently traveled to Winnipeg and brought back pictures from the testing ground. Just looking at them makes the temperature drop.

What Packs More Power than the Titanic and a Space Rocket Combined? Boeing Picks Massive GE Jet Engines for Next-Gen 777 Plane

Boeing chose GE as the engine partner for developing the next-generation 777 plane.
“This decision to work with GE going forward reflects the best match to the development program, schedule and airplane performance," said Bob Feldmann, vice president and general manager for the 777X development project at Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “We are studying airplane improvements that will extend today's 777 efficiencies and reliability for the next two decades or longer, and the engines are a significant part of that effort. Our focus is on providing the most competitive offering to our customers in the large twin aisle market.”

The GE90 would turn the Titanic into a speedboat.

The Boeing 777 is the world's most successful twin-engine, long-haul airplane. The latest generation of planes, the 777-300ER, the 777-200LR and also 777 freighters, use exclusively the GE90-115B engine, which reigns as the world’s most powerful jet engine. The engine generated 127,900 pounds of thrust at a GE test stand in Peebles, Ohio, in 2002. That’s more than the combined total horsepower of the Titanic (46,000 pounds) and the Redstone rocket (76,000 pounds) that took the first American, Alan Shepard, to space. The feat earned the engine a spot in the Guinness World Records book.

The engine is also a study in innovation and applied design. The sinuous, efficient curves of the engine’s carbon fiber composite fan blades that pull thousands of pounds of air per second inside the engine are so graceful that New York’s Museum of Modern Art picked one for its Architecture and Design Collection.

GE has delivered more than 1,000 GE90 engines to Boeing. GE engineers have started working on an engine study, called GE9X, for the next-generation GE90 engine, which is designed specifically for the 777X plane. “The GE9X engine study is focused on improvements in fuel burn, noise and emission over the current GE90-115B engine while maintaining comparable reliability and maintenance cost,” said Bill Millhaem, general manager of the GE90 program at GE Aviation.

The engine core will have parts manufactured from a revolutionary new material called ceramic matrix composite. The material can work at temperatures as high as 2,400 F, higher than any advanced alloy. These innovations will help GE improve fuel efficiency by 10 percent, compared to today’s GE90 engines, saving airlines millions.

Life of Pi: From the Pyramids to String Theory, Pi Animates Science and Imagination

Some students fall in love with their teacher. Mathematician Andrew Barnes fell in love with pi. “My relationship with pi probably began when I was a schoolboy,” says Barnes, who is 44 years old and builds financial models, computes probabilities, and investigates bell curves at GE Global Research. “It started with elementary geometry and the relationship just keeps growing. Now it’s almost like being wedded to a concept.”

Pi Face: Artist Stewart Moore is painting pi to 2,500 decimal places. Ten different colors represent numbers from 0 to 9. Credit: Stewart K. Moore

Pi is the mystical ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle. This infinite number, which we generally round at 3.14, is celebrated every March 14 (which also happens to be Albert Einstein’s birthday.)

Barnes has been drawn to pi because of its intellectual history and philosophical implications. For example, does pi even exist? “Its existence is predicated on the fact that the ratio is the same for all circles,” he says. “They could be as small as a pea or as large as the sun, but ratio is always the same. I find that fascinating.”

Humans have known about pi since they started using wheels 4,000 years ago. Ancient Babylonians could celebrate an entire “Pi Month” since they gave pi value of 3 (as does the Old Testament).

In 300 BC, Euclid provided a path for calculating pi by “looking at the circle as a polygon with infinitely many sides,” Barnes says. Archimedes applied Euclid’s theorems to arrive at pi a few decades later. When a troop of Roman soldiers occupying his hometown Syracuse walked over his math drawings in the sand, he rebuked them and paid for pi with his life. His last words? “Do not disturb my circles.”

Barnes says that the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Indians and other civilizations have all tried to crack pi’s mysteries. For example, they looked for a square whose area matched exactly the surface of a circle. “Squaring the circle was one of the biggest math problems of the time, kind of like our Fermat’s Last Theorem,” Barnes says. “They guessed that it was probably impossible. But the Great Pyramid in Giza contains certain ratios that involve numbers close to rational approximation of pi.”

In the 1690s, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, the fathers of calculus, bridged the gap between algebra and geometry and used infinite series techniques to calculate pi to a then-record 15 digits.

Twentieth century mathematicians like India’s Srinivasa Ramanujan used number theory and special mathematical tools called elliptic integrals to find new ways to compute pi even further. As a result, we can now calculate 5 trillion digits of pi, but we will never be done. “These things have deep connections with other areas of mathematics,” Barnes says. “They take us to the forefront of the greatest unsolved problems.”

Algrebraic geometry is now finding applications in fields like cryptography, string theory in physics, and cosmology. “This is a fascinating journey through the intellectual history of mankind, at least for me,” Barnes says.

Everything Is Illuminated: New Method Aims to Light Up Pieces of the Cancer Puzzle

We’ve learned a lot about cancer, but far from enough. Doctors have gotten better at diagnosing the disease, but they still struggle to pick the right weapon for a patient to fight cancer’s aggressive behavior. “Cancer is very complicated and very different from patient to patient,” says Michael Gerdes, cancer researcher at GE Global Research (GRC) in New York. “We really have not done an adequate job matching patients to therapies. We get some patients but we miss a lot.”

But new breakthroughs in molecular diagnostics are starting to change the picture. Gerdes and his GRC colleagues have developed a new method to look at 60 different tissue markers at a time to help get a better idea of the cancer’s behavior. “With unprecedented views, we hope, will come unprecedented insights that tell us more about how cancer forms, how it progresses, and most importantly, how to defeat it,” Gerdes says.

True Colors: The picture above shows an image of early stage colon cancer using GE’s cancer mapping technology. The technology can display dozens of disease markers in a single tissue sample.

Gerdes and his team start by cutting a translucent slice of tissue some 5 microns thick from a tumor. They stain the sample with organic fluorescent dyes that stick to antibodies, proteins, nucleic acids or other organic material associated with cells and cancer. They put the samples under the fluorescence microscope and snap digital pictures of the stains. Since they can also turn off the colors, they can run several rounds of testing on the same sample.

Other similar methods dissolve the tissue before it is analyzed, but the GRC team keeps the sample intact. This is crucial. “Sometimes a tumor can send out the same signal as a blood vessel,” Gerdes says. “If you grind the sample up, you don’t know where it came from. With our approach we can actually see the cells that are giving us that signal.”

The signals allow the GRC team to create cancer maps. “We can define the boundaries of the cells, give each cell a unique identifier, look at proteins active in different functions of the cell, and monitors different metabolic activities,” Gerdes says.

The GRC researchers have now teamed up with Vanderbilt University to study colon tumors and a new kind of intestinal stem cell discovered by the Vanderbilt team. The cells express a protein that acts as a strong tumor suppressor, but there are different theories about how the cells work. Gerdes hopes to shed new light on the conundrum. “We can look at all the different markers that researchers are pursuing collectively at the same time,” he says. “After we look at the basic biology of what’s happening in the stem cells, we can look at what happens to these cells during tumor formation.”

GRC and Vanderbilt received a $3.75 million grant from the Office of the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the project.

In the future, the GRC technology could help pharmaceutical companies design new cancer drugs, test their effectiveness, and help with patient selection. “I really believe that having additional pieces of the puzzle will help us provide a more accurate assessment of patients to determine their therapeutic course,” Gerdes says.