CRANE, Ind. – A Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division (NSWC Crane) employee is leading a new data science team to improve and streamline processes, a method that could improve efficiency by 13 million percent. Alicia Scott, a Data Scientist at NSWC Crane, provides customers better access to the data they already have by using Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Scott says by using AI, customers can derive actionable insights from that information.
“Artificial Intelligence is not just a technology for automated vehicles,” says Scott. “We can now use AI to process data in ways we never could before. Some may have the tendency to think AI and data can solve big problems immediately. If we start with small, achievable goals, we can leverage those successes to solve more complex challenges.”
Scott has used the Naval Innovative Science and Engineering (NISE) program and the Crane AI Development Lab (CrAIDL) to conduct Research and Development (R&D) that exemplifies this. One R&D project uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to optimize labor and time intensive practices. NLP, a component of AI, is a way to compute and analyze language.
Currently, she says, engineers manually read each report to gather trending topics and number of occurrences.
“Aggregating and processing can take months and can be painstaking work,” says Scott. “Through implementing NLP, we were able to analyze the text and reduce that time to 11 seconds, which is an improved efficiency of 13 million percent and could save about 1.5 million dollars. The research not only showed tremendous increases in efficiency, but it is scalable, easily implemented with low build time, and serves a wide variety of purposes.”
Scott joined NSWC Crane less than a year ago after spending about five years in a market research and data management firm. In this short span of time, Scott’s research has taken off. She has presented and taught seminars about this research which is currently being deployed on active programs.
“People are excited about what I’m doing, whether they are from government, industry, or academia,” says Scott. “Though the Department of Defense and government agencies store data differently, there is a wide interest in our approach to this research. These methods could help improve inefficiencies across a wide range of topics”
Scott is passionate about driving change and building efficient environments.
“I like improving upon processes, researching new methodologies, and using data to make beneficial change within an organization,” says Scott. “I enjoy taking on a challenge and at the end being able to say, ‘I did this awesome thing.’ I love making people’s lives better and knowing I make a difference.”
NSWC Crane is a naval laboratory and a field activity of Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) with mission areas in Expeditionary Warfare, Strategic Missions and Electronic Warfare. The warfare center is responsible for multi-domain, multi- spectral, full life cycle support of technologies and systems enhancing capability to today's Warfighter.