I hadn’t noticed until now but Dave Forsyth’s presentation at the 2011 Aircraft Airworthiness & Sustainment (AA&S) Conference is available (mirrored here).  Dave was kind enough to add me to the list of authors; I don’t do much in the way of Probability Of Detection (POD) but I did do the Python front-end that runs the models (originally written in R).

Developing the front end (PODToolkit) was interesting for me in that in was one of the first times I’ve really gone through a formal mock-up process.  Ordinarily I’ll sketch a few ideas for the user interface on paper or on the whiteboard, but this time around I needed to make sure that my ideas matched pretty closely with the end user’s.  After a few phone calls, emails, and one big fax we ended up at this for our mock-up:

Which after a while ended up looking like this:

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. There’s a lot of information that has to be presented when you’re working with POD in Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) and I like to think we did a good job of putting it together. Hopefully we’ll get the chance to do some more work on it in the future.