The usual views of air traffic - a single plane in the sky, several planes on approach, even the route map in the back of the in-flight magazine - are deceptive. The truth is that air traffic (and its counterpart, maritime traffic) is a big, messy, complex, ever-evolving morass where this morning's anomaly is this afternoon's status quo. Naturally, understanding this mess is increasingly crucial to applications from airspace management to economic planning.

I will illustrate some of the complexity that makes traffic analysis difficult and discuss Tracktable, a suite of algorithms and tools under development at Sandia that has yielded insight into the lower- and higher-level patterns present within large traffic data sets.

Andy Wilson is a principal member of technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Since his first research group meeting as a brand new graduate student he has been orbiting issues arising from large data analysis, starting with data curation and ending with visual analysis, with excursions into cybersecurity, information visualization, graph analysis, topic modeling and system architectures for data-intensive computing.