GE has revealed the private leaderboard on Flight Quest 2 -- and four outstanding winners! The competition has been running since August as the second part of GE's Industrial Internet Flight Quest with a challenge to develop algorithms that increase flight efficiencies in real time, reducing delays and maximizing a flight's profitability. Using national airspace data provided by FlightStats, the winning algorithms determine the most efficient flight routes, speeds, and altitudes by taking into account variables such as weather, wind, and airspace restraints. The 1st place model by José Fonollosa proved to be up to 12 percent more efficient when compared to data from actual flights.

Flight Quest 2 was another massive step in GE's innovative approach to imagining the future of aviation. With some 3800 submissions to the leaderboard, Kagglers simulated well over 50,000,000 flights by modelling their waypoints into the scoring Simulator. Our hats are off to the hard work of everyone on the leaderboard… this is one of the most challenging problems we've ever hosted.

 Jose A. R. Fonollosa has a M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Universitat Politëcnica de Catalunya (UPC, 1986 and 1989). He is a member of the Department of Signal Theory and Communications since 1986, currently as Full Professor, and visitor, from August 1991 to July 1992, of the Signal and Image Processing Institute, University of Southern California. Jose received the 1992 Marconi Young Scientist Award. He was co-founder (1999) of the company VERBIO S.L., specialised in spoken language technology. From 2006 to 2010, he was director of the Center for Language and Speech Technologies and Applications (TALP). He has published more than 150 scientific papers in statistical signal analysis, artificial intelligence, machine learning and optimization.