Towards Sound and Efficient Solutions to Contemporary Situation Assessment Problems

Contemporary net-centric applications, such as large scale crisis management, maritime security, disease and pollution monitoring, etc. can greatly benefit from multi modal fusion of large amounts of heterogeneous information stemming from static and mobile sensors as well as intelligence obtained from human observers, databases and the World Wide Web.

By combining multiple information modalities, the content of the relevant information in the fusion system is increased, which in turn can mitigate the impact of noise and reduce ambiguities.  In fact, many contemporary fusion challenges can be solved only by combining heterogeneous types of information. 

However, the heterogeneity of the available information and dynamic constellations of information sources, often dispersed throughout systems of mobile platforms, introduce substantial challenges which require novel approaches. Often it is not trivial to build systems which allow sound correlation of information of different types and quality. This typically requires advanced approaches to modeling and processing. In addition, real world systems are likely to require large models whose construction and maintenance can become intractable, if not addressed in a systematic manner. Modularization of fusion processes, the use of Service Oriented Architectures and collaborative design methods might provide solutions to these challenges. This in turn requires design methods and tools which exploit inherent properties of the used modeling and processing techniques. Moreover, a huge body of potentially useful information can be found in easily accessible electronic documents and on the Internet. However, such unstructured information can be used by automated fusion processes only if it is appropriately preprocessed and transformed. This is a non-trivial problem which requires suitable techniques, such as semantic networks, pattern recognition, etc.

The main goals of the workshop are: (i) identification of major challenges of multi modal information fusion in real world applications and (ii) discussion on methods supporting efficient and sound implementation of advanced fusion systems.

Distinguished experts from the industry and academia will address the following relevant topics: 

• Identification of challenges (modeling, inference, pattern recognition, semantic processing, net-centric operation).
• Sound information processing. What does this mean and why is it important?
• Contemporary modeling methods and algorithms which can cope with the heterogeneity of the information and facilitate distribution.
• Understanding the problem complexity and tractable implementation of reliable fusion systems supporting complex processing in real world applications; identify techniques/theories which support efficient analysis of the tractability of different solutions.
• Methods facilitating semantic processing.
   

Date:  4th of November    -     Location: Delft,  D-CIS Lab  [ location link ]