Plenaries

Schedule

 
Tuesday, 10 July 08:00 a.m. Dr. James Llinas, State University of New York at Buffalo
New Challenges for Defining Information Fusion Requirements
 
Wednesday, 11 July 08:00 a.m. Alain Appriou, ONERA
Knowledge Propagation: A Federative Look at Developments in the Framework of Belief Function Theories
 
Thursday, 12 July 08:00 a.m. Masatoshi Ishikawa, University of Tokyo
System Architecture for Dynamic Information Fusion: Dynamics Matching and Meta Perception

New Challenges for Defining Information Fusion Requirements

Dr. James Llinas

Professor, Executive Director

Center for Multisource Information Fusion

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York, USA

Email: llinas@eng.buffalo.edu

Abstract:
The changing geopolitical landscape in the world has been and will continue to be the driving framework within which requirements for new and adaptable capabilities in Information Fusion (IF) technology are defined. For major nation-states of the world, this changing landscape will, it is argued, generate new challenges that significantly broaden both the range and adaptive nature of the capability that future IF systems must have. Another dramatically changing landscape is that of information networking, and the integration and exploitation of such networking in military and defense operations have led to transformations in military thinking and culture, even to the consideration of radically new socio-organizational dynamics for Command and Control (C2). Further, the need to develop deeper insights into agile and creative adversarial behaviors imparts what is called here the need for a “multi-perspective” nformation Fusion process that will require new ways to think about exploiting both traditional and novel Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) sources. Further, there is the impact of informational dimensionality via the need, similarly motivated, to fuse and exploit the “PMESII” (Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure, Information) spectrum of information. Lastly, there is the desire on the part of the military to focus on “Effects-based” operations; here too there is an impact of new requirements onto the Data Fusion process.

These extensive changes in both the application context and the technological foundations for IF have far-reaching implications for the both the architectural design of IF processes as well as the foundational algorithms employed in IF systems. Significant challenges exist toward achieving robustness and scalability of IF capabilities, the role of and support to human involvement on the IF process, and the ability of IF systems to estimate not only states in the physical domain but also in the informational and cognitive domains. This paper and presentation will survey this extensive new and changing landscape as regards the impacts on IF requirements, with some thoughts on new strategies for IF process design.

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Knowledge Propagation: A Federative Look at Developments in the Framework of Belief Function Theories

Alain APPRIOU

ONERA, BP 72, 92322 CHATILLON CEDEX, France

Tel : +33 1 46 73 49 19, Fax : +33 1 46 73 41 63

Email: Alain.Appriou@onera.fr

Abstract:
Information systems have to process more and more disparate complementary sources in an efficient way, in order to face the increased complexity of environments and requirements. Therefore they have to deal with individual believes expressed on heterogeneous frames of discernment that may have with each other uncertain or imprecise relations, so that it becomes unsuitable to look for a common one as usually proposed by classical data fusion theories. To face this context, the ability of the belief function theories now to propagate knowledge from one frame of discernment to another is emphasized on the basis of a generic operator named “extension”. Furthermore, the latter provides a general formulation of the different operators that constitute a complete and coherent processing of multiple uncertain observations, from their modeling up to the required decision making. Therefore the particular conditions that lead to the traditional operators can be specified, in order to provide a federative view of recent developments about sensitive problems faced in the framework of the uncertainty theories, such as information unreliability, source conflict, or adaptive decision making, for instance. The implementation of the generic operator is described, and a few examples illustrate a suitable management of uncertainty processing thanks to available tools.

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System Architecture for Dynamic Information Fusion: Dynamics Matching and Meta Perception

Masatoshi Ishikawa

Professor

School of Information Science and Technology University of Tokyo

http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/

Email: Masatoshi_Ishikawa@ipc.i.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Abstract:
Information in the real world is structured in an inherently parallel way. In order to obtain fruitful information by processing sensor data from the real world as well as from files in computers, the key concept may be a system based on a hierarchical parallel and distributed processing architecture, capable of working in real time. In addition, dynamics matching as a system design concept and meta-perception as a system application are proposed as new points of view for dynamic information fusion. Dynamics matching means that physically defined time constants of system elements such as sensors, actuators, objects, environment, and processing modules should be matched with each other. Meta perception includes various methods for capturing and manipulating information that is normally inaccessible to humans and machines In this presentation, a high speed image processing system with 1 kHz image processing rate based on pixel parallel processing architecture will be shown with applications ranging from multi target tracking (1000 targets per 1 ms), high speed 3D range data acquisition (1000 points pre 1 ms), to micro visual tracking system and visual inspection. In addition, a sensory-motor fusion system capable of realizing high-speed catching, batting, grasping, and dribbling based on dynamics matching and high speed visual feedback will be presented. On the other hand, the "Khronos Projector" interactive-art installation, and the haptic radar will be shown as examples of meta-perception applications.

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