4th IEEE Workshop on Situation Management (SIMA 2008)

at MILCOM 2008

San Diego, CA, Nov 18, 2008

Sponsored by the IEEE ComSoc Sub-TC on Operational Situation Management

ADVANCE PROGRAM

Keynote Address

Lessons from a Large Scale Deployment of SEAS in a Theater of War

Dr. Alok R. Chaturvedi

Professor of Management

Professor of Computer Science (courtesy)

Director, SEAS Laboratory

Founding Director, Purdue Homeland Security Institute

Purdue University

West Lafayette, IN

Abstract:

In spring of 2007 a theater field commander, for the first time in the history, used a simulation based decision support to develop and evaluate comprehensive courses of actions for operational use. It was the start of a 13-month field experiment of Sentient World Simulation (SWS) that was based on synthetic environments for analysis and simulation (SEAS). SWS is a synthetic mirror of the real world that is automatically calibrated, in real-time, from major events, opinion polls, news feeds, economic reports, sensor data, and transaction processing systems. SWS embodies multi-disciplinary approach consisting of components that continually capture new events as they occur anywhere in the theater, while offering sufficient detail for any local area of the synthetic world to be explored on demand. The ensemble of models that make up the synthetic environment, encompass the behavior of individual entities, while simultaneously capturing the trends emerging from the interaction of entities with their environment and with each other. Emergent behaviors, interactions, and relationships are observed in SWS much as they would be in the real world. The multi-granularity of details provides means for inserting new models or incorporating user-supplied data at varying temporal and spatial scales. Based on the concept of "theoretical pluralism" in a manner that is unbiased to specific school of thought or discipline, SWS offers a unique environment in which to develop, test, and assess alternative perspectives.

There are many challenges associated with the deployment of a large scale simulation based decision support system to assist in full range of combat and non-combat operational environment. Some of these challenges include deployment infrastructure (hardware, software, network), data classification and security, updates of technology, CONOPS development, personnel training, and support and maintenance.

Speaker Biography:

Dr. Alok R. Chaturvedi is a Professor in Purdue University's Krannert Graduate School of Management and the Department of Computer Sciences (courtesy) and the Founder, Chairman, and the CEO of Simulex Inc., a Modeling and Simulation Company located in Purdue Technology Park. He is the technical lead for US Department of Defense's Sentient World Simulation project. Dr. Chaturvedi is the founding Director of Purdue Homeland Security Institute and has also served as an Adjunct Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), Alexandria, Virginia - a leading think tank on national and homeland securities matters. He received his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems and Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is an accomplished scholar and thinker and has published extensively in major journals and conference proceedings. Dr. Chaturvedi has been working on multi-agent synthetic environments for over fifteen years. He has led a team of researchers to develop the Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS). SEAS is extensively being used by the US Department of Defense for war games, experimentations, planning, analysis, operations, and shaping in multiple theaters. National Training Simulations Association (NTSA) recognized SEAS as the best simulation for analysis in all of Department of Defense for the year 2005. Dr. Chaturvedi is the Principal Investigator (PI) and the Project Director for several major grants from National Science Foundation, Indiana 21st Century Research and Technology Fund, Office of Naval Research, Defense Acquisition University, and several Fortune 500 companies. He has been involved with several Government task forces on important public policy and national security matters. Professor Chaturvedi was named in Federal 100 by Federal Computer Weekly and was awarded the "Sagamore of the Wabash" by the Governor of Indiana, the highest civilian award for his service to the State.

Invited Talk

Ground Situation Awareness in the Infofusion Research Program

Dr. Sten F. Andler

Professor of Computer Science, University of Skövde, Sweden

Program Director of Infofusion

Abstract:

The Infofusion research program at University of Skövde is funded for six years by the Swedish Knowledge Foundation in collaboration with companies in a number of application areas, and has strong links to other research institutes, such as the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI), the German Defence Establishment (FGAN), and the Center for Multisource Information Fusion (CMIF), University at Buffalo. Infofusion focuses on civilian application scenarios of information fusion, such as pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and precision agriculture, as well as a large military and civilian ground situation awareness scenario in collaboration with Saab AB.

An important common goal is to bring information fusion methods and tools to bear on complex problems in various domains. The goal of information fusion technology is to support automated or human decision making, and we have provided a more precise definition of the field of information fusion. This allows researchers within the field to motivate their own work and evaluate contributions of others, as well as researchers and practitioners outside the field to relate their own work to the field and understand the scope of its techniques and methods. The novel definition of information fusion as a field of research is based on strengths and weaknesses of existing definitions of information fusion as well as data and sensor fusion.

The goal of the information fusion research within ground situation awareness is to increase the situation awareness by adding automatic and semi-automatic fusion processes at level 2 and 3 of the JDL model. Another goal is to demonstrate the usefulness of the information fusion approach within the ground situation awareness area. Research involves sensor systems and simulation, and deals with robust sensor fusion, mobility, and fuzzy decision-making. Situation awareness is a complex high-level task that is unlikely to be fully automated, but suitable for rapid decision-making. Projects are carried out on methods and algorithms for situation awareness, human-computer interaction and visualization of situation awareness, hypotheses linking situation awareness to threat analysis, and sensor fusion with human intelligence reports.

Researchers in the program have introduced a unified model that combines and extends existing models of technological as well as human aspects of decision making support. These technological and human perspectives on situation analysis merged into a unified situation analysis model for semi-automatic, automatic and manual decision support (SAM)2. A further extension of the proposed model is used for describing concepts such as common operational picture and common situation awareness.

The introduction of information fusion to different application scenarios is supported by research on generic methods and algorithms for performing information fusion functions and representing data fragments and their associated uncertainty, as well as support by underlying tools and infrastructure. We explore a whiteboard infrastructure with real-time capabilities, based on design ideas from distributed real-time database research, including support for fault tolerant simulation and other requirements of information fusion systems, in an infrastructure demonstrator. Research issues are distributed fusion, adaptive resource management, and fault-tolerant real-time simulation.

Speaker Biography:

Sten F Andler is a Professor of Computer Science at University of Skövde, Sweden, and the Program Director of Infofusion, the Research Program in Information Fusion at Skövde. Infofusion is funded for 6 years by a grant from the Swedish Knowledge Foundation and matching grants from industry and the university, totaling over USD $18 M. He has also served three years as Dean of Science at the University. Prof. Andler was previously affiliated with the IBM Almaden Research Center and IBM Software Solutions, San Jose, CA, for fourteen years, with brief periods as Visiting Professor at University of California at Berkeley and Research Intern at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Prof. Sten F Andler received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1979 from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, also in 1979. His interests are in the areas of information fusion, distributed systems, real-time systems, and databases. In addition to the Information Fusion Program, now in its third year, Prof. Andler heads a research group in Distributed Real-Time Systems (DRTS), with activities in information fusion infrastructures, distributed real-time databases, and model-based software testing. Prof. Andler is a Member of the ACM, the IEEE Computer Society, and INCOSE. He is a Member of the Editorial Board of Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering: A NASA Journal, and serves on the Board of Directors of International Society of Information Fusion (ISIF).

Invited Talk

Intelligent Sensing and Sensor Web: Design and Deployment Experience

Dr. WenZhan Song

Assist. Professor of Computer Science, Washington State University, USA

Director, SensorWeb Research Lab

Abstract:

NASA invests to develop smart "sensor web" to provide timely, on-demand data and analysis, and enable practical benefits for scientific research, national policymaking, economic growth, natural hazard mitigation, and the exploration of other planets in this solar system and beyond. An erupting volcano, like Mount St. Helens, provides a challenging environment to examine and advance sensor web technology. Various geophysical and geochemical sensors have been applied to study the various complex phenomenons before or after eruptions (e.g., magma movements, lava dome collapse, ash fall, gas emission, pyroclastic flow, mud flow, landslide, etc). The crater at Mount St. Helens is a dynamic 3-dimensional communication environment, with batteries as the only reliable energy source. To determine an volcano events, it requires the correlation analysis among different sensors. In addition, the sensors can be destroyed occasionally by the eruption. Hence, an in-situ network shall be self-organizing and self-healing, and have the capability to optimize resources usage according to envionment situations and network situations, e.g., situation awareness. In the talk, Dr. WenZhan Song will discuss the research challenges, system design and field deployment experiences of a smart sensor web for volcano monitoring.

Speaker Biography:

Dr. WenZhang Song is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Washington State University and Director of the SensorWeb Research Lab. He is currently principal investigator for a $1.6M NASA-funded project on "Optimized Autonomous Space - In-situ Sensorweb", which involves computer cientists, earth scientists and space scientists from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USGS Cascades Volcano Obseratory and Washington State University. He is guest editor of the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments - Special Issue on Wearable Sensors, and was chair, Workshop on Smart Sensing and and Situation Awareness in Sensor Networks 2008. He serves on many program committees. Dr. Song received the PhD in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2005 and was also a recipient of Best Oversea PhD Student award (40 in US) from China Ministry of Education in 2004. Before that, he was a Member of Technical Staff at Alcatel Shanghai Bell. His research spans distributed systems, wireless networks, sensor networks, peer-to-peer content networks and algorithm design, and has received over $2 million funding support from NASA, USGS and Boeing. Dr. Song has published over 35 book chapters, conference papers (e.g., MOBICOM, INFOCOM, MOBIHOC) and journal articles (e.g., TPDS, JPDC, MONET, WINET, TOSN). His research on wireless network topology management was selected as one of the three best papers at the ACM MobiCom 2005.