Overview of High-Level Information Fusion Theory, Models, & Representations

Over the past decade, the ISIF community has put together special sessions, panel discussions, and concept papers to capture the methodologies, directions, needs, and grand challenges of high-level information fusion (HLIF) in practical system designs. This tutorial brings together the contemporary concepts, models, and definitions to give the attendee a summary of the state-of-the-art in HLIF. Analogies from low-level information fusion (LLIF) of object tracking and identification are extended to the HLIF concepts of situation/impact assessment and process/user refinement. HLIF theories (operational, functional, formal, cognitive) are mapped to representations (semantics, ontologies, axiomatics, and agents) with contemporary issues of modelling, testbeds, evaluation, and human-machine interfaces. Discussions with examples of search and rescue, cyber analysis, and battlefield awareness are presented. The attendee will gain an appreciation of HLIF through the topic organization from the perspectives of numerous authors, practitioners, and developers of information fusion systems. The tutorial is organized as per the recent text:

E. P. Blasch, E. Bosse, and D. A. Lambert, High-Level Information Fusion Management and Systems Design, Artech House, April 2012.