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     COLLOQUIUM OF THE COMPUTATIONAL MATERIALS SCIENCE CENTER
                                AND 
           THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTATIONAL & DATA SCIENCES
                            (CSI 898-Sec 001)
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      High Level Information Fusion for Crisis Response Planning

                     Kathryn Blackmond Laskey
     Department of Systems Engineering and Operations Research
              George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

Each year, natural and anthropogenic crises disrupt the lives of 
millions of people. Local, national and international crisis response 
systems struggle to cope with urgent needs during and immediately after 
a crisis. The challenges multiply as population grows, density of urban 
areas increases, and coastal areas become more vulnerable to rising sea 
levels. A typical crisis scenario requires coordinating many diverse players, 
including local, national and international military, other governmental, and 
non-governmental organizations. Often, no single entity is in charge of the 
response, making coordination even more difficult.  There is an urgent need 
for better ways to allocate resources, maintain situation awareness, and 
reallocate resources as the situation changes. Multi-source information 
fusion is vital to effective resource allocation and situation awareness.  
Some of the greatest inefficiencies in crisis response stem from the inability 
to exchange information between systems designed for different purposes and 
operating under different ownership.  Too often, information integration and 
fusion must be performed manually.  Greater automation could support more 
timely, better coordinated responses in situations where time is of the 
essence.  The greatest need is not for low-level fusion of sensor reports to 
classify and track individual objects, but for high-level fusion to characterize 
complex situations and support planning of effective responses.  

This talk describes challenges of high-level fusion for crisis management, 
proposes a technical framework for addressing high-level fusion, and discusses 
how effectively addressing high-level fusion challenges can improve efficiency of 
crisis response.  We illustrate our ideas with a case study involving a 
humanitarian relief operation in a flooding scenario.

                           February 29, 2016
                               4:30 pm
                    Exploratory Hall, room 3301 
                          Fairfax Campus

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 PM.
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Find the schedule at http://www.cmasc.gmu.edu/seminars.htm