HLFDMCM 2013 - Special Session on Higher Level Fusion and Decision Making For Crisis Management

Critical situations can be caused by natural and/or man-made activities and usually result in dangerous social, political, economic, and large-scale environmental events as well as military operations. It is important to monitor, recognize, and make sense of these activities as early as possible in order to either prevent a crisis or mitigate its outcome. Recognizing crises and effectively responding to them require systematical gathering, analyzing, and fusing of a large amount of data and information. There are two interrelated challenges here: ? how to translate data and information into knowledge ? how to use that knowledge wisely. The former is the problem of Higher level fusion (situation and impact assessment), processes that infer, approximate and predict the critical characteristics of the environment to produce contextual understanding of the events and behaviors of interest. The latter is the problem of crisis management, a collection of methods and tools aimed at helping decision makers to control dynamic situations and act effectively to prevent and/or mitigate crises. Higher level fusion represents a key enabling technology for crisis management since it provides decision makers with a better understanding of the crisis context and its dynamics. The purpose of the session is to exchange ideas and the latest results related to designing higher level fusion processes and decision making methods for crisis management.