Contextual and Human Factors in Information Fusion

Proceedings of: NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Human Systems Integration to Enhance Maritime Domain Awareness for Port/Harbour Security Systems, Opatija (Croatia), December 8-12, 2008Context and human factors may be essential to improving measurement processes for each sensor, and the particular context of each sensor could be used to obtain a global definition of context in multisensor environments. Reality may be captured by human sensorial domain based only on machine stimulus and then generate a feedback which can be used by the machine at its different processing levels, adapting its algorithms and methods accordingly. Reciprocally, human perception of the environment could also be modelled by context in the machine. In the proposed model, both machine and man take sensorial information from the environment and process it cooperatively until a decision or semantic synthesis is produced. In this work, we present a model for context representation and reasoning to be exploited by fusion systems. In the first place, the structure and representation of contextual information must be determined before being exploited by a specific application. Under complex circumstances, the use of context information and human interaction can help to improve a tracking system's performance (for instance, video-based tracking systems may fail when dealing with object interaction, occlusions, crosses, etc.).Publicad

An abstract architecture for virtual organizations: The THOMAS approach

Today, the need for architectures and computational models for large-scale open multi-agent systems is considered to be a key issue for the success of agent technology in real-world scenarios. This paper analyzes the significant unsolved problems that must be taken into account in order to develop real, open multi-agent systems. It identifies requirements and related open issues, discusses how some of these requirements have been tackled by current technologies, and explains how the THOMAS architecture is able to give support to these open issues. This paper also describes the THOMAS abstract architecture and computational model for large-scale open multi-agent systems based on a service-oriented approach that specifically addresses the design of virtual organizations. An application example for the management of a travel agency system, which demonstrates the new features of the proposal, is also presented. © 2010 Springer-Verlag London Limited.This work is supported by the Spanish government grants CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-00022, TIN2008-04446 and TIN2009-13839-C03-01 and by the GVA project PROMETEO 2008/051.Argente Villaplana, E.; Botti Navarro, VJ.; Carrascosa Casamayor, C.; Giret Boggino, AS.; Julian Inglada, VJ.; Rebollo Pedruelo, M. (2011). An abstract architecture for virtual organizations: The THOMAS approach. Knowledge and Information Systems. 29(2):379-403. doi:10.1007/s10115-010-0349-1S379403292Agent-Oriented-Software (2004) JACK intelligent agents: JACK teams manual, Release 4.1Aguero J, Rebollo M, Carrascosa C, Julian V (2009) Mdd-based agent-oriented software engineering for ubiquitous deployment. 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