Strategies and Techniques for Use and Exploitation of Contextual Information in High-Level Fusion Architectures

Abstract

Proceedings of: 13th Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION 2010): Edinburgh, UK. 26-29 July 2010.Contextual Information is proving to be not only an additional exploitable information source for improving entity and situational estimates in certain Information Fusion systems, but can also be the entire focus of estimation for such systems as those directed to Ambient Intelligence (AI) and Context-Aware(CA) applications. This paper will discuss the role(s) of Contextual Information (CI) in a wide variety of IF applications to include AI, CA, Defense, and Cyber-security among possible others, the issues involved in designing strategies and techniques for CI use and exploitation, provide some exemplars of evolving CI use/exploitation designs on our current projects, and describe some general frameworks that are evolving in various application domains where CI is proving critical.The UC3M Team gratefully acknowledge that this research activity is supported in part by Projects CICYT TIN2008-06742-C02-02/TSI, CICYT TEC2008-06732- C02-02/TEC, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485) and DPS2008-07029-C02-02. UC3M also thanks Prof. James Llinas for his helpful comments during his stay, which has been supported by the collaboration agreement ‘Chairs of Excellence’ between University Carlos III and Banco Santander. The US/UB Team gratefully acknowledge that this research activity is supported by a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant (Number W911NF-09-1-0392) for “Unified Research on Networkbased Hard/Soft Information Fusion”, issued by the US Army Research Office (ARO) under the program management of Dr. John LaveryPublicad