Intended Audience: Researchers in industry, government, or academic settings seeking to appropriately explain and design methods for Fusion Systems deployment that incorporate LLIF (fusion methods/theories) and HLIF (information design and mantements).

Description: 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 modeling, 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, Information Fusion Theory and Representations, Artech House, April 2012.

Presenter: Erik Blasch

Erik Blasch received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering (’94), health science (’95), and industrial engineering (human factors) (’95) from Georgia Tech and attended the University of Wisconsin for a M.D./Ph.D. in mechanical engineering/neurosciences until being called to active duty in 1996 to the United States Air Force. He completed an M.B.A. (’98), M.S.E.E. (’98), M.S. econ (’99), M.S./Ph.D. psychology (ABD), and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Wright State University and is a graduate of Air War College. From 2000-2010, Dr. Blasch was the information fusion evaluation tech lead for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Sensors Directorate—COMprehensive Performance Assessment of Sensor Exploitation (COMPASE) Center, adjunct professor with Wright State University, and a reserve officer with Air Office of Scientific Research. From 2010-2012. Dr. Blasch was an exchange scientist to Defence R&D Canada at Valcartier, Quebec in the Future Command and Control (C2) Concepts group. He is currently with the AFRL Information Directorate. He compiled over 30 top ten finishes as part of robotic teams in international contests, received the 2009 IEEE Russ Bioengineering Award, and the 2014 Joseph Mignogna Data Fusion Award from the U.S. Department of Defense Joint Directors of Laboratories Data Fusion Group. He is a past President of the International Society of Information Fusion (ISIF), a member of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronics Systems Society (AESS) Board of Governors, AIAA Associate Fellow, and a SPIE Fellow. His research interests include target tracking, information/sensor/image fusion, pattern recognition, and biologically-inspired applications.