Showing papers on "Situation awareness published in 2012"

Using Social Media to Enhance Emergency Situation Awareness

Abstract: The described system uses natural language processing and data mining techniques to extract situation awareness information from Twitter messages generated during various disasters and crises.

Emergency situation awareness from twitter for crisis management

Abstract: This paper describes ongoing work with the Australian Government to detect, assess, summarise, and report messages of interest for crisis coordination published by Twitter. The developed platform and client tools, collectively termed the Emergency Situation Awareness - Automated Web Text Mining (ESA-AWTM) system, demonstrate how relevant Twitter messages can be identified and utilised to inform the situation awareness of an emergency incident as it unfolds.A description of the ESA-AWTM platform is presented detailing how it may be used for real life emergency management scenarios. These scenarios are focused on general use cases to provide: evidence of pre-incident activity; near-real-time notification of an incident occurring; first-hand reports of incident impacts; and gauging the community response to an emergency warning. Our tools have recently been deployed in a trial for use by crisis coordinators.

Handbook of Intelligent Vehicles

Abstract: Traffic Statistics and Challenges.- Introduction of Relevant Vehicular Systems and Control Functions.- Overview of Intelligent Vehicle Systems and Approaches.- Sensing and Situational Awareness.- Sensory Requirements: External, Internal, Positioning and Condition Monitoring.- Driver Assistance.- Trip Planning, Navigation, and Trajectory Control.- Advanced Control and Decision Systems.- Safety and Comfort Systems.- Drowsy and Fatigue Driver Detection, Monitoring, and Warning.- Computer Vision Systems and Algorithms.- Vehicular Communications Systems.- Drive-By-Wire.- Fully Autonomous Driving.- A Look to the Future.

Progress toward multi-robot reconnaissance and the MAGIC 2010 competition

Abstract: Tasks like search-and-rescue and urban reconnaissance benefit from large numbers of robots working together, but high levels of autonomy are needed to reduce operator requirements to practical levels. Reducing the reliance of such systems on human operators presents a number of technical challenges, including automatic task allocation, global state and map estimation, robot perception, path planning, communications, and human-robot interfaces. This paper describes our 14-robot team, which won the MAGIC 2010 competition. It was designed to perform urban reconnaissance missions. In the paper, we describe a variety of autonomous systems that require minimal human effort to control a large number of autonomously exploring robots. Maintaining a consistent global map, which is essential for autonomous planning and for giving humans situational awareness, required the development of fast loop-closing, map optimization, and communications algorithms. Key to our approach was a decoupled centralized planning architecture that allowed individual robots to execute tasks myopically, but whose behavior was coordinated centrally. We will describe technical contributions throughout our system that played a significant role in its performance. We will also present results from our system both from the competition and from subsequent quantitative evaluations, pointing out areas in which the system performed well and where interesting research problems remain. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Situation Awareness and Cognitive Modeling

Abstract: This paper discusses the basic concepts of computer support for situation awareness. The main idea is to share “situations” by computer and human agents. Two cases of situation awareness are discussed. Some of the future research topics are listed.

A measurement-based study of beaconing performance in IEEE 802.11p vehicular networks

Abstract: Active safety applications for vehicular networks aims at improving safety conditions on the road by raising the level of “situation awareness” onboard vehicles. Situation awareness is achieved through exchange of beacons reporting positional and kinematic data. Two important performance parameters influence the level of situation awareness available to the active safety application: the beacon (packet) delivery rate (PDR), and the packet inter-reception (PIR) time. While measurement-based evaluations of the former metric recently appeared in the literature, the latter metric has not been studied so far. In this paper, for the first time, we estimate the PIR time and its correlation with PDR and other environmental parameters through an extensive measurement campaign based on IEEE 802.11p technology. Our study discloses several interesting insights on PIR times that can be expected in a real-world scenarios, which should be carefully considered by the active safety application designers. A major insight is that the packet inter reception time distribution is a power-law and that long situation awareness black-outs are likely to occur in batch, implying that situation awareness can be severely impaired even when the average beacon delivery rate is relatively high. Furthermore, our analysis shows that PIR and PDR are only loosely (negatively) correlated, and that the PIR time is almost independent of speed and distance between vehicles. A third major contribution of this paper is promoting the Gilbert-Elliot model, previously proposed to model bit error bursts in packet switched networks, as a very accurate model of beacon reception behavior observed in real-world data.

Distributed Data Fusion for Network-Centric Operations

Abstract: With the recent proliferation of service-oriented architectures (SOA), cloud computing technologies, and distributed-interconnected systems, distributed fusion is taking on a larger role in a variety of applicationsfrom environmental monitoring and crisis management to intelligent buildings and defense. Drawing on the work of leading experts around the world, Distributed Data Fusion for Network-Centric Operations examines the state of the art of data fusion in a distributed sensing, communications, and computing environment. Get Insight into Designing and Implementing Data Fusion in a Distributed Network Addressing the entirety of information fusion, the contributors cover everything from signal and image processing, through estimation, to situation awareness. In particular, the work offers a timely look at the issues and solutions involving fusion within a distributed network enterprise. These include critical design problems, such as how to maintain a pedigree of agents or nodes that receive information, provide their contribution to the dataset, and pass to other network components. The book also tackles dynamic data sharing within a network-centric enterprise, distributed fusion effects on state estimation, graph-theoretic methods to optimize fusion performance, human engineering factors, and computer ontologies for higher levels of situation assessment. A comprehensive introduction to this emerging field and its challenges, the book explores how data fusion can be used within grid, distributed, and cloud computing architectures. Bringing together both theoretical and applied research perspectives, this is a valuable reference for fusion researchers and practitioners. It offers guidance and insight for those working on the complex issues of designing and implementing distributed, decentralized information fusion.

Impact of WAMS Malfunction on Power System Reliability Assessment

Abstract: Monitoring/control infrastructures are often assumed to be fully reliable in power system reliability studies. However, recent investigations on blackouts have revealed the crucial impacts of monitoring/control system malfunctions. This paper addresses the impact of situational awareness and controllability on power system reliability assessment. A methodology is proposed to simulate a situation in which a limitation of either or both monitoring and control functions could spread the consequence of power system events throughout the grid. It is assumed that the monitoring/control infrastructure is based on a wide-area measurement system (WAMS). While the proposed methodology is applicable to a variety of strategies for grid operations, certain assumptions are made for the simulation purposes. The Monte Carlo simulation is applied and a scenario reduction technique is considered for overcoming computational burdens. The performance of the proposed approach is simulated and analyzed on 9-bus and the IEEE 57-bus systems.

Spatial Computing and Social Media in the Context of Disaster Management

Abstract: The growing trend of using smartphones and other GPS-enabled devices has provided new opportunities for developing spatial computing applications and technologies in unanticipated and unprecedented ways. Some capabilities of today's smartphones highlight the potential of citizen sensors to enable the next generation of geoinformatics. One promising application area for this is social media and its application to disaster management. Dynamic, real-time incident information collected from onsite human responders about the extent of damage, the evolution of the event, the community's needs, and responders' ability to deal with the situation, combined with information from the larger emergency management community, could lead to more accurate and real-time situational awareness. This would enable informed decisions, better resource allocation and thus a better response and outcome to the total crisis. In this context, the US Department of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate (DHS-S&T) has initiated the Social Media Alert and Response to Threats to Citizens" (SMART-C) program, which aims to develop citizen participatory sensing capabilities for decision support throughout the disaster life cycle via a multitude of devices and modalities. Here, the authors provide an overview of the envisioned SMART-C system's capabilities and discuss some of the interesting and unique challenges that arise due to the combination of spatial computing and social media within the context of disaster management.

Wide-area motion imagery (WAMI) exploitation tools for enhanced situation awareness

Abstract: The advent of streaming feeds of full-motion video (FMV) and wide-area motion imagery (WAMI) have overloaded an image analyst's capacity to detect patterns, movements, and patterns of life To aid in the process of WAMI exploitation, we explore computer vision and pattern recognition methods to cue the user to salient information For enhanced exploitation and analysis, there is a need to develop WAMI methods for situation awareness Computer vision algorithms provide cues, contexts, and communication patterns to enhance exploitation capabilities Multi-source data fusion using exploitation context from the video needs to be linked to semantically extracted elements for situation awareness to aid an operator in rapid image understanding In this paper, we identify: (1) opportunities from computer vision techniques to improve WAMI target tracking, (2) relate developments of clustering methods for activity-based intelligence and stochastic context-free grammars for accessing, indexing, and linking relevant information to assist processing and exploitation, and (3) address situation awareness methods of multi-intelligence collaboration for future automated video understanding techniques Our example uses the open-source Columbus Large Image Format (CLIF) WAMI data to demonstrate connection of video-based semantic labeling with other information fusion enterprise capabilities incorporating text-based semantic extraction

Understanding situation awareness in nursing work: a hybrid concept analysis.

Abstract: Eighty percent of medical error are attributed to human factors. Human factors experts suggest the least explored factor in patient errors is attention, specifically, situation awareness. The purpose of this article was to analyze the concept of situation awareness using a hybrid concept analysis. The experience of situation awareness among nurses was elicited during the fieldwork phase through semistructured interviews. Content and relational analyses yielded 9 themes: perception, comprehension, projection, knowledge and expertise, cognitive overload, interruption management, task management, instantaneous learning, and cognitive stacking. A conceptual definition of situation awareness emerged along with recommendations for application in nursing.

Autonomous Driving: Context and State-of-the-Art

Abstract: Vehicles are evolving into autonomous mobile-connected platforms. The rationale resides on the political and economic will towards a sustainable environment as well as advances in information and communication technologies that are rapidly being introduced into modern passenger vehicles. From a user perspective, safety and convenience are always a major concern. Further, new vehicles should enable people to drive that presently can not as well as to facilitate the continued mobility of the aging population. Advances are led by endeavors from vehicle manufacturers, the military and academia and development of sensors applicable to ground vehicles. Initially, the motivators are detailed on the reasons that vehicles are being built with intelligent capabilities. An outline of the navigation problem is presented to provide an understanding of the functions needed for a vehicle to navigate autonomously. In order to provide an overall perspective on how technology is converging towards vehicles with autonomous capabilities, advances have been classified into driver centric, network centric and vehicle centric. Vehicle manufacturers are introducing at a rapid pace Advanced Driving Assistance Systems; these are considered as Driver Centric with all functions facilitating driver awareness. This has resulted on the introduction of perception sensors utilizable in traffic situations and technologies that are advancing from simple (targeted to inform drivers) towards the control of the vehicle. The introduction of wireless links onboard vehicles should enable the sharing of information and thus enlarge the situational awareness of drivers as the perceived area is enlarged. Network Centric vehicles provide the means to perceive areas that vehicle onboard sensors alone can not observe and thus grant functions that allow for the deployment of vehicles with autonomous capabilities. Finally, vehicle centric functions are examined; these apply directly to the deployment of autonomous vehicles. Efforts in this realm are not new and thus fundamental work in this area is included. Sensors capable to detect objects in the road network are identified as dictating the pace of developments. The availability of intelligent sensors, advanced digital maps, and wireless communications technologies together with the availability of electric vehicles should allow for deployment on public streets without any environment modification. Likely, there will first be self-driving cars followed by environment modifications to facilitate their deployment.

ESA: emergency situation awareness via microbloggers

Abstract: During a disastrous event, such as an earthquake or river flooding, information on what happened, who was affected and how, where help is needed, and how to aid people who were affected, is crucial. While communication is important in such times of crisis, damage to infrastructure such as telephone lines makes it difficult for authorities and victims to communicate. Microblogging has played a critical role as an important communication platform during crises when other media has failed. We demonstrate our ESA (Emergency Situation Awareness) system that mines microblogs in real-time to extract and visualise useful information about incidents and their impact on the community in order to equip the right authorities and the general public with situational awareness.

Preventive Dynamic Security Control of Power Systems Based on Pattern Discovery Technique

Abstract: This paper presents a statistical learning-based method for preventive dynamic security control of power systems. Critical operating variables regarding system dynamic security are first selected via a distance-based feature estimation process. An unsupervised learning procedure called pattern discovery (PD) is then performed in the space of the critical variables to extract the subtle structure knowledge called patterns. The patterns are geometrically non-overlapped hyper-rectangles, representing the system dynamic secure/insecure regions and can be explicitly presented to provide decision support for real-time security monitoring and situational awareness. By formulating the secure patterns into a standard optimal power flow (OPF) model, the preventive control against dynamic insecurities can be efficiently and transparently attained. The proposed method is validated on the New England 39-bus system considering both single- and multi-contingency conditions.

Considering Etiquette in the Design of an Adaptive System

Abstract: In this article, the authors empirically assess the costs and benefits of designing an adaptive system to follow social conventions regarding the appropriateness of interruptions. Interruption management is one area within the larger topic of automation etiquette. The authors tested these concepts in an outdoor environment using the Communications Scheduler, a wearable adaptive system that classifies users' cognitive state via brain and heart sensors and adapts its interactions. Designed to help dismounted soldiers, it manages communications in much the same way as a good administrative assistant. Depending on a combination of message priority, user workload, and system state, it decides whether to interrupt the user's current tasks. The system supports decision makers in two innovative ways: It reliably measures a mobile user's cognitive workload to adapt its behavior, and it implements rules of etiquette adapted from human-human interactions to improve human- computer interactions. Results indicate costs and benefits to both interrupting and refraining from interrupting. When users were overloaded, primary task performance was improved by managing interruptions. However, overall situation awareness on secondary tasks suffered. This work empirically quantifies costs and benefits of "appropriate" interruption behaviors, demonstrating the value of designing adaptive agents that follow social conventions for interactions with humans.

Enhancing Grid Measurements: Wide Area Measurement Systems, NASPInet, and Security

Abstract: Deregulation, market transactions, congestion management, and the separation of functions have created increasing complexity that is making it difficult to maintain situational awareness and supervision of power system performance over large areas. Past reliability events (such as blackouts) have highlighted the need for better situational awareness and advanced applications to improve planning, operations, and maintenance. The deployment of a continent- wide wide area measurement system (WAMS) is an important part of the solution to these complex problems, but it faces challenges with respect to communications and security.

The importance of shared mental models and shared situation awareness for transforming robots from tools to teammates

Abstract: Current ground robots are largely employed via tele-operation and provide their operators with useful tools to extend reach, improve sensing, and avoid dangers. To move from robots that are useful as tools to truly synergistic human-robot teaming, however, will require not only greater technical capabilities among robots, but also a better understanding of the ways in which the principles of teamwork can be applied from exclusively human teams to mixed teams of humans and robots. In this respect, a core characteristic that enables successful human teams to coordinate shared tasks is their ability to create, maintain, and act on a shared understanding of the world and the roles of the team and its members in it. The team performance literature clearly points towards two important cornerstones for shared understanding of team members: mental models and situation awareness. These constructs have been investigated as products of teams as well; amongst teams, they are shared mental models and shared situation awareness. Consequently, we are studying how these two constructs can be measured and instantiated in human-robot teams. In this paper, we report results from three related efforts that are investigating process and performance outcomes for human robot teams. Our investigations include: (a) how human mental models of tasks and teams change whether a teammate is human, a service animal, or an advanced automated system; (b) how computer modeling can lead to mental models being instantiated and used in robots; (c) how we can simulate the interactions between human and future robotic teammates on the basis of changes in shared mental models and situation assessment.

Network security situation awareness system and method based on information correlation

Abstract: The invention relates to a network security situation awareness system and method based on information correlation. The system comprises a data acquisition module, a network security situation evaluation module, a network security situation prediction module and a network situation visualization module, wherein the data acquisition module is used for acquiring network essential information; the network security situation evaluation module is used for quantitatively analyzing threat, frangibility and stability of the network by utilizing the network essential information, thereby analyzing the current network security situation; the network security situation prediction module is used for predicting the network security situation according to historical information and current state of the network security situation; and the network situation visualization module is used for visually displaying network security indexes according to the analysis and prediction result of the network security situation. The invention solves the problem that the existing network situation awareness system lacks data validity verification, data correlation and quantitative analysis, so that the network security situation awareness is more accurate.

Bridging the air gap: an information assurance perspective

Abstract: The military has 5 domains of operations: Land, Sea, Air, Space and now Cyber. This 5th Domain is a heterogeneous network (of networks) of Communication and Information Systems (CIS) which were designed and accredited to meet Netcentric capability requirements; to be robust, secure and functional to the organisation’s needs. Those needs have changed. In the globalised economy and across the Battlespace, organisations now need to share information. Keeping our secrets, secret has been the watchwords of Information Security and the accreditation process; whilst sharing them securely across coalition, geo-physically dispersed networks has become the cyber security dilemma. The diversity of Advanced Persistent Threats, the contagion of Cyber Power and insecurity of coalition Interoperability has generated a plethora of vulnerabilities to the Cyber Domain. Necessity (fiscal and time-constraints) has created security gaps in deployed CIS architectures through their interconnections. This federated environment for superior decision making and shared situational awareness requires that Bridging the (new capability) Gaps needs to be more than just improving security (Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability) mechanisms to the technical system interfaces. The solution needs a new approach to creating and understanding a trusted,social-technical CIS environment and how these (sensitive) information assets should be managed, stored and transmitted. Information Assurance (IA) offers a cohesive architecture for coalition system (of systems) interoperability; the identification of strategies, skills and business processes required for effective information operations, management and exploitation. IA provides trusted, risk managed social-technical (Enterprise) infrastructures which are safe, resilient, dependable and secure. This thesis redefines IA architecture and creates models that recognise the integrated, complex issues within technical to organisational interoperability and the assurance that the right information is delivered to the right people at the right time in a trustworthy environment and identifies the need for IA practitioners and a necessary IA education for all Cyber Warriors.

Adaptable and Adaptive Automation for Supervisory Control of Multiple Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract: Supervisory control of multiple autonomous vehicles raises many issues concerning the balance of system autonomy with human interaction for optimal operator situation awareness and system performan...

Situational Awareness in Computer Network Defense: Principles, Methods and Applications

Abstract: Worldwide computer crimes cost organizations and governments billions of dollars each year. In response, organizations use a plethora of heterogeneous security devices and software such as firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) to monitor networks in conjunction with Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRT) that are responsible for ensuring availability, integrity, and confidentiality of network services.Situational Awareness in Computer Network Defense: Principles, Methods and Applications provides academia and organizations insights into practical and applied solutions, frameworks, technologies, and implementations for situational awareness in computer networks. This book presents situational awareness solutions in Computer Network Defense (CND) currently being researched or deployed. The key objective is to fill a gap that exists in the way CND and security are being approached by formalizing the use of situational awareness in computer network security and defense.

Evaluation of an Ecological Interface Design for Military Command and Control

Abstract: Two alternative interfaces developed for military command and control were evaluated. The theoretical frameworks and concepts used during their development are discussed, and the findings are related to larger issues in display, interface, and system design. Key aspects of cognitive systems engineering (CSE) and ecological interface design (EID) are discussed. An ecological interface was designed with principles of direct perception, direct manipulation, and visual momentum. An experimental version of an existing interface was also developed. An experiment was conducted with a synthetic task environment that incorporated scenarios of tactical operations. Participants were experienced army officers. Dependent variables included status reports for friendly and enemy resources and activities, subjective workload, and information access. Significant results favoring the ecological interface were obtained for six of seven dependent measures. The ecological interface was easy to learn, easy to use, and dramatically more effective than the existing interface. The results are interpreted from the CSE-EID perspective, but insights from naturalistic decision making and situation awareness are also described. The specific design features of the ecological interface are directly applicable to military command and control and similar domains; the overall CSE-EID approach is applicable to interface design for all work domains.

The Role of Situation Awareness for the Operators of Process Industry

Abstract: Situation awareness (SA) is commonly described as the challenges encountered by an operator and it appears during the course of interaction with either the process itself or a human machine interface. Application and significance of SA is well established in different production sectors such as aviation, armed forces, and air traffic. The importance and significance of SA for Field Operators (FOPs) and for Control-Room Operators (CROPs) is highlighted and discussed in this paper. The major factors that influence the SA of operators in the process industry are identified, presented, and discussed. Furthermore, the career track of operators with respect to its effect on SA is also analyzed and the concept of Team Situation Awareness (TSA), which is the coordination among different operators (intra and inter teams) is presented.

An adaptive rule-based approach for managing situation-awareness

Abstract: Situation awareness is a powerful paradigm that can efficiently exploit the increasing capabilities of handheld devices, such as smart phones and PDAs Indeed, accurate understanding of the current situation can allow the device to proactively provide information and propose services to users in mobility Of course, to recognize the situation is a challenging task, due to such factors as the variety of possible situations, uncertain and imprecise data, and different user's preferences and behavior In this framework, we propose a robust and general rule-based approach to manage situation awareness We adopt Semantic Web reasoning, fuzzy logic modeling, and genetic algorithms to handle, respectively, situational/contextual inference, uncertain input processing, and adaptation to the user's behavior We exploit an agent-oriented architecture so as to provide both functional and structural interoperability in an open environment The system is evaluated by means of a real-world case study concerning resource recommendation Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach

A knowledge-based decision support system for shipboard damage control

Abstract: The operational complexity of modern ships requires the use of advanced applications, called damage control systems (DCSs), able to assist crew members in the effective handling of dangerous events and accidents. In this article we describe the development of a knowledge-based decision support system (KDSS) integrated within a DCS designed for a national navy. The KDSS uses a hybrid design and runtime knowledge model to assist damage control operators through a kill card function which supports damage identification, action scheduling and system reconfiguration. We report a fire fighting scenario as illustrative application and discuss a preliminary evaluation of benefits allowed by the system in terms of critical performance measures. Our work can support further research aimed to apply expert systems to improve shipboard security and suggest similar applications in other contexts where situational awareness and damage management are crucial.

Predictive mental workload modeling for semiautonomous system design: Implications for systems of systems

Abstract: Predictive mental workload modeling is one established tool within the broad systems engineering activity of Human Systems Integration (HSI). Using system architecture as the foundation, this paper explores the use of Multiple Resource Theory to create representative workload models for evaluating operational system-of-systems (SoS) concepts. Through careful consideration of task demands, conflict generated between tasks, and workload mitigation strategies, informed design decision can improve overall human-system performance. An example involving a single pilot controlling multiple remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) is presented to illustrate the use of workload modeling. Several observations are made that drive measurably excessive workload: multitasking, communications, continuously updating situational awareness and mission planning. In addition, three metrics are proposed for incorporating human workload analysis during system design. This technique has applicability across a wide range systems-of-systems and operational concepts involving complex human-system interactions. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 15 © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Wireless distributed computing in cognitive radio networks

Abstract: Individual cognitive radio nodes in an ad-hoc cognitive radio network (CRN) have to perform complex data processing operations for several purposes, such as situational awareness and cognitive engine (CE) decision making. In an implementation point of view, each cognitive radio (CR) may not have the computational and power resources to perform these tasks by itself. In this paper, wireless distributed computing (WDC) is presented as a technology that enables multiple resource-constrained nodes to collaborate in computing complex tasks in a distributed manner. This approach has several benefits over the traditional approach of local computing, such as reduced energy and power consumption, reduced burden on the resources of individual nodes, and improved robustness. However, the benefits are negated by the communication overhead involved in WDC. This paper demonstrates the application of WDC to CRNs with the help of an example CE processing task. In addition, the paper analyzes the impact of the wireless environment on WDC scalability in homogeneous and heterogeneous environments. The paper also proposes a workload allocation scheme that utilizes a combination of stochastic optimization and decision-tree search approaches. The results show limitations in the scalability of WDC networks, mainly due to the communication overhead involved in sharing raw data pertaining to delegated computational tasks.

A platform for situational awareness in operational BI

Abstract: Enterprises are being swamped with data, and much of it is unstructured in origin. As these data volumes for unstructured data increase, there is a need to extract more value from them. For the purpose of gaining business insight, besides traditional text mining, we need capabilities to correlate unstructured data emanating from different sources. An important instance of this is the capability to correlate streaming unstructured web data with internal document data in near real time, which can give enterprises significant tremendous competitive advantage by enabling them to be aware of external events that can affect their business operations. This situational awareness gives business managers the opportunity to make informed operational decisions before it is too late. SIE-OBI is a platform being developed at HP Labs that responds to this need. In this paper, we describe SIE-OBI and illustrate its use via an application that provides awareness of events described in news articles that could affect the contracts of an enterprise. We present the main components of the platform architecture and illustrate their functionality to our contractual situational awareness scenario.