Situation awareness

About: Situation awareness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 7380 publications have been published within this topic receiving 108695 citations. The topic is also known as: SA & situational awareness.

Information assurance visualizations for specific stages of situational awareness and intended uses: lessons learned

Abstract: Information visualization has proven to be a valuable tool for working more effectively with complex data and maintaining situational awareness in demanding operational domains. Unfortunately, many applications of visualization technology fall short of expectations because the technology is used inappropriately - the wrong tool applied in the wrong way. A study of visualization techniques as applied to one particularly demanding area, information assurance, leads to the conclusion that there is a proper and formal way to approach designing visualization techniques for maintaining situational awareness in complex domains. Visualization techniques should be specifically designed or selected to align with one of the three identified stages of situational awareness - perception, comprehension, or projection -and with one of five standard uses of visualization - monitoring, inspecting, exploring, forecasting, or communicating. Greater value can be realized by selecting the right visualization technique to focus on each operational task, rather than searching for a single all-encompassing solution to fit every need. Examples of how visualizations can be used to support specific tasks of IA analysis are presented, with examples based on a review of available literature, a formal cognitive task analysis performed by the authors, and lessons learned from direct experience with developing IA visualizations and training analysts in their use.

Using social media to enhance emergency situation awareness

Abstract: Social media platforms, such as Twitter, offer a rich source of real-time information about real-world events, particularly during mass emergencies. Sifting valuable information from social media provides useful insight into time-critical situations for emergency officers to understand the impact of hazards and act on emergency responses in a timely manner. This work focuses on analyzing Twitter messages generated during natural disasters, and shows how natural language processing and data mining techniques can be utilized to extract situation awareness information from Twitter. We present key relevant approaches that we have investigated including burst detection, tweet filtering and classification, online clustering, and geotagging.

Situation awareness mechanisms for wireless sensor networks

Abstract: A wireless sensor network should be able to operate for long periods of time with little or no external management. There is a requirement for this autonomy: the sensor nodes must be able to configure themselves in the presence of adverse situations. Therefore, the nodes should make use of situation awareness mechanisms to determine the existence of abnormal events in their surroundings. This work approaches the problem by considering the possible abnormal events as diseases, thus making it possible to diagnose them through their symptoms, namely, their side effects. Considering these awareness mechanisms as a foundation for high-level monitoring services, this article also shows how these mechanisms are included in the blueprint of an intrusion detection system.

The Role of Shared Mental Models in Developing Team Situational Awareness: Implications for Training

Abstract: This paper examines a skill that is critical to performance in complex team environments—team situational awareness. Specifically, it describes how the concept of shared mental models can be used to explain team situational awareness. A model is presented which explains how shared mental models are transformed into team situational awareness to enable effective team performance in dynamic task situations. Potential training strategies for enhancing team situational awareness are derived from this model and are discussed.

PERCIVAL: proactive and reactive attack and response assessment for cyber incidents using visual analytics

Abstract: Situational awareness is a key concept in cyber-defence. Its goal is to make the user aware of different and complex aspects of the network he or she is monitoring. This paper proposes PERCIVAL, a novel visual analytics environment that contributes to situational awareness by allowing the user to understand the network security status and to monitor security events that are happening on the system. The proposed visualization allows for comparing the proactive security analysis with the actual attack progress, providing insights on the effectiveness of the mitigation actions the system has triggered against the attack and giving an overview of the possible attack’s evolution. Moreover, the same visualization can be fruitfully used in the proactive analysis since it allows for getting details on computed attack paths and evaluating the mitigation actions that have been proactively computed by the system. A preliminary user study provided a positive feedback on the prototype implementation of the system. A video of the system is available at: https://youtu.be/uMpYCJCX95k.