Multimedia & Applications

Biography

Biography: Christopher Laing

Abstract

Human operators when trying to understand the current state of a system must first perceive the relevant elements of data and then comprehend their meaning and significance, before anticipating what the implications of this system state are in terms of the actions required of them. Only then–with this situational awareness–can they make a decision about the system criticalities and have a better understanding of what action to take. While the study of situational awareness has its origins in military research, recent work has taken it out of the military zone and into social media, where a new field of data fusion explores patterns of influence, location, identity and interactions between individuals and groups. We intend to explore the advantages of an information fusion system in which the information infrastructure finds new ways to reflect upon its own state and new ways to express this state that provides a good fit to human communication and cognition processes. This interplay should then generate a better and more responsive human-computer symbiosis. It is anticipated that allowing the information infrastructure to reflect on its current context, dynamically sensing the environment, making a trust judgment in respect of that environment and communicating that judgment to a user should then generate a better and more responsive human-computer symbiosis leading to improved situation awareness. This, in turn, should generate better decision-making (although obviously individual and task factors can play a mediating effect).