--Networks have played a critical role in advancing our civilization with ever growing global impact to social, economic, and political fabric of our society. An essential component of networks of the future is information networks which are connected to other complex networks such as social, cognitive, physical and communications networks. In order to understand the behavior of these composite networks, it is crucial to investigate the fusion and interplay dynamics among these networks. This special session will explore developments in characterizing fusion of information across networks of networks and their interplay with one another for effective distributed decision making. Problems of interest include understanding dynamics of interaction between information and socio-cognitive as well as communication networks, modeling composite trust in information networks for distributed decision making, and dynamic information fusion for cognitive reasoning. Also included are the applications of information fusion tools integrated with social and cognitive networking technologies such as adversarial reasoning, effective situational awareness, shared understanding, and hybrid fusion of autonomous networks with human knowledge systems.

--Dr. Reza Ghanadan is an Engineering Fellow and Technical Director for Networking and Information Processing at BAE Systems. He received Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (1993), M.S. in Electrical Engineering (1990), and two B.S. degrees in Electrical Eng. & Physics (1988) both Summa Cum Laude, all from University of Maryland College Park. He has also received Masters in Business Administration in Organizational Management with distinction from New York University, Stern School of Business Executive MBA program. Reza was a recipient of NSF Graduate Fellowship from Institute for Systems Research at UMCP and Tau Beta Pi Graduate Fellowship. At BAE Systems, Reza directs several technology research and development programs in intelligent information processing systems, advanced networking, and wireless communications systems. He is also chief systems architect for Airborne Networking initiative to deliver advanced situational understanding for networked airborne fighter platforms at tactical edge environments. In 2006, under his leadership, he and his team received global BAE Systems Gold Chairman’s Award for Innovation which is the highest technical achievement at global BAE Systems. Prior to BAE Systems, Reza was with Flarion Technologies (now part of Qualcomm) since its foundation in early 2000 where he helped creating the start up company and was responsible to create and execute Flash OFDM wireless internet technology throughout its market trial. Prior to Flarion, Reza was a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories, Lucent technologies and AT&T Bell Labs Federal Systems. Reza is a fellow of Tau Beta Pi National Engineering Honor Society. He holds several patents and numerous publications in advanced networking, wireless and information processing systems.

--Dr. John S. Baras holds a permanent joint appointment as professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering and the Institute for Systems Research. He was the founding director of ISR, which is one of the first six National Science Foundation engineering research centers. Dr. Baras is the Lockheed Martin Chair in Systems Engineering and is the founding and current director of the Center for Hybrid and Satellite Communication Networks, a NASA commercial space center. He also serves as a faculty member of the university's Interdisciplinary Program in Applied Mathematics and an affiliate professor in the Computer Science Department. Dr. Baras’ research interests include trust and cooperation in networks, scaleable multicast security; integrated management of hybrid communication networks; modeling and performance evaluation of large broadband hybrid networks; fast internet over heterogeneous (wireless-wireline) networks; manufacturing process selection for electromechanical products; intelligent control; wavelets; robust speaker identification; low complexity, high fidelity, low rate speech coding; image processing and understanding; learning clustering algorithms and classification; distributed control (or decision) systems; stochastic dynamic model building; stochastic control and scheduling; real-time sequential detection and estimation; computer-aided control systems design; queuing systems; quantum communications; nonlinear systems; and radar systems modeling and performance evaluation and distributed parameter systems. A Fellow of the IEEE, Dr. Baras has served the organization in various leadership positions. He also serves on the editorial boards of numerous mathematics and engineering journals and book series, and consults extensively with industry and government on various automation and telecommunication problems. He is the recipient of two Invention of the Year awards from the University of Maryland, holds two patents, and has received many awards for his research and publications. Dr. Baras received his B.S. in electrical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Math from Harvard University. Web page: http://www.isr.umd.edu/~baras/

--Dr. Michael Martin is currently a Project Scientist at Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems, Carnegie Mellon University, http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu. Prior to this position, he was Research Scientist at Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, and Senior Cognitive Systems Engineer at ManTech Cognitive Systems Engineering Center, Pittsburgh, PA. His interests include computational cognitive modeling and computational organization science at Carnegie Mellon University. He has a Doctorate in Experimental Cognitive Psychology from the University of Kansas and a Masters in Human Factors Psychology from the University of Arkansas. Since 1995, Dr. Martin has performed research – generally concerned with the support of high-level cognition in complex, dynamic, socio-technical systems –in government, industrial, and academic environments, first as a Research Psychologist at the Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division and later as a Cognitive Systems Engineer at Logica Carnegie Group, BBN, and ManTech. In 2005, Dr. Martin joined the Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, where he combined behavioral studies with computational cognitive modeling techniques to explore how people learn to control slow-responding dynamic systems. Since 2007, Dr. Martin has been a member of the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon University, where he uses dynamic network analysis and multi-agent simulation to model the influence of organizational constraints on individual, group, team, and organizational behavior.