--The increased complexity of automatically estimating states and conditions of interest in asymmetric and urban scenarios involving physical entities and humans of interest comingled with complex clutter increases the need for new approaches to defining the role of humans as analysts and collaborators with automatic fusion procedures. There is a need to extend the human role beyond passive monitor or partial controller to a dynamic, runtime adaptive filter as well as knowledge and control agent, fully partnered with a suite of knowledge-and-control-adaptive fusion algorithms and processes. This session will address fundamental challenges for methods to design such human-on-the-loop fusion systems, as well as implications for new techniques in fusion processing for state and situational estimation. Note: Human decision making based on the output of a fusion process is an important issue in its own right but is not the focus of this session. This session focuses on the human as an element of the fusion process itself, not on higher-level human decision making based on the output of the fusion process.

--Prof. David Hall is associate dean for research and graduate programs in Pennsylvania State University’s School of Information Sciences and Technology. He is author of the book Techniques in Multisensor Data Fusion. Prof. Hall’s research interests are in knowledge-based systems, information systems and sensor information fusion.

--Dr. James Llinas is Professor and Executive Director of the Center for Multisource Information Fusion at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the USA, where he is currently involved in three programs in this research area, one of which is represented in this session.