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May 11, - US Army Night Vision & Electronic Sensors Directorate (NVESD)  sponsors FUSION98.

May 11, Ft. Belvoir, VA -  US Army Night Vision & Electronic Sensors Directorate is  an official sponsor of the international conference on multisource-multisensor information fusion (FUSION98), to be held between July 6 -9, in Las Vegas, NV, USA. The other sponsors of FUSION98 are National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Army Research Office, and the IEEE Signal Processing Society (co-operating).

The participating NVESD division is the Countermine Division that is responsible for sensor fusion research and applied development related to military tactics.As one of the development centers of US Army, NVESD's research efforts range from airborne, hand-hold, and vehicular systems, including acoustics, electronics, ATR and signal processing, image processing, and so on.

As of this writing, the conference has accepted about 170 papers that are organized in 28 sessions.

April 8, 1998 - message from Erik Blasch (Wright-Patterson AFT)
1.  For the Air Force initiatives released last week, data fusion was in the top five if not the top spot. I erased the formal email, but the military sees it as vital to the security of information warfare and I can find the web version to send to the committee if so desired.

2.  I can not speak for anyone, but at the NSSDF98 in Atlanta, I talked with Dr Alan Steinberg and Dr Chris Bowman about research issues.  More importantly, two discussions surfaced were:

A panel discussion lead by Llinas, Bowan, Steinberg, Hall and a few others were expressing these concerns for the NSSDF group. I am not sure how I could best help, but:

I could get some direct perceptions about FUSION98 from any of these experts.


erik blasch

March 27, 1998,  Questions on possible IEEE-FUSION 
Question from PAMI TC chair, IEEE Computer Society

TO: TC Chairs and Fusion Organizers, IEEE Signal Processing Society Executives and IEEE Robotics & Automation Chair:

I have discussed this a bit with my organization (TC-PAMI), and we have
mixed feelings about the sensor fusion conference and organization.

As far as the conference goes, if there is a sufficient body of people interested in the topic, it seems like a good idea. TC-PAMI is happy to participate in any way. It does not appear at present that the conference organizers are seeking official involvement of TC-PAMI, but we support the conference in principle and would be happy to be involved if desired.

However, at the bottom of the note is a statement that the Conference Executive Committee intends to seek status as an IEEE Society or Council. The TC-PAMI is highly dubious about the value of this.

Sensor fusion is a topic that arises in many contexts and applications. As such, it is already heavily represented by professional organizations, particularly in the areas of pattern recognition, robotics, signal processing, and human-computer interaction. A conference that draws together these communities, along with engineers from the various applications disciplines using sensor fusion, seems like a good idea. But, drawing more boundaries by separating the topic into a new society that heavily operlaps existing ones does not seem so attractive. The publications are likely to draw papers away from the venues in which they presently appear, and the membership may also be essentially a duplicate of current IEEE and CS members.

Before TC-PAMI could support such a proposal, we would like to see the answers to these questions from the proposers:

1. What is the *new* intellectual content of the area of sensor fusion, which does not lie within the established scope of TC-PAMI, the Signal Processing Society, or the Robotics & Automation Society?

2. What is the compelling motivation for a new professional organization in the area of sensor fusion?

If there has already been substantial discussion of these matters, my apologies, but I need to be brought up to date, along with my advisors in TC-PAMI. If there has not been such discussion, then I invite it before my organization can stand behind the prospect of a new organizational body for
sensor fusion.

-- Steve Shafer, Chair, IEEE PAMI TC

Answer by Chris Harris, Universityof Southampton, UK

THE ABILITY TO DYNAMICALLY SENSE,GATHER AND STORE MORE INFORMATION LEADS TO THE REQUIREMENT FOR AUTOMATED SYSTEMS THAT CAN EXTRACT AND COMBINE RELEVENT DATA FROM MULTIPLE AND DISPARATE SOURCES TO PRESNT CONSOLIDATED INFORMATION TO SUPPORT OR EVEN REPLACE HUMAN DECISIONS.MSDF IS THE ENABLING
TECNOLOGY  FOR THESE SYSTEMS,IT IS A MULTIDISCIPLINE SUBJECT INVOLVING A HIERARCHY OF PROCESSES SUCH AS SENSING,SIGNAL PROCESSING,DATA FEATURE EXTRACTION, PATTERN PROCESSING,SITUATION ASSESSMENT,DECISION MAKING,ACTIONS WITH VARIOUS FEEDBACK FLOWS TO AID THE VARIOUS SUBPROCESSES SUCH AS ACTIVE DATA GATHERING, NETWORK MANAGEMENT,ETC.NO PROFESSIONAL COMMITTEE COVERS THE FULL RANGE OF DISCIPLINES INVOVED IN MSDF,YET IT HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED BY GOVERNMENT FORESIGHT TECNOLOGY PLANNING FOR THE YEARS 2025 AS ONE OF THE MOST VITAL INFORMATION TECNOLOGIES.IF THE IEEE DOES NOT TAKE UP THE SUBJECT ANOTHER PROFFFESSIONAL AGENCY WILL- SEE RECENT SPIE,IFIPS, AND EURIDT ACTIVITIES,

REGARDS,

CHRIS HARRIS.

Professor Chris J Harris
Image, Speech & Intelligent Systems research group
Dept of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

Tel: +44 (0)1703 592353, Fax: +44 (0)1703 594498, Email: cjh@ecs.soton.ac.uk

October 1997
9 - FUSION98 was conceived in California
10 - FUSION98 was born
16 - first call for participation distributed
30 - setup of FUSION web site

November 1997
3 - Dr. Yaakov Bar-Shalom of UConn agreed to deliver Keynote Speech on July 9, 1998
5 - Dr. L Zadeh of UC-Berkeley is Honorary Chairman of FUSION98
6 - Intel Corp expressed interest in FUSION98; 40 people on the Program Committee (PC) temporarily, representing 9 countries
6 - Motorola, Inc. expressed interest
11 - 370 hits on FUSION98 web site
12 - Office of Naval Research expressed interest in sponsoring the conference
25 - IEEE (Signal Processing Society) agreed to co-sponsor the conference
26- US National Science Foundation (NSF) agreed to co-sponsor the conference