Issues and challenges in higher level fusion: Threat/impact assessment and intent modeling (a panel summary)

Many say that we live in the information age, but in reality if you ask any analyst today they would say we live in the data age. The amount of data being presented and displayed to the analyst is overwhelming - to a point that in many cases they are missing the salient or key activities of interest. Analysts are spending the majority of their time filtering through the data rather than performing analysis. Over the past 10 years, there has been an increasing emphasis on research in higher level fusion or what many are calling situation awareness. In this paper, we describe a collection of research addressing the challenges of enabling situation awareness. We will review our reference model and provide a discussion of a flow through the model to include how we can rank various activities based on their impact and threat. We also provide a number of algorithms that have been implemented and then tested and evaluated using a set of performance metrics.