Summary of Activities:
The Center for Network-Centric Cognition and Information Fusion (NC²IF) (last updated 2/29/08)

The following are highlights of recent activities and accomplishments of the Center for NC²IF:

1. Formal approval of the Center for Network-Centric Cognition and Information Fusion – We have obtained formal university-level approval (VP of Research) for our new center. This provides official recognition of our activities across the university. We are proceeding to develop formal plans and procedures for pursuit and conduct of research, implementation of a cyber-infrastructure, and educational activities. In early January, we conducted an initial strategic planning session with follow-up conducted in early February. 
2. NC²IF Collaborative Cyber Infrastructure – A special intranet site (portal) has been designed and implemented to facilitate NC²IF research collaboration. Built with Plone, the open-source enterprise content management system, the portal provides secure document sharing, personal- and project-based Weblogs, a wiki, and an event calendar system. Additional features, such as task tracking and project management, will be added to support project management. The portal's authentication and authorization system is tied to the Penn State WebAccess single-sign on system. The collaboration Web site supports sharing of data, technical papers, educational materials, links to external sites, and other types of formal and informal communications.
3. Plume modeling and displays – A Flex-based, Web-services capability was implemented to display the results of plume calculations to show the effects of various contaminants (e.g., chemical spills, nuclear radiation, and biological contamination) as an overlay to a geographical situation display. The model uses a Gaussian plume model and takes into account factors such as source height, contamination rates, atmospheric dispersion effects, etc. 
4. Decision space and situation space - We have continued research on the concept of linking an understanding of decision space and situation space. One of our Ph.D. students, Ben Hellar, has completed his literature search and has designed an experiment using the MINDS laboratory to evaluate the effect of using visual artifacts to improve team collaboration and cognition. He will defend his dissertation proposal in about 3 weeks and begin “human in the loop” experiments later this spring. 
5. Effects of emotion on team decision making - In late December, another IST graduate student, Mark Pfaff, successfully defended his dissertation involving exploration of how emotion (specifically mood and stress) affects team decision making. He conducted “human in the loop” experiments using the MINDS laboratory. 
6. Sonification – We have received IR&D funding from Lockheed Martin to continue our explorations of advanced visualization for improved situational awareness and decision-making. Under this effort we have begun to explore the use of sonification (transformation of data into sounds for human analysis) for improved information analysis. Initial research conducted by Dr. Mark Ballora has demonstrated the utility of sonification to characterize attacks on cyber-networks. 
7. Neocities Enhancements – Current work is underway to improve the implementation of Neocities by using a Flex-based interface. This will allow incorporation of new geospatial visualization capabilities and improve the ability of neocities to operate in a distributed, Web-based environment (see MINDS). 
8. Exploration of analysis tools - Work has begun to investigate the use of analysis tools such as i2 Analyst Notebook and virtual world collaboration tools to assist in data understanding and situation refinement. A special session on the use of virtual world environments for data fusion is being organized for FUSION 2008, the international data fusion conference to be held in Cologne, Germany this summer. 
9. Investigation of humans as “soft” sensors – Under a grant from the Army Research Office, research is being conducted to understand issues related to incorporating human reports (viz., using humans as ad hoc observers or “soft” sensors) with traditional sensor data. Phase I of this project has been completed, and resulted in a technical report submitted to the sponsor on January 15, 2008. Follow-on work in phase II will involve developing methods for representing uncertainty and second-order uncertainty for human reports. In addition, a new task is focused on how to task human sensors as ad hoc observers (level 4 fusion in the JDL data fusion process model). Note that a special session on humans as “soft sensors” is being organized for FUSION 2008. 
10. Graduate course development – A new graduate level course (IST 885 Introduction to Multisensor Data Fusion) is being designed this semester for on-line learning to support an IST proposed graduate master’s degree in Information Sciences and Technology and for an approved graduate certificate program in geospatial intelligence. The course will use a special resource Web site containing information such as an extended data fusion bibliography, links to Web sites, wikipedias, and on-line exercises and tools. A specialized search engine for data fusion references is currently being implemented.