ABSTRACT

Non-traditional warfare in urban environments leads to challenges in combat identification (Combat ID) and motivates observing and understanding the physical terrain as well as understanding the human terrain. New sources of information for improved situational awareness and threat refinement include the use of human observers and data available on the internet from blogs, news reports, YouTube and self-reported news. The chapter considers a new role for the analyst-in-the-loop in data fusion to using humans as soft sensors. Traditional information and data fusion has sought to address the challenges by integrating and fusing data from heterogeneous sources and sensors to improve situational awareness. The goal of information and data fusion has been to transform physics-based observations about physical objects into knowledge about those physical objects. With few exceptions, the focus of data fusion research has been data and observation driven-that is, the development of new and improved physical sensors, new methods for processing data, and architectures that served the data.