The 4th IEEE International Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA 2014)

Mar 3, 2014 – Mar 6, 2014

San Antonio, TX, USA

http://www.cogsima2014.org/

Call for Papers

The 4th IEEE CogSIMA 2014 Conference will be held on March 3-6, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, USA. The conference continues to expand the research domain on cognitive situation management that was established by the previous conferences. The aim of the CogSIMA conference is to provide a venue for presenting scientific results of multi-disciplinary studies specific to complex heterogeneous dynamical systems that include humans, physical systems, computer agents and networks whose behaviors depend on situations. Examples of such systems include ad hoc communication networks, social networks, physical and cyber security systems, disaster monitoring and recovery systems, epidemic monitoring and control, intelligent transportation systems, financial and investment services, as well as tactical and operational battlefield command and control systems.
Common to these systems is the need to adequately perceive, reflect and act according to the situational changes happening both in the surrounding world and within the systems themselves. The amounts of information that needs to be processed in order to derive decisions overwhelm both human cognitive capabilities and the computer processing power. Consequently, there is a need to develop new situation awareness and decision support approaches for augmenting the cognitive capabilities of working collaboratively humans and computer agents. These agents, both humans and machines, are faced with collaborative solving of various problems:

1. Selecting which data is relevant to the objectives and actively requesting or searching for additional information
2. Integrating disparate data into a consistent world model
3. Inferring relations among various elements of the model, including prediction of the future states of the world
4. Assessing uncertainties associated with decisions
5. Learning new models and/or model elements
6. Valuating particular current and/or future states of the world according to some metrics
7. Identifying desirable states of the world, selecting actions that could lead to the desirable states
8. Communicating and interacting with other agents, and engaging into the process of collective situation awareness and decision-making

While this process is complex, it is further complicated by the fact that each of the steps mentioned above depend on the situation. A specific item of information relevant in one situation may be irrelevant in another. A given model of the world may be adequate in one situation, but is not appropriate in another. As such, a given set of logical conditions implying a given relation holds in a given situation, but not in another situation. A given state that is desirable in one situation can be harmful in another. Finally, a given sequence of actions that leads to a given state in one situation may not in another.
Conference Scope
A distinguishing characteristic of the CogSIMA conferences is that the key concepts like situations, events and actions are considered as first class objects. The solution to the above-mentioned problems requires multi-disciplinary research that addresses the topics listed below.

• Studies of concepts of situation, context, event, goal, intention, action, activity, behavior in the context of hybrid human-computer systems
• Theories of situational awareness in human-computer systems
• Situation dependent data integration
• Modeling of situations – model acquisition, construction, adaptation and learning
• Models of human-machine collaboration, hybrid cognition
• Situation perception, comprehension, tracking, prediction and management
• Collaborative decision support
• Theories of relevance
• Methods of planning actions to achieve desired situations
• Approaches to spatial and temporal reasoning, reasoning about goals, intentions and actions, and collective reasoning by teams of human and/or machine agents
• Advancement of situational control theory, including situational feedback, goal assessment and optimization, situational games with nature and adversaries, reflective situational control, and collective situational behavior
• Metrics and evaluation of performance of hybrid human-computer systems
• Applications, Case Studies, Systems, Platforms and Tools
  • Emergency situation management
  • Tactical operations
  • Semantic web systems
  • Communication, information, social and composite networks
  • Intelligent transportation systems
  • Medical and health care
  • Cyber security
  • Other applications

Important Dates