Journal of Information Technology & Software Engineering
Open Access

Using context informed information infrastructures for improved situational awareness

Global Summit and Expo on Multimedia & Applications

August 10-11, 2015 Birmingham, UK

Christopher Laing

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: J Inform Tech Soft Engg

Abstract :

Human operators when trying to understand the current state of a system must first perceive the relevant elements of
data and then comprehend their meaning and significance, before anticipating what the implications of this system state
are in terms of the actions required of them. Only then–with this situational awareness–can they make a decision about the
system criticalities and have a better understanding of what action to take. While the study of situational awareness has its
origins in military research, recent work has taken it out of the military zone and into social media, where a new field of data
fusion explores patterns of influence, location, identity and interactions between individuals and groups. We intend to explore
the advantages of an information fusion system in which the information infrastructure finds new ways to reflect upon its
own state and new ways to express this state that provides a good fit to human communication and cognition processes. This
interplay should then generate a better and more responsive human-computer symbiosis. It is anticipated that allowing the
information infrastructure to reflect on its current context, dynamically sensing the environment, making a trust judgment in
respect of that environment and communicating that judgment to a user should then generate a better and more responsive
human-computer symbiosis leading to improved situation awareness. This, in turn, should generate better decision-making
(although obviously individual and task factors can play a mediating effect).