Cognitive Information Systems for Situation Awareness Modelling, Context-Aware Decision Support, and Knowledge Discovery

Situation awareness refers to the perception and understanding of one’s environment for the purpose of planning and critical decision making. However, situation models in real-world applications are typically complex and not easy to use. To reduce the cognitive load of human operators, this project aims to develop a new breed of cognitive information systems for goal-oriented situation awareness and context-aware decision support.

Taking an embodied cognition approach, a family of self-organizing neural models is used for modelling the environment in terms of entities and relations as well as their significance to individual entity’s goals and missions. In contrast to traditional situation awareness modeling systems, the decision support system further incorporates a knowledge level for learning critical causal relationships between the situations and the actions of the entities. Using an integrated learning and inference engine, the system shall support a range of critical operations, including event classification, action recommendation, and proactive decision making.

The technologies developed in this project are expected to overcome limitations of traditional computing systems and provide substantial new opportunities in all sectors, encompassing critical defense, industrial and commercial applications. Although our primary application domain is on command and control in battlefield modelling and tactical warfare planning, we see immediate applications to cyber gaming, logistic planning, and homeland security.

Principal Investigator: Assoc. Professor Tan Ah Hwee

Team Member:
Ms. Feng Yuhong, Project Officer
Mr Teng Teck Hou, Ph.D Student