The Hats Simulator and Colab: An Integrated Information Fusion Challenge Problem and Collaborative Analysis Environment

We present an overview of our work in information fusion for intelligence analysis. This work includes the Hats Simulator and the COLAB system. The Hats Simulator is a parameterized model of a virtual world in which hundreds of thousands of agents engage in individual and collective activities. Playing against the simulator, the goal of the analyst is to identify and stop harmful agents before they carry out terrorist attacks on simulated landmarks. The COLAB system enables multiple human analysts in different physical locations to conduct collaborative intelligence analysis. COLAB consists of two components: an instrumented analysis working environment built on a blackboard system, and a web-based user interface that integrates the Trellis hypothesis authoring and management tool with a query language. COLAB is integrated with the Hats Simulator to provide a complete end-to-end analysis environment with challenging problem domain.

[1]  Paul R. Cohen,et al.  Identifying Covert Sub-Networks Through Iterative Node Classification , 2005 .

[2]  Clayton T. Morrison,et al.  COLAB: A Laboratory Environment for Studying Analyst Sensemaking and Collaboration , 2005 .

[3]  P. King,et al.  Simulating terrorist threat with the hats simulator , 2005 .

[4]  M E J Newman,et al.  Fast algorithm for detecting community structure in networks. , 2003, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[5]  H. P Nii,et al.  Blackboard Systems , 1986 .

[6]  Daniel D. Corkill,et al.  Collaborating software: Blackboard and multi-agent systems & the future , 2003 .

[7]  P. Cohen,et al.  Measuring Confidence Intervals in Link Discovery: A Bootstrap Approach , 2004 .

[8]  Clayton T. Morrison,et al.  Population generation for large-scale simulation , 2005, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[9]  Clayton T. Morrison,et al.  The Hats Simulator , 2004, Proceedings of the 2004 Winter Simulation Conference, 2004..

[10]  D. Corkill.  Blackboard Systems , 1991 .

[11]  Victor Lesser,et al.  The Evolution of Blackboard Control Architectures , 1992 .

[12]  Yolanda Gil,et al.  User interfaces with semi-formal representations: a study of designing argumentation structures , 2005, IUI '05.

[13]  Ramez Elmasri,et al.  Fundamentals of Database Systems, 5th Edition , 2006 .

[14]  Ramez Elmasri,et al.  Fundamentals of Database Systems , 1989 .

[15]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  The Hearsay-II Speech-Understanding System: Integrating Knowledge to Resolve Uncertainty , 1980, CSUR.