Intelligent Maritime Information Acquisition and Representation for Decision Support
Human-made and environmental processes in the maritime environment are becoming increasingly complex due to the intensification of human activity and its impact on the natural environment. Understanding these complex and rapidly changing processes requires intelligent information acquisition and interpretation that shifts the paradigm of manual data collection that is agnostic to the dynamic environment. The new paradigm needs to provide adaptation to specific missions, the integration of heterogeneous capabilities, and representation of information that will allow informed decisions. Providing such an agile response to the challenge of understanding the complex maritime environment requires a synergy of human and cyber-physical systems. This synergy requires the seamless integration of agile capabilities of multiple heterogeneous sensing, processing, communications, energy use, actuation, and information interpretation capabilities. The achievement of the symbiosis between human and cyber-physical resources needs to overcome the challenges related to achieving agile heterogeneous data fusion and capability integration. This talk reviews technological advancements towards the intelligent information acquisition and representation that will aid human users and organizations “make sense” of the complex maritime environment.