Abstract :
Summary form only given, as follows. Three major trends will provide enabling technology for global ubiquitous sensing including: (1) the rapid evolution of nano-scale and micro-scale sensors, (2) wide-band wireless communications, and (3) high-speed micro-scale ???invisible??? computers with near unlimited storage capabilities. These trends provide the opportunity to enable enormous collection and dissemination of data for a wide variety of applications such as smart buildings, condition-based maintenance of machinery, environmental monitoring, medical health monitoring, supply chain management, and many other areas. Low-cost, ubiquitous sensing, unlimited processing and ultra-wideband communications would appear to provide significant opportunities for changing nearly every aspect of our everyday lives. However, these technological enablers may also lead to significant challenges and potential problems such as the inability to ingest, process and understand data (overwhelming human analysts inducing cogminutia fragmentosa (McNeese et al)), an inability to effectively utilize distributed information sources, and finally, induced poor decision-making and lack of collaboration. These technology advances are leading to a situation in which human decision-makers are drowning in a sea of data, but thirsting for knowledge. This presentation describes an approach to transform the data-driven, sensor-centric approach into a human-centric, knowledge-focused approach. Our goal is to integrate data driven and inference (hypothesis) driven reasoning to achieve the best of both worlds of data collection and human reasoning. This presentation will discuss the key technology trends, challenges and potential solutions. Research in advanced, 3-D full immersion visualization, use of team-based intelligent agents, and multi-sensor data fusion are presented, along with perspectives on how to achieve integrated data collection, human reasoning systems.
