Summary Alan S. Willsky SensorWeb MURI Review Meeting September 22, 2003

An Update to the 2.5-Year Summary Last year’s review provided a complete picture of the state of this MURI Scientific achievement Fulfilling the intellectual agenda outlined in our proposal Achieving objectives of MURI programs Interdisciplinary and synergistic research Community leadership and influence Responsiveness to EAC/TAB and contributions to critical DoD S&T challenges The following is a brief update, based on what has been presented in the previous talks

Fulfilling the intellectual agenda outlined in our proposal We have maintained course along all three intellectual themes defined in our proposal Focus primarily on intellectual “long-poles” Maintaining relevance to and coverage of the RCA’s, We continue to have considerable success Major research results Recognition of our work by the broader community

A Sampling of Recent Accomplishments & Activities New, robust methods for source localization with sensor arrays New methods with enhanced robustness to noise and uncertainty Well-adapted to signal structures arising in applications of central interest to the Army but which previous methods have not addressed (e.g., multiband sources) Ongoing interaction with ARL to maintain and enhance relevance and impact of this work, e.g. Distributed sources Sources with harmonic structure

Sampling - II Fusion of heterogeneous sensors Robust information-theoretic methods for multisensor fusion New approaches for Estimating information measures Overcoming combinatorial explosion of data association Initiation of ARL collaboration via extended visit by Alex Ihler Multisensor association,fusion and exploitation Marriage of received signal strength work of Sadler/Pham and our NBP methods New information-theoretic approach to sensor management and querying in networked environments

Sampling - III Network-constrained fusion Exploitation of embedded tractable structures Embedded tree algorithms Extended message passing algorithms Tree-reweighting optimization Extension of particle filtering to networks Collaboration with CTA-funded research (Moses-OSU) on source and sensor localization Applications to distributed data association Investigation of performance/communication tradeoff Newly initiated formulation capturing simple proximity sensor models New approach using particle filters avoiding data association complexity completely

Sampling - IV Methods and guarantees for exploiting heterogeneous sensors Principles, methods, and guarantees for estimation, association and discrimination Collaborative use of fragmented data Dynamic, adaptive resource allocation with performance guarantees PAC-learning-based approach to bounds on number of information queries required to make decision/estimate with specified level of confidence Universal prediction approach to sequential resource allocation with application to energy management in wireless networks

Sampling - V Information transfer in wireless networks for distributed sensing and control Problems at the interface of sensing, inference, communication, and computation Results on harvesting statistics from sensor networks: relating fusion rate to network strategies Optimal use of energy-limited nodes in networks with fading channels

Sampling - VI Integrated approaches to communications- constrained fusion Intelligent querying of sensors for localization and tracking of targets Transitioned through SensIT program Continuing collaboration (through Dr. M Chu, now at PARC) Initiation of new effort in distributed fusion Blending concepts from decentralized detection and graphical models Anticipated collaboration with Prof. P. Varshney (involved in the Battlefield Visualization MURI) Already have uncovered major conceptual issues

Sampling - VII Recognition of our work continues New plenary and invited talks Numerous papers and theses We continue to strengthen our interactions with other research activities Decision-making under uncertainty MURI Battlefield visualization MURI Sensors CTA

Sampling - VIII We continue to respond conscientiously to the mission of MURI research Responsiveness to EAB/TAC comments See previous talks Continued and enhanced interactions with ARL (both directly and through collaborative research with those involved in CTAs)