Grant: Alliance Grants

Modern defence organizations around the world face new challenges related to information flow. They deal with massive information streams from on-board sensors, coalitionpartners, or remote sites. This information needs to be absorbed and interpreted in its current decision-making context of time, space, and provenance. Such contextualization is known as Situational Awareness. The proposed AMNIS (Automated Monitoring of the Naval Information Space) project is an alliance of the Institute for Big Data Analytics at Dalhousie University (IBDA), the Atlantic Research Centre of the Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), and the General Dynamics (Mission Systems-Canada) group. AMNIS will bring the state-of-the-art data integration, modeling and predictive models to the task of Situational Awareness. AMNIS will build on the results and collaborative links established in the recent (2016-2019) IBDA-DRDC-Lockheed Martin Canada project on Mission-Relevant Information Management for Integrated Response (MIMIR). In AMNIS, we will use Machine Learning to address select SA aspects and learn the persistent alarm definitions from the data, to model the concepts of trust, to account for and reproduce doubtful provenance (adversarial) data, and to represent data drift. We will also develop techniques for data exploration and data-centered collaboration using visual queries and advanced data visualization. AMNIS will support more than 30 person-years of High- Quality Personnel training in Data Science, Machine Learning, and Data Visualization and advanced HCI -areas in high demand in the Canadian industrial and government labs.