Human factor study and many more

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higher intelligence inference, such as the human brain intelligence, the cognitive intelligence process will need to be studied. The next section will cover a brief de-scription of the cognitive intelligence. And since the fusion architecture will also affect the fusion system design (system engineering design perspective) and the fu-sion algorithms (in term of efficiency and effectiveness), the section after cognitive intelligence will discuss the fusion architecture.

The attempt to engineer the cognitive process has led to cognitive psychology3, knowledge engineering, ontological engineering, memory engineering, computa-tional intelligence (e.g. biologically-inspired algorithms), human factor study and many more. More recently, the term cognitive informatics was coined for the study of natural intelligence. Cognitive informatics study the internal information pro-cessing mechanisms and natural intelligence of the brain [229] and has originated from information theory and contemporary informatics4. Cognitive informatics look into how human beings acquire, process, interpret, and express information by us-ing the brain and how we understand the mind of different individuals. This new interest has led to the First IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Infomatics (ICCI’02) held in 2002.

The other aspect of the cognitive process is in attempting to make sense of infor-mation or also known as sensemaking. In the general sense, the word ‘sensemaking’refers to the derivation of an understanding of a problem given a large set of data that is complex and sometimes even self-conflicting. Sensemaking is a complicated process and is described as a cognitive task model [53, 184]. As such, it is subjective and is dependent on many factors, such as the point-of-view of the people performing it and diversity of the group. Sensemaking is used in situations where information is often vague and ambiguous. For more information on sensemaking, reader may refer to the publication by Leedom [136, 137].

The transformation from information to knowledge is situation dependent [54] and involves smart algorithms. Figure 5.6 shows a possible engineering flow of an attempt to model cognition and high-level fusion to achieve situation and impact awareness.

High-level fusion process

Sensemaking

(Information presentation)
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