Deep Learning for Situational Understanding

Abstract Situational understanding (SU) requires a combination of insight — the ability to accurately perceive an existing situation — and foresight — the ability to anticipate how an existing situation may develop in the future. SU involves information fusion as well as model representation and inference. Commonly, heterogenous data sources must be exploited in the fusion process: often including both hard and soft data products. In a coalition context, data and processing resources will also be distributed and subjected to restrictions on information sharing. It will often be necessary for a human to be in the loop in SU processes, to provide key input and guidance, and to interpret outputs in a way that necessitates a degree of transparency in the processing: systems cannot be “black boxes”. In this paper, we characterize the Coalition Situational Understanding (CSU) problem in terms of fusion, temporal, distributed, and human requirements. There is currently significant interest in deep learning (DL) approaches for processing both hard and soft data. We analyze the state-of-the-art in DL in relation to these requirements for CSU, and identify areas where there is currently considerable promise, and key gaps. The relevant ITA IPP item is Project 6, Task 2 titled "Deep Learning for Multi-Layer Situational Understanding".
Authors
  • Supriyo Chakraborty (IBM US)
  • Alun Preece (Cardiff)
  • Moustafa Alzantot (UCLA)
  • Tianwei Xing (UCLA)
  • Dave Braines (IBM UK)
  • Mani Srivastava (UCLA)
Date Sep-2017
Venue 1st Annual Fall Meeting of the DAIS ITA, 2017
Variants