IEEE CogSIMA Conference 2014

The 4th Annual IEEE CogSIMA Conference continues and expands the research domain on cognitive situation management that was established by the previous conferences. The aim of the CogSIMA conference is to provide a venue for presenting scientific results of multi-disciplinary studies specific to complex heterogeneous dynamical systems that include humans, physical systems, computer agents and networks whose behaviors depend on situations. Examples of such systems include ad hoc communication networks, social networks, physical and cyber security systems, disaster monitoring and recovery systems, epidemic monitoring and control, intelligent transportation systems, financial and investment services, and tactical and operational battlefield command and control systems.

Common to these systems is the need to adequately perceive, reflect and act according to the situational changes happening both in the surrounding world and within the systems themselves. The amounts of information that needs to be processed in order to derive decisions overwhelm both the human cognitive capabilities and the computer processing power. Consequently, there is a need to develop new situation awareness and decision support approaches for augmenting the cognitive capabilities of working collaboratively humans and computer agents. These agents, both humans and machines, are faced with collaborative solving of various problems:

Selecting which data is relevant to the objectives and actively requesting or searching for additional information;
Integrating disparate data sources into a coherent information representation and a consistent model of the world;
Inferring relations among various elements of the model, including prediction of the future states of the world;
Assessing uncertainties associated with decisions;
Learning new models and/or model elements;
Valuating particular current and/or future states of the world according to