Mining for Landmarks: introducing new local environments to a global network
Amy
In operations and in response to terrorist attacks and natural disasters, the military must introduce new or radically altered landscapes to its situational models. In linking these environment to its global network, the network must absorb new information, new services and new uses in a disciplined, organized fashion to ensure quality of service and benefits to network utility. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research is pursuing in basic research that fosters, quantifies, and predicts the "network effect" such that, as nodes are added to the network, the distributed users share information and skills with increased functionality and reduced processing.
Landmarks are an important orientation cue that assist in introducing new environments and aligning multiple users' perspectives and the fields of view of sensors with disparate modalities. By identifying key landmarks, it is possible to orient users and sensors to new environments quickly and to share key findings, to access experts, and to transfer skill sets efficiently. Our goal is to establish orientation and data mining services that can accelerate the massive assimilation tasks necessary to build complex networks in dynamic environments in a systematic way.