VISUAL FUSION AND CORRELATION OF ASSETS AND MISSION

For ten years, the interdisciplinary team of the Center for the Representation of Multi-Dimensional Information (CROMDI) at the University of Utah has successfully worked on problems in Medicine, Finance, and Networking to transform experts' heuristic knowledge into quantitative displays that improve decision making with respect to existing displays. The team has researched and developed visualizations for the Intelligence Community ARDA in order to improve situational awareness of critical cyber events, which resulted in "VisAlert" a very flexible visualization to fuse and correlate network information. The team founded IntelliVis, to commercialize VisAlert and to produce new visualization products for other situational awareness and decision making problems with overloading data. The objective of this proposal is to design a user centered visualization framework that fuses a variety of information sources both from physical and cyber-assets, and that can aid situational awareness and decision making in command and control. We propose to leverage our work for IC-ARDA, extend the capabilities, and generalize the visualization system we designed for network alerts so that the visual structure can be used to allow multiple users, spanning from the staff responsible for analyzing raw data to the commanders who are interested in summarized results. The resulting user centered visualization will allow for the perceptual grouping of disparate and heterogeneous types of data such as the status of fixed and mobile assets, mission information reporting, vulnerabilities, computer network activity, analysts summary, security alerts etc. across a temporal horizon. In particular, we will introduce variables, such as uncertainty and relevance, which are important user defined criteria that should be embedded and interacted with in the visualization. The objective is to ensure that the visualization propositions constructed are usable and result in increased usage and performance. This will be achieved by performing domain analysis to drive the design, and usability testing in the design phases. The studies will be conducted with expert users at the University of Utah ROTC, AFRL, and ARL by employing CROMDI's interdisciplinary methodology that has been successful in other domains.