Agent based information fusion

The goal of this panel discussion is to identify key technical issues for information fusion at both lower and higher levels, and promising agent-based development approaches. Currently there are high expectations in the industrial, military, and business fusion communities that agent technologies can provide insights into and solutions for some of the most complex problems. Moreover, such expectations are also due to agents' inherent capability of operating autonomously, and communicating and coordinating with other agents in the environment, thus making them suitable for embedding in entities operating in hazardous and high-risk operational environments, including robots, Unmanned Air Vehicles, Unattended Ground Sensors, etc. Recent DoD-wide thrust on Network Centric Warfare (NCW) is by definition distributed in nature, where agents can potentially play a vital role in the areas such as cooperation, coordination, negotiation, brokering, and filtering. We are pleased to have five distinguished panelists from both academia and industry to talk about their experience in dealing with agent technology.