Special Session 4

SPECIAL SESSION #4

Federico Cerutti

University of Brescia, Italy

• federico.cerutti@unibs.it

Lauro Snidaro

University of Udine, Italy

• lauro.snidaro@uniud.it

The exploitation of all relevant information originating from a growing mass of heterogeneous sources, both device-based (sensors, video, etc.) and human-generated (text, voice, etc.), is a critical factor in producing a timely, comprehensive, and accurate description of a situation or phenomenon to make informed decisions. Even when exploiting multiple sources, most fusion systems are developed for combining just one type of data (e.g., positional data, sales updates) to achieve a specific goal (e.g., accurate target tracking, quarterly report predictions) without considering other relevant information (e.g., current situation status) from different abstraction levels. The goal of seamlessly combining information from diverse sources, including HUMINT and OSINT, exists only in a few narrowly specialised and limited areas. In other words, there is no unified, holistic solution to this problem.

‍Processes at different levels generally work on data and information of various natures. For example, low-level processes could deal with device-generated data (e.g. images, tracks, etc.), while high-level processes might exploit human-generated knowledge (e.g. text, ontologies, etc.). The overall objective is to enhance making sense of the information collected from multiple heterogeneous sources and processes to improve situational awareness and include topics such as sense-making of patterns of behaviour, global interactions, and information quality, integrating sources of data, information, and contextual knowledge.

Federico Cerutti is an Associate Professor at the University of Brescia, and Chair of the University of Brescia branch of the Italian National Cybersecurity Laboratory. He is a Rita Levi-Montalcini laureate, a highly prestigious fellowship from the Italian Ministry of Research with an acceptance rate lower than 8%. Previously, he served as Academic Director of the Data Science Academy of Cardiff University and as programme leader for the Master in Artificial Intelligence of Cardiff University.
He has been one of the Expert Evaluators for the last Evaluation of Research Quality (analogous to UK REF) run by the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes.
He is serving as a member of the PhD Board for AI for Security course of the Italian National PhD Program in Artificial Intelligence, which trains researchers in the cutting-edge topics of Artificial Intelligence while ensuring an integrated and “complex” vision of the ecosystem of AI technologies and solutions. He is also an Honorary Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University (UK) and Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton (UK).
His research focuses mainly on artificial intelligence and nonmonotonic reasoning (especially argumentation theory) and decision support with uncertainty and trust. He studied suitable models of arguments and critiques for practical reasoning and decision support and provided efficient algorithms for solving relevant problems in argumentation theory, thus significantly improving the current state-of-the-art. His expertise in the field is widely recognised with invited talks; he gave a tutorial on argumentation theory at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2015, and two more in 2017 and 2019, the most important venue for artificial intelligence; and a series of lectures at the Second Summer School on Argumentation in 2016. He attracted more than 1 million Euros combined in research funding, including projects funded by the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and the European Office of Aerospace Research and Development (EOARD).
He co-authors more than 80 peer-reviewed papers, including several journal papers, and is co-editor of two books.

Prof. Lauro Snidaro is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Udine. His main interests include Data/Information Fusion, Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning, Multimedia, Video understanding. He actively publishes in international journals and conferences and has co-authored more than 100 papers. He was the appointed Italian member of the NATO Task Group on Information Fusion Demonstrator (TGonIFD) IST-038/RTG-016 for 2003-05, of the NATO Information Technology Panel Task Group IST-065/RTG-028 on “Information Fusion in Asymmetric Operations” (RTGonIFAO) for 2007-2009, and of the NATO Research Task Group on “Information Filtering and Multi-Source Information Fusion” IST-106-RTG-051 for 2011-2014. He is currently the appointed Italian member for the NATO Task Group on “Multi-Level Fusion of Hard and Soft Information” (IST-132) for 2015-17.
He cooperates with international industries and research centres and is involved in several international projects on multi-sensor data fusion. He has been invited speaker at international symposiums and meetings in Armenia, Bulgaria, Spain, United States. In 2011 he was program co-chair of the 16th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing (ICIAP) and in 2019 he was program co-chair of the 22nd International Conference on Information Fusion.
He has co-organized several special sessions at the International Conference on Information Fusion and the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal-Based Surveillance. He was the lead editor of the volume “Context-Enhanced Information Fusion – Boosting Real-World Performance with Domain Knowledge”, Springer, 2016. He is special issue organizer and “Fusion for Signal/Image Processing and Understanding” Area Editor of the Information Fusion journal (Elsevier). He is “High level fusion” Area Editor of the ISIF “Journal of Advances in Information Fusion”. He serves as a computer science project reviewer for the Italian Ministry of University and Research. He regularly serves as reviewer for 28 international journals and 26 conferences.