"Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research on Human Systems Integration to Enhance Maritime Domain Awareness for Port/Harbour Security Systems, Opatija, Croatia, 8-12 December 2008."-- T.p. verso.

This volume is concerned with the human factors, ergonomics, and safety issues related to the design of products, processes, and systems, as well as operation and management of business enterprises in both manufacturing and service sectors of contemporary industry. The book is organized into ten sections that focus on the following subject matters:

Maritime piracy is the cause of widespread international concern, and the number of pirate attacks has increased substantially in recent years. Many commercial vessels are inherently vulnerable to attack because of their size and relative slowness, and technological improvements have resulted in smaller crews on large vessels, whilst the absence of enforcement agencies in international waters has served only to make pirates more daring. Collaborative human-centric information support systems can significantly improve the ability of every nation to predict and prevent pirate attacks, or to recognize the nature and size of an attack rapidly when prevention fails, and improve the collective response to an emergency. This book presents the papers delivered at the NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) Prediction and Recognition of Piracy Efforts Using Collaborative Human-Centric Information Systems, held in Salamanca, Spain, in September 2011. A significant observation from previous NATO Advanced Study Institutes and Workshops was that domain experts responsible for maritime security were not fully aware of the wide variety of technological solutions available to enhance their support systems, and that although technology experts have a general understanding of the requirements in security systems, they often lacked knowledge concerning the operational constraints affecting those who implement security procedures. This ASI involved both technology and domain experts, as well as students from related fields of study. It offered an opportunity for them to discuss the issues surrounding the prediction, recognition and deterrence of maritime piracy, and will be of interest to all those whose work is related to this internationally important issue.

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1406 “High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications (cHiPSet)“ project. Long considered important pillars of the scientific method, Modelling and Simulation have evolved from traditional discrete numerical methods to complex data-intensive continuous analytical optimisations. Resolution, scale, and accuracy have become essential to predict and analyse natural and complex systems in science and engineering. When their level of abstraction raises to have a better discernment of the domain at hand, their representation gets increasingly demanding for computational and data resources. On the other hand, High Performance Computing typically entails the effective use of parallel and distributed processing units coupled with efficient storage, communication and visualisation systems to underpin complex data-intensive applications in distinct scientific and technical domains. It is then arguably required to have a seamless interaction of High Performance Computing with Modelling and Simulation in order to store, compute, analyse, and visualise large data sets in science and engineering. Funded by the European Commission, cHiPSet has provided a dynamic trans-European forum for their members and distinguished guests to openly discuss novel perspectives and topics of interests for these two communities. This cHiPSet compendium presents a set of selected case studies related to healthcare, biological data, computational advertising, multimedia, finance, bioinformatics, and telecommunications.

"Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research on Human Systems Integration to Enhance Maritime Domain Awareness for Port/Harbour Security Systems, Opatija, Croatia, 8-12 December 2008."-- T.p. verso.

Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) is a very challenging mission area in an ever-increasing net-centric environment, which is inundated with data from many highly advanced, capable sensors and communication suites. With all these technological data collection and dissemination advances, the information available is just too voluminous for humans alone to process and react to manually, sifting the "wheat from the chaff," and be expected to accomplish effective operational decision making regarding maritime threats to national security, as well as to international peace and trade on the high seas. This thesis addresses MDA Joint Integrating Concept capability gaps, MDA-003C and MDA-004C, for aggregating, analyzing and displaying maritime information in order to understand the maritime environment to identify threats and predicting activity within the maritime domain. Applying the Systems Engineering process, the concept, requirements analysis, architectures, and system design and validation description for a systems integration solution is presented. The proposed implementation entails integrating autonomous behavior analysis capability that utilizes syntactical grammar-based spatial-temporal behavior classifications within existing Net-Centric MDA environments. In attestation to this implementation, this thesis describes the research conducted on a demonstrable proof-of-concept laboratory system, the Watchman Maritime Smart Environment System, whose representative architecture for specific autonomous behavior analysis implementation is provided.

Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) is the effective understanding of anything associated with the global maritime domain that could impact the security, safety, economy, or environment of the United States. MDA is a key component of an active, layered maritime defense in depth. It will be achieved by improving our ability to collect, fuse, analyze, display, and disseminate actionable information and intelligence to operational commanders. MDA is supported by the Global Maritime Intelligence Integration Plan and is the enabler for the Maritime Operational Threat Response Plan. This plan advocates enhanced and innovative collection of intelligence, the integration of correlated open source information, and the incorporation of automated algorithms to assist human analytic efforts. The National Maritime Intelligence Center will be the central point of connectivity to fuse, analyze, and disseminate information and intelligence for shared situational awareness across classification boundaries. To achieve persistent awareness in the maritime domain, Cold War legacy collection capabilities alone are no longer sufficient. We must reorient and integrate these legacy systems with current and emerging capabilities, such as unmanned aerial vehicles and acoustic sensors, fused in a common operating picture available to maritime operational commanders and accessible throughout the United States Government. Employment of these collection capabilities will maximize near-real time awareness of maritime threats. Stand-off detection capabilities for weapons of mass destruction in the maritime domain must be developed to complement existing and emerging cargo inspection systems and hand-held detection devices. Most significantly, human intelligence collection and the investigative actions of law enforcement officers can provide crucial insights about maritime threats.