IEEE IS special issue: Knowledge Systems for Coalition Operations
(call for articles is at Annex A)
Editors: James Lawton, AFRL, US; Niranjan Suri, IHMC, US; Austin Tate, AIAI, UK; Jitu
Patel, Dstl, UK
(Bios are at Annex B)
Submission deadline: May 4, 2012
Publication deadline: January 31, 2013
market analysis
1.
2.
3.
4.
Interest in emergency response and organizations formed to handle complex emergencies is
very topical and important. Of the10 most accessed articles from IEEE Xplore during July
2011 the top was a paper in this sector: "Harnessing the Crowd sourcing Power of Social
Media for Disaster Relief ". Indeed there is going to be an IEEE IS special issue in Dec 2012
on emergency response.
Coalition working is now a norm; all of the military operations over the last two decades have
been coalition ones. Many of these involve civilian agencies and non-government
organisations too. Many of the nations involved in coalition operations have active research
programmes focussed at addressing emerging issues. For example, the International
Technology Alliance (ITA) programme (www.usukita.com ) is joint UK Ministry of Defence
and US Army Research Laboratory funded research in the area of Network and Information
Sciences established in 2006. The ITA community, consisting of 24 academic and industry
partners, is just one example of a large body of people actively engaged in research to support
coalition operations. A significant proportion of this research is in Artificial Intelligence.
Some of the conferences that researchers have been presenting papers include Knowledge
Systems for Coalition Operations (KSCO), the Annual Conference of ITA (ACITA), and
International Command and Control Research Technical Symposium (ICCRTS).
In 2002 IEEE IS published a special issue of KSCO. This publication included some of the
key papers from what was then a large ARPI/Rome Laboratory programme, but also attracted
papers from other international programmes. The proposed KSCO special issue will target
researchers currently addressing deep problems in coalition operations.
IEEE IS - KSCO
CALL FOR ARTICLES
Annex A
KSCO (Knowledge Systems for Coalition Operations) is an international community of interest
exploring research in the use knowledge-intensive systems for supporting coalition operations, both
military and civilian. KSCO regularly organizes a technical conference where practitioners and key
decision makers in coalition operations meet and discuss with researchers from areas of knowledgebased systems, planning and multi-agent systems, exchange experience and ideas, share inspiration
and suggest novel concepts.
The editors are now soliciting papers to be published in an upcoming Special Issue of the IEEE
Intelligent Systems Journal that will address KSCO topics. We welcome submission of original
research and application papers related to coalition operations management. A coalition includes, but
not limited to, military, inter-agency and cross organization alliances engaged in a cooperative
endeavour and joining forces together for a common cause.
Topics may be related to knowledge systems requirements and knowledge systems potential or
actual use for coalition and inter-agencies operations (i.e., multi-national and multi-agency, civil
authorities, homeland safety and security, expeditionary or domestic operations). We will review
theoretical, experimental, methodological papers, but we are especially interested in case studies,
prototype evaluations and application reports. We particularly encourage submission of reports
presenting larger coalition and inter-agencies related national and international projects and
programs.
Key KSCO topics include:



















Innovative theory and techniques for formation of coalitions and similar "virtual
organizations"
Requirements for knowledge-based coalition planning and operations
Knowledge-based approaches to command and control
Knowledge-based approaches to coalition logistics
Knowledge-based approaches to inter-agency and domestic operations
Knowledge-based approaches to safety and security operations
Knowledge-based decision support
Coalition and inter-agencies modelling
Applications and requirements for knowledge-based coalition planning
Knowledge-based approaches to Operations-Other-Than-War
Multi-agent systems and the concept of agency in coalitions
Tools and techniques for knowledge-based simulation and modelling of coalition operations
Security and maintenance of private information or knowledge in coalition operations
Autonomous vs. centrally managed coalition operations
Mobility, agile and autonomous computing in coalition operation
Cyberspace issues for coalitions
Complexity issues and scalability in coalition operations
Cross-cultural issues in coalition operations
Deployed systems, case studies
Submission timelines
Submissions due for review: 4 May 2012
Notification of acceptance 7 September 2012
Final version submitted: 12 October 2012
Issue Publication: 31 January 2013
IEEE IS - KSCO
BIOs
Annex B
James Lawton (James.Lawton@london.af.mil ) is currently the Chief of Information Technology
Research at the US Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) European Office of Aerospace
Research and Development (EOARD), based in London, UK. There he manages a broad portfolio of
AFRL-funded information technology research projects that foster a closer relationship between
European researchers and their counterparts within AFRL. Before coming to EOARD, Dr. Lawton
was lead scientist in the Agents Technology Group at the AFRL’s Information Directorate
(AFRL/RI) in Rome, NY, USA, where he worked for more the two decades. While at AFRL/RI he
also held a visiting scientist position at Cornell University. He is the program chair for the
Knowledge Systems for Coalitions Operations (KSCO) conference series, and has served on
program committees for several other conferences, including the International Joint Conference on
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS). His personal research interests center
around the control and coordination of multi-agents systems, and include such topics as multi-agent
planning, adversarial modeling, and distributed episodic reasoning. Dr. Lawton received his Ph.D. in
Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire, and an M.S. and B.S. in Computer
Science from Syracuse University.
Niranjan Suri (nsuri@ihmc.us ) is a Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human & Machine
Cognition (IHMC). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Lancaster University, England
and his M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL.
His current research activity is focused on the notion of Agile Computing – which supports the
opportunistic discovery and exploitation of resources in highly dynamic networked environments.
His other research interests include coordination algorithms, distributed systems, networking,
communication protocols, virtual machines, and software agents. He has authored or co-authored
over 60 papers, has been on the technical program committees of several international conferences,
and has been a reviewer for the National Science Foundation as well as several international journals.
Prof Austin Tate (a.tate@ed.ac.uk ) holds the Chair in Knowledge-Based Systems at the University
of Edinburgh and is the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute at the University.
He helped form AIAI in 1984 and since that time has led its efforts to transfer the technologies and
methods of artificial intelligence and knowledge systems into commercial, governmental and
academic applications throughout the world. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
(Scotland's National Academy), and is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence amongst other honours. He is a Senior Visiting Research Scientist at the Institute of
Human Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Florida and is on the Senior Advisory Board for IEEE
Intelligent Systems journal.
Jitu Patel (jmpatel@dstl.gov.uk ) is a principal scientist at the Defence Science and Technology
Laboratory (Dstl), UK. He is currently the programme manager for Dstl’s Information Superiority
Experimentation Laboratory. From 2006 -2011 he was the government technical lead for distributed
planning and decision making theme of the International Technology Programme, a joint UK
Ministry of Defence and US Army Research Laboratory funded research. He is the general chair for
the Knowledge Systems for Coalitions Operations (KSCO) conference series. He has a PhD in
Artificial Intelligence and is a Senior Member of IEEE.