The 2015 IEEE CogSIMA conference continues to expand the research domain of cognitive situation awareness and decision support that was established by previous CogSIMA conferences. CogSIMA aims to provide an annual venue for presenting multi-disciplinary research on complex, often cyber-physical, dynamical systems – including humans, physical systems, computer agents and networks – whose individual and collective behavior depends on complex situations. Examples of such systems include command and control systems, disaster monitoring and recovery systems, human-robot exploratory systems, physical and cyber security systems, intelligent transportation systems, communication and social networks, and many others. Common to these systems is the need to adequately perceive, comprehend, act, and communicate according to the current situation and expected changes, both in the surrounding environment and within the systems themselves. The amount of information that needs to be processed in order to derive decisions typically poses significant challenges for both, human cognitive capabilities and computer processing power. Consequently, there is a need to develop novel situation awareness and decision support approaches for augmenting the cognitive capabilities of collaborating.
- Selecting which data is relevant and actively asking or searching for additional information
- Integrating disparate data into a consistent world model
- Inferring relations among elements of the situation, including prediction of future situations
- Assessing uncertainties associated with data, information, and decisions
- Automatic discovery of new situation models and/or model elements
- Metrics for evaluating current and/or future situations and decisions
- Interacting with other agents to achieve shared situation awareness and improve decision-making

Conference Scope

A distinguishing characteristic of the CogSIMA conferences is that key concepts like situations, events and actions are considered as first-class objects. The solution to the above-mentioned problems requires multi-disciplinary research that addresses the topics listed below.
- Studies of concepts of situation, context, event, goal, intention, action, behavior in the in the context of hybrid interactive human-machine systems
- Theories of situational awareness
- Modeling of situations – model acquisition, adaptation and learning
- Situation specification languages
- Situation dependent information integration and fusion
- Situation perception, comprehension, tracking, prediction, adaptation and learning
- Models of human-machine collaboration, hybrid and shared cognition
- Situation ontologies
- Theories of relevance and sharing of situational awareness
- Cyber-Physical Situation Management
- Methods of actions planning, collaborative decision support
- Approaches to spatial and temporal reasoning, reasoning about goals, intentions and actions, and collective reasoning by teams of human and/or machine agents
- Advancement of situational control theory, including situational feedback, goal assessment and optimization, situational games with nature and adversaries, reflective situational control, and collective situational behavior
- Metrics and evaluation of performance of hybrid human-machine systems
- Architectures, systems, platforms and tools for situation awareness and decision support
- Applications and case studies

Submission Guidelines

All papers must represent original and unpublished work that is not currently under review. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three independent referees. Papers will be evaluated according to their significance, originality, technical content, style, clarity, and relevance to the conference. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to attend the conference. To be published in the IEEE CogSIMA 2015 Conference Proceedings and IEEE Xplore®, an author of an accepted paper is required to register for the conference at the full (member or non-member) rate and the paper must be presented by an author of that paper at the conference unless the TPC Chair grants permission for a substitute presenter arranged in advance of the event and who is qualified both to present and answer questions. Non-refundable registration fees must be paid prior to uploading the final IEEE formatted, publication-ready version of the paper. For authors with multiple accepted papers, one full registration is valid for up to 3 papers. Accepted and presented papers will be published in the IEEE CogSIMA 2015 Conference Proceedings and in IEEE Xplore.

Paper Submissions

Two types of paper submissions will be accepted:
Oral presentation paper (max. 7 pages): Paper that describes new results that advance the state-of-the-art in basic or applied research
Poster presentation paper (max. 5 pages): Paper that describes work in progress

Submitted papers should clearly indicate on the first page the submission type. The Technical Program Committee of the conference reserves the right to move accepted papers between the oral and poster sessions after consultation with the authors. Authors of accepted papers will need to sign an IEEE copyright release form and present their paper at the conference. The conference proceedings will be digitally published by IEEE Communications Society and will be included into the IEEE Explore Digital Library.