Larus Technologies Presented with the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) 2015 Outstanding Organization Award at CISDA 2015

OTTAWA, ON, June 30, 2015 – Larus Technologies Research Scientist, Dr. Moufid Harb, was on hand to accept the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Outstanding Organization Award for 2015, as presented by Dr. Gustave Anderson from Lockheed Martin, CISDA 2015 Technical Sessions and Tutorials Co-Chair. This prestigious award recognizes an outstanding organization that contributed to the advancement of theory, technologies, and/or applications of CI through inventions, new technology, innovative technical developments, new product implementation, or the management of innovative product design or production processes (http://cis.ieee.org/cis-awards.html#aa). Larus follows prestigious past award recipients such as Natural Selection Inc. (2011), The European Centre for Soft Computing (2012) and Honda Research Institute Europe (2014) and was given the award with the following citation: “For advancing the field of computational intelligence as applied to defense and security applications.” Larus would like to thank the IEEE and the CIS for this award in recognition of the work being performed by Larus and its employees. Larus continues to innovate in the field of Computational Intelligence extending our product lines to address additional decision support requirements and support a wider variety of hard and soft data sources.

Dr. Moufid Harb from Larus Technologies (right) receiving the award from Dr. Gustave Anderson from Lockheed Martin (left).

Dr. Harb also gave a presentation, on the last day of the symposium, entitled “Risk-Aware Maritime Situational Awareness using Hard-Soft Data Fusion” as part of the System and Data Modeling session chaired by Dr. Georgiy Levchuk. The talk focused on how we augment the situational awareness capabilities of a recently proposed Risk Management Framework (RMF) with the incorporation of soft data. Risk features pertaining to maritime vessels were defined a priori and then quantified in real time using both hard (e.g., Automatic Identification System, Douglas Sea Scale) as well as soft (e.g., historical records of worldwide maritime incidents) data sources. The paper illustrated the beneficial role of the hard-soft data fusion in the characterization and evaluation of potential vessels in distress within Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) scenarios and proposed a risk-aware metric to quantify the effectiveness of the hard-soft fusion process. The presentation was very well received and garnered a lot of inquiries and follow-up discussions from the audience members.

The IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence for Security and Defense Applications (CISDA) was held from 26 to 28 May 2015 at the Turning Stone Resort Casino in Verona, NY. IEEE CISDA 2015 (http://www.cisda2015.org) and was the eighth forum (the first was held in 2007) on CI for security and defence applications. Since that inaugural year, new problems have emerged within the broad areas of security and defence that are increasingly more difficult to tackle with conventional methods, thus requiring new techniques for detecting and adapting to emerging threats. The purpose of the symposium is to present current efforts in CI (e.g., neural networks, fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, swarm intelligence, and other emerging learning or optimization techniques) as applied to security, defence and military problems. The following topics are typically discussed at the symposium: complex adaptive systems, intelligence gathering and exploitation, modeling and simulation of military operations, network security, automatic target recognition and tracking, biometrics, as well as employment and control of autonomous vehicles.