Mr. Kolodny is a presently a Senior Technology Advisor for the US Army Research Lab. Prior to his current consulting position, he worked in R&D for ARL until his retirement in May 2009 as the Signal & Image Processing Division Associate for Technology. He had been Chief of both the Sensor Integration and Advanced Research Branches at ARL. He was among the leaders and visionaries behind the US Army's program for Unattended Ground Sensors and sensor interoperability. He chairs the annual "Ground/Air Multisensor Interoperability, Integration and Networking for Persistent ISR" SPIE Conference. His other work explored coalition interoperability architectures, sensor fusion systems, networked sensors, unexploded ordnance detection systems, aircraft detection systems, missile radar design and automated test equipment design among others. His current interests include autonomous coalition plug and play interoperability of disparate ISR systems, exploitation of open sources for situational understanding and anomaly determination, development of information need-driven ontology for discovery of sensing sources and developing a vision for the future direction of situational understanding.

"We are drowning in the deluge of data that is being collected world-wide, while at the same time starving for knowledge and understanding." In the military domain, there is a need to autonomously access & synthesize all relevant available data & information into situational understanding for the Warfighters to rapidly & effectively make critical decisions. A key aspect of this process is to provide only information that is relevant and useful for the needed mission decision at hand. Innovative research is needed to achieve the necessary situational understanding required by military decision makers especially at the tactical edge. This presentation will discuss the following topics: