Track: Digital Media: Content and Communication
Minitrack: Knowledge Discovery for Rapid Response (KD4RR)

Knowledge Discovery for Rapid Response (KD4RR) focuses on "satisficing" obtaining the best response possible within sufficient time to be useful. From analysts in a variety of disciplines (intelligence, business, stock markets, etc), to firefighters in a burning building or troops sweeping a hostile urban environments, to manufacturing materials buyers or customs officers with hundreds of cars backed up, these and many others need a new kind of decision paradigm that includes the influence of time, and therefore is not maximizing nor optimizing, but "satisficing."

These problems have the added feature that each decision taken yields new information, and that the signs and features associated with the underlying thing to be discovered may drift over time (open source characterization of issues) or abruptly (emergence of a new threat class). The research to improve KD4RR must balance optimality of learning methods against the cost of gathering more data.

** Satisfice: "To accept a choice or judgment as one that is good enough, one that satisfies. According to Herb Simon, who coined the term, the tendency to satisfice shows up in many cognitive tasks such as playing games, solving problems, and making financial decisions where people typically do not or cannot search for the optimal solutions." Source: The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, Arthur S. Reber 1995.

Topics and research areas include:
Knowledge discovery in rapid response environments and Knowledge Discovery for Rapid Response that has the following characteristics.
* The information to be dealt with can be in any medium: text, sound, image, signals, etc.
* For a given medium, the format may vary widely, for example in the text medium, formats may range across emerging technologies (blogs, wikis, text or internet messaging, etc.) as well as more traditional formats (word processor documents, database output, spreadsheets, web pages, etc.).
* The "best rules of action" based on the information are fluid, changing frequently and unexpectedly.
* The operating rules often require that a good, but sub-optimal action be selected within a time frame too short to revise and apply more thorough rules of action.

Co-chairs:
Mark T. Elmore (Primary Contact)
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
PO Box 2008 MS6364, Oak Ridge TN 37831-6364, USA
Direct Phone: +1-865-241-6372
Departmental Phone: +1-865-574-4837
Fax: +1-865-576-5943
Email: ElmoreMT@ornl.gov

Paul Kantor
Rutgers University
4 Huntington St ., New Brunswick NJ. 08901-1071, USA
Direct Phone: +1-732-932-7500 x8216
Departmental Phone: +1-732-932-7500
Fax: +1-732-932-1504
Email: Kantor@scils.rutgers.edu