Panel on computational intelligence for homeland defense and counterterrorism

The past year has seen a rapid expansion of intelligence and law enforcement community efforts in the areas of Counter-terrorism and Homeland Defense, principally in the US, but also in most major democracies of the world. This has led to a corresponding increase in research and development activities in this area as well. Many of the problems in this area involve dealing with large amounts of imprecise information, detecting pattems in such information, and reasoning over uncertain facts. The Soft Computing and Computational Intelligence communites in general, and the Fuzzy Computing community in particular, have focused on these areas and developed several well regarded techniques. The objective of this panel is to bring together experts from the federal and state government, industry, and the academia, who are familiar with the problem domain and can bring out the problems, issues, and needs of the domain. We hope to discuss not just how existing techniques from the community may be applicable to this problem domain, but more importantly what new research challenges this domain poses to the computational intelligence community,