FUSION 2001 Fourth International Conference on Information Fusion

FUSION 2001 provided a forum for fusion research, applications, and technological advances by scientists and engineers working in all aspects of information and data fusion techniques and systems. This Fourth incarnation of the International Conferences on Information Fusion was held on behalf of the International Society on Information Fusion (ISIF) in Montréal (Québec, Canada) from August 7-10 2001, during a record-breaking heat wave (35 days without rain!). Systems (MITACS), and was under technical co-sponsorship of the IEEE AES Society. Montréal is a bilingual cosmopolitan New World city, where French and English co-exist amicably. The chosen venue was the 30-story Delta Centre-Ville hotel, which accommodated both the conference grounds and reserved guest rooms at reduced rate for participants. Centrally located, close to historic Old Montréal, Chinatown, and only minutes away on foot from the downtown. Museums and restaurants abound in the area and were certainly well sampled by the 261 participants. The buffet-style banquet was held in the rotating penthouse restaurant Tour de Ville which gave the attendees a view of the city and the harbor and featured Canadian Cuisine from Coast to Coast. Catering for the breakfasts, coffee breaks and lunches, all of which were included with the registration, earned many plaudits. Conference topics covered theoretical and technical advances for fusion algorithms and systems, and provided real-world applications. There were 146 technical contributions from 304 authors representing 19 countries. The format of the technical program allowed for a 25 minute presentation, and were distributed in 3 parallel sessions from 10 AM until slightly past 6 PM. There were also 7 organized sessions onHypothesis Tracking (Larry Stone, 5 papers). For more information, visit www.crm.umontreal.ca/fusion, which will be continually updated with conference statistics and photographs of lecturers and participants alike. Each morning started with a plenary talk that attempted to give an overview of fusion applications not covered by the conference. On Tuesday, the Canadian Astronaut Bjarni Tryggvason described the exhaustive space applications with which he is quite familiar, while providing the message that scientists from different disciplines should learn to fuse their research results in their