The Video Event Awareness System (VEAS) analyzes surveillance video streams from thousands of video cameras and automatically detects complex events in near real-time - at pace with their input video streams. For events of interest to security personnel, VEAS generates and routes alerts and related video evidence to subscribing security personnel.

Awareness-enabled coordination (AEC) is a platform designed to address the problem of scaling collaboration to large multi-organizational teams. Such collaboration is inhibited by the complexity in multi-organizational environments and lack of efficiency in achieving team objectives. AEC provides a contextualization mechanism that deals with such complex, real world environments where teams involve humans, tools, software services, and agents that come from different organizations, are subject to multiple jurisdictions, and provide diverse expertise. To provide efficiency in achieving team objectives, AEC provides situation- and project-related awareness, as well as process-based coordination and automation. We describe the AEC architecture and discuss AEC models and mechanisms for computing awareness and coordinating action. We use examples from the homeland security domain to illustrate these AEC technical capabilities and their benefits

Operation support systems (OSSs) integrate software components and network elements to automate the provisioning and monitoring of telecommunications services. This paper illustrates Telcordia's Cable OSS and shows how customers may use this OSS to provision IP and telephone services over the cable infrastructure. Telcordia's Cable OSS is a process-based application, i.e. a collection of flows, specialized components (e.g. a billing system, a call agent soft switch, network services and elements, cable modems, etc.) and corresponding adaptors that are integrated, coordinated and monitored using CMI (Collaboration Management Infrastructure), Telcordia's advanced process-based integration technology. Customers interact with the Cable OSS by using Web or IVR (interactive voice response) interfaces.

Collaboration management involves capturing the collaboration process, coordinating the activities of the participating applications and humans, and/or providing awareness, i.e. information that is highly relevant to a specific role and situation of a process participant. In this paper, we propose an awareness provisioning solution that allows focusing, customizing, and temporally constraining the awareness delivered to each process participant. Unlike existing collaboration management technologies (such as workflow and groupware) that provide only a few built-in awareness choices, the proposed awareness solution allows the specification of what information is to be given to what users and at what time. To support this advanced level of awareness, we require the definition of awareness roles and the specification of corresponding awareness descriptions. Awareness roles can be dynamically created and associated with any process scope. Awareness descriptions define what information is to be given to users in an awareness role. Since awareness roles are created or become visible when they are needed, the existence of an awareness role also determines the appropriate time interval during which the information specified in the awareness description can be delivered. This awareness provisioning approach minimizes information overloading and allows the combination of process-relevant information with external information as needed by the process participants. The proposed awareness provisioning solution is employed by the Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI), a federated system for collaboration process management. In this paper, we introduce an Awareness Model (AM) for creating awareness specifications and defining related execution semantics. Awareness specifications in AM are specialized composite event specifications that define patterns of process-related events and external events, as well as how information should be digested from them. We also describe the implementation of CMI's awareness provisioning engine and related tools.

Processes for crisis mitigation must permit coordination flexibility and dynamic change to empower crisis mitigation coordinators and experts to deal with unexpected situations. However, such mitigation processes must also provide enough structure to prevent chaotic response and increase mitigation effectiveness. Such combination of structure and flexibility cannot be effectively supported by existing workflow or groupware technologies. In this paper, we introduce the Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI) and describe its capabilities for supporting crisis mitigation processes. CMI provides a comprehensive Collaboration Management Model (CMM) and a corresponding federated system. CMM supports process templates that provide the initial activities, control and data flow structure, and resources needed to start mitigating a variety of crisis situations. In the event of a crisis, the appropriate process template is selected and instantiated. Crisis mitigation is achieved by escalating the instantiated process template. Escalation involves selecting and adding new process templates, creating new activities, roles, and task forces as needed to deal with the current demands in the crisis, and delegating responsibilities to process participants and task forces. CMM provides advanced composable primitives that empower crisis mitigation coordinators and experts to escalate the process. We provide an overview of the implementation of a federated CMI system and discuss our initial experience with various applications in the area of crisis management.

The Collaboration Management lnfrastructure (CMI) has been developed at MCC to manage collaboration processes in both traditional and virtual enterprises, and to provide combined process and situation awareness. CMI technology development is driven by the requirements of many advanced applications provided by the companies that are members of the consortial CMI project. Such advanced applications include crisis mitigation, command and control, logistics, and service provisioning in virtual enterprises. These applications are not effectively supported by existing workflow and groupware technologies. To address the requirements imposed by these applications CMI provides a sophisticated Collaboration Management Model (CMM) and a corresponding component-oriented system that implements the CMM. CMM draws existing primitives from workflow and groupware models and introduces new primitives that address previously unsupported requirements of the CMI driver applications. In this paper, a crisis mitigation application is presented that involves several process templates which are extended dynamically as details about the crisis become known.

Collaboration management involves capturing the collaboration process, coordinating the activities of the participating applications and humans, and/or providing awareness, i.e., information that is highly relevant to a specific role and situation of a process participant. We propose an awareness provisioning solution that allows customization of the awareness delivered to each process participant. Unlike existing collaboration management technologies (such as workflow and groupware) that provide only a few built-in awareness choices, the proposed awareness solution allows the specification of what information is to be given to what users and at what time. To support this advanced level of awareness, we require the definition of awareness roles and the specification of corresponding awareness descriptions. Awareness roles can be dynamically created and associated with any process scope. Awareness descriptions define what information is to be given to users in an awareness role. Since awareness roles are created or become visible when they are needed, the existence of an awareness role also determines the appropriate time interval during which the information specified in the awareness description can be delivered. This customized awareness provisioning approach minimizes information overloading and allows the combination of process-relevant information with external information as needed by the process participants. The proposed awareness provisioning solution is employed by the Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI), a federated system for collaboration process management. Examples from the crisis management domain are presented.