Maritime piracy is the cause of widespread international concern, and the number of pirate attacks has increased substantially in recent years. Many commercial vessels are inherently vulnerable to attack because of their size and relative slowness, and technological improvements have resulted in smaller crews on large vessels, whilst the absence of enforcement agencies in international waters has served only to make pirates more daring. Collaborative human-centric information support systems can significantly improve the ability of every nation to predict and prevent pirate attacks, or to recognize the nature and size of an attack rapidly when prevention fails, and improve the collective response to an emergency. This book presents the papers delivered at the NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) Prediction and Recognition of Piracy Efforts Using Collaborative Human-Centric Information Systems, held in Salamanca, Spain, in September 2011. A significant observation from previous NATO Advanced Study Institutes and Workshops was that domain experts responsible for maritime security were not fully aware of the wide variety of technological solutions available to enhance their support systems, and that although technology experts have a general understanding of the requirements in security systems, they often lacked knowledge concerning the operational constraints affecting those who implement security procedures. This ASI involved both technology and domain experts, as well as students from related fields of study. It offered an opportunity for them to discuss the issues surrounding the prediction, recognition and deterrence of maritime piracy, and will be of interest to all those whose work is related to this internationally important issue.

The book emphasizes a contemporary view on the role of higher level fusion in designing crisis management systems, and provide the formal foundations, architecture and implementation strategies required for building dynamic current and future situational pictures, challenges of, and the state of the art computational approaches to designing such processes. This book integrates recent advances in decision theory with those in fusion methodology to define an end-to-end framework for decision support in crisis management. The text discusses modern fusion and decision support methods for dealing with heterogeneous and often unreliable, low fidelity, contradictory, and redundant data and information, as well as rare, unknown, unconventional or even unimaginable critical situations. Also the book examines the role of context in situation management, cognitive aspects of decision making and situation management, approaches to domain representation, visualization, as well as the role and exploitation of the social media. The editors include examples and case studies from the field of disaster management.