What is it about?
A network of information fusion can be drawn as a coloured, decorated tangle (of string?) rather than as a labeled directed graph. The information fusion algorithms used must have a reversibility property (no information is lost in fusion) and no-double-counting property (all redundancy is eliminated).
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Why is it important?
Tangled strings are flexible and can be shifted about. The action of moving strands relates to the process of switching between different information flows to "achieve the same goal" but at different cost. From amongst these we can select a "best" way to achieve that goal. This concept, which originates in low dimensional topology, might be used in the future to design and to analyze self-optimizing fault-tolerant information fusion networks.
Perspectives
In mathematics, there is a field called "knot theory". Knots, or rather diagrams of knots, have proven to be unreasonably effective at providing insights about other parts of mathematics. I have felt for a long time that this is because knots can actually "express something" in the real world, just as numbers express quantities of objects. This paper is one such interpretation. On the one hand it's an example because the setting is one of sensor fusion. But on the other hand it gets at something quite universal, because so many things in our world can be thought of as fusion of information. Really, I think that there are underlying low dimensional topological aspects to information theory itself, and this paper is one step along a journey to reveal them.
Dr Daniel Moskovich
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Low Dimensional Topology of Information Fusion, January 2015, Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering (ICST),
DOI: 10.4108/icst.bict.2014.258005.
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