IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - July 2021 - 112

Feature Article:
DOI. No. 10.1109/MAES.2021.3065085
The Fusion of Human Data: A European Essay
Yvonne Hofstetter , University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhine-Sieg,
Sankt Augustin 53757, Germany
NOTHING NEW, BUT EVER MORE POWERFUL: MASS
SURVEILLANCE, DATA FUSION, ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE
In 2020, the world remembers a political miracle: 30 years
ago, two separate German states became one unified nation,
an unthinkable event most German citizens and politicians
did not dare to dream of until it really happened. The citizens
of the Warsaw Pact, in particular those of the former
communist German Democratic Republic, longed for an
everyday life without the cynical Berlin Wall and the iron
Curtain. Their greatest desire was freedom and democratic
power, and they weighed up:-freedom for totalitarian
coercion, social market economy for centralistic planning,
and private property for state property.
Thirty years later, that spirit has evaporated. People
are enthusiastic about the new, chic means of mass surveillance.
Smarthomes or workplaces that are closely
being monitored by employers; networked furniture;
online platforms from Instagram to Netflix; cars that are
always online; face recognition or an " Aktiv-App " for
social welfare recipients, in short: the ambient intelligence
[1], are integral to our daily life, which is no longer just
physical and analog, but also virtual and digital. What
once was silent, now spills data-Big Data, huge amounts
of measured data about individual human lives. Equipped
with sensors, uploaded artificial intelligence at the edge,
and fully networked, billions of objects, the Internet of
Everything, process information just as humans do. Sapiens
(as the individual user, or person, will be referred to in
this article) activates the objects surrounding him, making
them intelligible and cognitive. Environments turn into
artificial organisms, monitoring and fusing personal
human data, and analyzing and predicting Sapiens in order
Authors' current address: Yvonne Hofstetter, University
of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhine-Sieg, Sankt Augustin
53757, Germany (e-mail: yvonne.hofstetter@h-grs.de).
Manuscript received September 21, 2020; accepted
September 26, 2020, and ready for publication March 8,
2021.
Review handled byWolfgang Koch.
0885-8985/21/$26.00 ß 2021 IEEE
112
to always be one step ahead-of course merely serving as
a subservient " digital assistant. " Indeed, the world's transformation
into a mega computer seems to be very unselfish.
Technological pioneers targeting consumers are
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. They
are the Western world's tech elite, also referred to as Big
Tech. Google, for example, has launched an artificial
intelligence initiative and wants to position itself as a
" helper for people's everyday life. " And it is not only the
tech giant that uploads artificial intelligence to things.
Amazon's sales figures for Alexa, for example, continue
to rise. Twitter's social bots are appearing more human
than ever before. And a huge crowd of firms are following
these leaders. As ambient intelligence becomes mainstream,
every human being is about to share the planet not
only with eight million more individuals, but with an ever
growing number ofsmart machines.
Surveillance, data fusion, and artificial intelligence are
not new tools. Data fusion and predecessors of artificial
intelligence have been in use for military reconnaissance
and situation analysis for 25 years, remarkably in the field
of recognized air picture production. A well-known example
is the NATO AWACS E-3A aircraft as of its midterm
modernization 1997. The " eye in the sky " monitors the
airspace and collects data through different sensors. In
order to classify an aircraft as friend or foe, the system
fuses all available raw data: airspeed, radar cross-section,
and civil flight plans. But intelligent data fusion systems
and its three-step process (monitor-analyze-control)
are not only useful for military reconnaissance and as
components to command and control systems. Nowadays,
they also provide the base technology for any autonomous
system, from self-driving cars to autonomous drones.
Beyond the overhype of artificial intelligence, is there
an objective difference between today's artificial intelligence
and approaches from earlier decades? Certainly, it
is the availability of mass data. The amount of unstructured
data, such as sensor readings, images, texts or videos,
is exploding. In fact, the most valuable data is that
produced from human beings, rather than data generated
by objects such as industrial plants or critical infrastructures.
Human data, even if machine-generated by browser
cookies, smart phone sensors, electronic door locks, networked
vacuum robots, or digital insulin pumps, can be
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