Information Latency Study for DOD

I  suggest that there are important latency conditions in many parts of large networked systems.  For example in supply chains it can greatly change costs, effective responses, contract and goal compliance, risk analysis,  decision design integration, etc.    Information latency is always considered in such systems, but often not carefully enough.  Latency is a key kind of metadata, and should be included in a 'knowledge graph' to represent a problem in both its statement and in any automated approaches being designed.   - Franz

Research Team to Study Information Latency With $7.5M DOD Grant
By Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
 Virginia Tech researchers Walid Saad, Jeffrey Reed, and Thomas Hou

Information latency is a measure of how quickly or slowly networked devices transmit information. When the information being transmitted is for the military, understanding latency may be the deciding factor in the outcome of warfare.

That's one of the reasons the U.S. Department of Defense has now tapped the expertise of an interdisciplinary research team led by Virginia Tech to study latency and information freshness in military Internet of Things systems with a $7.5 million, five-year Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant.

The goal is to develop a novel foundational framework for guaranteeing low latency and information freshness in military networked systems, such as the Internet of Things, using a cutting-edge concept known as multimode age of information, which tightly ties in information latency with the dynamic networked military system.

The project will fundamentally define this new concept of information latency and provide a suite of tools to optimize multimode age of information in massive-scale military networked systems.

"Despite much progress being made in the study of military communications, the basic science for tracking, control, and optimization of information latency is yet to be developed," says principal investigator Jeffrey Reed, Willis G. Worcester Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. "In fact, a fundamental knowledge of information latency is crucial for our military to maintain information superiority on the battlefield."  ..... " 

(see more at link above)