Briefs

DoD analysts can use it to try and forecast terrorists' plans

By Jaikumar Vijayan, February 26, 2008 (Computerworld)

Can terrorist groups' past behavior help predict what they might do in different situations in the future?

To a large extent, yes, according to researchers at the University of Maryland who have developed a portal that policy analysts and counter-terrorism groups can use to forecast terrorist behavior based on past actions.

"This is intended as a platform and an environment [that] Department of Defense (DoD) analysts and others involved in counter-terrorism can use as a way to learn how these groups are operating based on real data," said V.S. Subrahmanian, computer science professor and director of the University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).

The SOMA Terror Organization Portal (STOP) uses publicly available data on more than 110 terror groups from around the world. It uses a real-time data extraction tool called T-REX to scour and extract data from more than 128,000 articles a day on average from 180 news sites in 93 countries. That data is organized into tables with multiple rows and columns. Each row represents a different year, while each column consists of a variable associated with the group, such as an attack it might have carried out, any counter-measures taken against it by a government, or the level of financial support the group gets from supporters.

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