Speaker will discuss applying dynamic network analysis to counterterrorism

released October 04, 2005

The next seminar in the Center for Advanced Study Age of Networks series will feature Kathleen Carley, a professor at the Institute for Software Research International in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Carley's talk, "Dynamic Network Analysis Applied to Counterterrorism," will be at 4 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 24 in 1404 Siebel Center. A reception will be held after the talk in the second floor atrium.

Dynamic network analysis (DNA) centers on the collection, analysis, understanding, and prediction of dynamic relations (such as who talks to whom and who knows what) and the impact of such dynamics on individual and group behavior. DNA facilitates reasoning about real groups as complex dynamic systems that evolve over time. In her talk, Carley will describe a basic tool chain for DNA and will illustrate their use by examining al Qaeda. The technology described enables an analyst to identify vulnerabilities in the terrorist network and to assess how that network might change in response to strategic interventions.

Carley is the director of the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS), an interdisciplinary center that brings together network analysis, computer science, and organization science. Her research combines cognitive science, dynamic social networks, text processing, organizations, social and computer science in a variety of theoretical and applied venues. Her specific research areas are computational social and organization theory; dynamic social networks; multi-agent network models; group, organizational, and social adaptation, and evolution; statistical models for dynamic network analysis and evolution, computational text analysis, and the impact of telecommunication technologies on communication and information diffusion within and among groups. She is the lead developer of ORGAHEAD, a tool for examining organizational adaptation, CONSTRUCT-TM, a computational model of the co-evolution of people and social Networks, DyNet, a computational model for network destabilization, BioWar a city-scale multi-agent network model of weaponized biological attacks, and MECA and AutoMap, which are computational tools for automated text analysis.

 

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