John Bohannon Presenter: Mustafa Kilavuz

 Shyam Sankar proposes looking at the geospatial distribution of significant acts on the map of Baghdad.  They investigate the bars on the map indicating the daily acts in April and May 2008 such as:  Suicide bombings  Mortar attacks  Improvised explosive device (IED) detonations

 As they go through the timeline they find dense events in Sadr City District.  The attacks seem to be correlated over time and space with the construction of this security wall, forming a line.  This information is important to predict the insurgents’ next moves.

 Sinensky works on a social network with the Naval Postgraduate School that shows the people connected to Noordin Mohammed Top who is Southeast Asia’s most wanted terrorist.  The graph represents the suspects’ known communications and relationships, as well as their known involvement with terrorist plots.

 Sinensky applies betweenness, centrality, and eigenvector centrality and they see Noordin is the first in the list.  How about the second and the third names?  After September 11 attacks social networks were used more in the warfare analysis.  Some in the U.S. military worries about they put too much faith in it.  One former U.S. official claims that they led to unethical practices.

 It emerged that the 9/11 attacks were not work of a government but a team of international terrorists: 19 hijackers and dozens of supporters (funding, logistic).  The intelligence community was desperate for any help they could get to prevent another attack.  Valdis Krebs made a social network from the information on the news: meetings, residences, and financial transections.

 Mohammed Atta scored highest on  Degrees: Intensity of his activity  Closeness: Ability to access others  Betweenness: Control over the flow in the network  He was the ringleader and a member of Al- Qaeda

 By 2003, U.S. defense officials expanded the network by including insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The results disappointed Krebs. It didn’t really work to catch the bad guys.

 They were good at modeling a static network but this network was highly dynamic. When someone dies or caught, someone else replaced him with own relations.  Noise increased as the graph grew.  Mathematical analysis was not enough by itself. Social analysis were needed.  Pizza delivery guy problem

 After bombing in London on July 7, 2005, a report is issued called “Could 7/7 Have Been Prevented?”  Using network analysis, the researchers traced the relations between plotters.  The result: “A hairball”

 Ian McCulloh, a U.S. Army major, proposed a technique called “dynamic metanetwork analysis” which can adapt the change over time.  Instead of having a “who” network, different layers storing information about when, what, where and why are needed.  Carley, McCulloh’s advisor from the university, developed a computer program (ORA) that finds people who are a threat by using both mathematical and social metrics.

 McCulloh and Carley investigated 1500 videos made by insurgents in Iraq.  As of March 2006, 3 of 4 U.S. soldier deaths were on tapes.  They extracted a big network out of these tapes which is kept as secret.  The actions taken according to this network reduced the sniper activities 70% and also reduced the IED deaths.

 Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist, doesn’t believe that the network works. According to him, there could be many reasons that the numbers drop.  Carley just counters that Sageman doesn’t get the methods.  The army established a network science center in Aberdeen, Maryland 2 years ago.  This year U.S. Army Research Lab is committing $162 million to research on “network-centric warfare”.  Carley is one of the academics applying for funding.