New Technology To Help Find IED Weapons Caches
Screen shot of sample Google Earth output from SCARE compared with attack data for Baghdad. Predicted caches are yellow bulls-eyes, attacks are pink push-pins.
University of Maryland researchers have developed and successfully tested new computer software and computational techniques to analyze patterns of improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan or other locations and predict the locations of weapons caches that are used by insurgents to support those attacks.
Screen shot of sample Google Earth output from SCARE compared with attack data for Baghdad. Predicted caches are yellow bulls-eyes, attacks (those used for the reasoning of the predictions) are pink push-pins. Image Courtesy University of Maryland and Google Earth.
University of Maryland computer science Ph.D. student Paulo Shakarian and computer science Professor V.S. Subrahmanian, together with University of Torino (Italy) computer science Professor Maria-Luisa Sapino developed a new computational technique called geospatial abduction designed to help analysts locate caches of explosive weapons. Their resulting software, called SCARE (Spatio-Cultural Abductive Reasoning Engine) allows human analysts to combine available intelligence with this analytical computational technique to identify the most probable locations of IED weapons caches. The researchers say tests conducted with the SCARE software have been quite accurate. (more…)
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