Predicting Insurgent Attacks with a Mathematical Model
When bombs and bullets left 37 dead during Friday prayers at a mosque in Pakistan, earlier this month, the insurgency was using the element of surprise. Unpredictability is the hallmark of modern insurgent attacks such as this one. However, the likelihood of such events, their timing and strength can now be estimated and managed before occurring, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Miami. The study entitled “Common Ecology Quantifies Human Insurgency” is featured as the cover of the December 17, 2009 issue of the scientific journal Nature.
The University of Miami (UM) researchers and their collaborators analyzed the size and timing of 54,679 violent events reported in Afghanistan, Colombia, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Northern Ireland, Peru, Senegal and Sierra Leone. The findings show that there is a generic way in which humans carry out insurgency and terrorism when faced by a large powerful state force, and this is irrespective of background history, motivation, ideology, politics and location, explains Neil Johnson, principal investigator of the study and professor of Physics at the UM College of Arts and Sciences.
“We have found a unified model of modern insurgent wars that shows a fundamental pattern in the apparent chaos of wars,” says Johnson. “In practical terms, our analysis can be used to create and explore scenarios, make predictions and assess risks, for present and future wars.” (more…)
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…)
Military Scenerios Through Virtual Worlds
Advances in computerized modeling and prediction of group behavior, together with improvements in video game graphics, are making possible virtual worlds in which defense analysts can explore and predict results of many different possible military and policy actions, say computer science researchers at the University of Maryland in a commentary published in the November 27 issue of the journal Science.
“Defense analysts can understand the repercussions of their proposed recommendations for policy options or military actions by interacting with a virtual world environment….They can propose a policy option and walk skeptical commanders through a virtual world where the commander can literally ’see’ how things might play out. This process gives the commander a view of the most likely strengths and weaknesses of any particular course of action,” write authors V.S. Subrahmanian, a Maryland computer science professor and director of the University’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), and John Dickerson, a UMIACS computer science researcher.
Computer scientists now know pretty much how to do this, and have created a “pretty good chunk” of the computing theory and software required to build a virtual Afghanistan, Pakistan or another “world,” explains Subrahmanian, who notes that much of the leading edge of this work has been done at the University of Maryland. (more…)
Technology On Way to Forecasting Humanity’s Needs
Vespignani is the James H. Rudy Professor of Informatics and adjunct professor of physics and statistics at IU, where he is also the director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS) at IU's Pervasive Technology Institute and the IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing.
Much as meteorologists predict the path and intensity of hurricanes, Indiana University’s Alessandro Vespignani believes we will one day predict with unprecedented foresight, specificity and scale such things as the economic and social effects of billions of new Internet users in China and India, or the exact location and number of airline flights to cancel around the world in order to halt the spread of a pandemic.
In tomorrow’s (July 24) “Perspectives” section of the journal Science, Vespignani writes that advances in complex networks theory and modeling, along with access to new data, will enable humans to achieve true predictive power in areas never before imagined. This capability will be realized as the one wild card in the mix — the social behavior of large aggregates of humans — becomes more definable through progress in data gathering, new informatics tools and increases in computational power.
Researchers have already shown they can track the movement of as many as 100,000 people at a time over six months using mobile phone data, and use worldwide currency traffic as a proxy for human mobility. There are sensors and tags generating data at micro, one-to-one interaction levels, much as Bluetooth, Global Positioning Systems and WiFi leave behind detailed traces of our lives. (more…)
Predicting Pandemics Before They Happen
![“Once any significant number of cases are identified [in an area], the pandemic spread is virtually impossible to control," says industrial engineer Sandra Garrett.](http://x-journals.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/sandra-garrett.jpg "sandra-garrett")
“Once any significant number of cases are identified 9in an area0, the pandemic spread is virtually impossible to control," says industrial engineer Sandra Garrett.
“The goal is a public information and awareness system for pandemic with the same level of credibility, timeliness and visibility as storm-warning icons presented on television screens,” said Barrett Caldwell, a Purdue University associate professor of industrial engineering.
The system works by monitoring “event phases” of human behavior leading up to a pandemic, such as an increase in people purchasing flu-related medications or “foraging” on the Internet for certain types of information related to the flu.
Understanding these phases might be a way to overcome a fundamental hurdle in controlling pandemic: Conventional approaches require public-health officials to know when certain events leading to pandemic begin, Caldwell said. (more…)
Predicting Hotspots as Climate Change Shifts Global Wildfire Patterns
When it comes to global warming and wildfires, the bad news is that rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns that accompany climate change will make some areas more susceptible to outbreaks.
The good news is that by using thermal-infrared data from satellites, a group of scientists at University of California, Berkeley, and Texas Tech University has identified common characteristics associated with present-day global fire activity that may serve as predictors for future wildfire hotspots. The results of the study will be published April 7 in the journal PLoS ONE.
(more…)
Academia’s Suppression of Novel Ideas
AGAINST THE TIDE
A Critical Review by Scientists of
How Physics and Astronomy Get Done
Martín López Corredoira &
Carlos Castro Perelman (Eds.)
A book about scientists’ struggle against academia’s suppression of novel ideas:
Nobody should have a monopoly of the truth in this universe. The censorship and suppression of challenging ideas against the tide of mainstream research, the blacklisting of scientists, for instance, is neither the best way to do and filter science, nor to promote progress in the human knowledge. The removal of good and novel ideas from the scientific stage is very detrimental to the pursuit of the truth. There are instances in which a mere unqualified belief can occasionally be converted into a generally accepted scientific theory through the screening action of refereed literature and meetings planned by the scientific organizing committees and through the distribution of funds controlled by “club opinions”. It leads to unitary paradigms and unitary thinking not necessarily associated to the unique truth. This is the topic of this book: to critically analyze the problems of the official (and sometimes illicit) mechanisms under which current science (physics and astronomy in particular) is being administered and filtered today, along with the onerous consequences these mechanisms have on all of us. (more…)
Predicting the Future Spread of Infectious Diseases
As global warming raises concerns about potential spread of infectious diseases, a team of researchers has demonstrated a way to predict the expanding range of human disease vectors in a changing world.
Researchers from Australia and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have identified the key biological and environmental factors constraining a population of the dengue fever vector, the mosquito Aedes aegypti. In a study publishing online Jan. 28 in the British Ecological Society’s journal Functional Ecology, they report that climate changes in Australia during the next 40 years and the insect’s ability to adapt to new conditions may allow the mosquitoes to expand into several populated regions of the continent, increasing the risk of disease transmission. (more…)
Honing Our Visionary Skills
An Introduction to an issue of Visions magazine: This issue of Visions springs from the general observation that much of government’s vision for information technology is aimed really at making government more convenient for citizens. Not that this is a bad thing at all. On the contrary, it is highly desirable. But if we look across the world today with its multitude of social, political and economic problems, surely the bar can be raised much higher than that
Even the goal of increasing efficiency and productivity within government, catching up with the private sector in this regard, while again desirable, can hardly be called visionary.
Our view can be summed up very simply: if we really are in the throes of an information revolution that will drastically alter our society – as many social scientists have predicted – then our aspirations for technology should be equally revolutionary, if not visionary. (more…)
New Institute Applies Computer Power to Sustainability
Could a computer model help stabilize the tuna population? Can we compute how to transition to ethanol fuel without jeopardizing food production?
Those and other questions will be tackled by computer scientists, applied mathematicians, economists, biologists and environmental scientists affiliated with Cornell University’s new Institute for Computational Sustainability, being launched with a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). (more…)
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