Research Summaries

Back Open Source Assessment of External Threats to Border Security in North Africa and the Middle East

Fiscal Year 2020
Division Graduate School of Operational & Information Sciences
Department Defense Analysis
Investigator(s) Warren, Timothy C.
Sponsor U.S. Department of State (Other-Fed)
Summary The Border Security and nonproliferation community faces an increasingly complex environment, characterized by new forms of "networked" actors, and diverse channels of social and political communication that are difficult or impossible to directly control. Analysts and planners thus find themselves contesting opponents on terrain that is informational, rather than physical, in contests that hinge crucially on the effective assessment of human narratives and sentiments. Security in such environments rests on the effective construction of state legitimacy, which in turn depends on the ability to understand, assess, and map the broad diversity of challenges to state consolidation. However, analysts currently lack the necessary tools for assessment in this informational domain.
Our approach seeks to turn the crisis of the flood of "big data" into an opportunity to tap into the burgeoning "open source" revolution. Our team's development of novel approaches to machine learning are now making it possible predict the emergence of threats to border security through systematic spatio-temporal mapping of the content of messages transmitted through open-source online media.
In particular, we aim to conduct a cross-lingual analysis of all available social media and mass media sources, to generate systematic spatio-temporal maps of communication patterns in North Africa and the Middle East, over the period 2014 - 2016. In particular, the contemporary security situation in North Africa and the Middle East present four key dimensions for analysis: Location, Identity, Fear, and Violence.
Keywords
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal