SBIR-STTR Award

Although a number of political governance and human rights indicators have been developed over the years, there are no analytical models that map these societal indicators to future radicalization. Here, we propose to research and develop an analytical software tool, PSIR (Predictive Societal Indicators of Radicalism) that predicts future radicalization based on current and historical societal indicators. For the societal indicators, we will evaluate scored political governance indicators collected in comparative political science research. For the radicalization metrics, we propose to develop a scoring process based that uses our in-house geocultural knowledge and statistics based on the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base. We propose to develop models that find the causal relationships between the societal indicators and radicalism metrics, and the parameters that define quantitatively the dependency among these indicators. Our tool will enable the analysis and prediction of radicalization across various dimensions, different regions, and countries in a GIS visualization environment. Our approach also learns the temporal evolution of these indicators so that the analysts can make predictions on future value of radicalization based on changes in current conditions. Our tool will help commanders develop more effective plans that address the cycle of behaviors sustaining criminal activity and IED networks.

Keywords:
Prediction, Behavior Analysis, Improvised Explosive Device, Multi-Sensor Fusion, Pattern Analysis, Trends, Societal Indicators, Governance Indicators

IED and related attacks are symptoms of local instability.  Military doctrine COIN and the recently released Stability Operations (SO) Field Manuals defines key stability indicators (security, economic, essential services, governance, grievances) which can be used to represent root causes of instability. With COIN and SO doctrine providing a blueprint for our development, we propose to develop a Campaign Design Tool for Stability (and COIN) Operations that codifies the data and analytics proscribed in the blueprint, and leverages the multitude of global databases built over decades on governance, economics, grievances, and the like as context, thus responding to the doctrine that calls for the SO Commander not only be a warrior but also be a diplomat, economist, governor, and director of infrastructure services such as transportation, water, electricity.  Our tool enables the operational commander to make strategic decisions and resource allocation plans that result in the desired end states, thus promoting stability and diminishing the threat from IEDs.   Our Phase II approach is informed by our Phase I analysis in that our proposed model uses Belief networks where quantitative domain data is available, and supplants this model with domain expert knowledge to fill the gaps between the islands of data.  

Benefit:
The software that will be developed in this project is most relevant to the following markets: (1) PRT and SSTR communities, (2) COIN and military intelligence, (3) the Enterprise Social Network technology providers, and (4) foreign policy and international aid planning.

Keywords:
Space Radar, Hrr, Isar, Multi-Sensor Tracking And Fusion, Sensor Fusion, Gmti, Smti