Terror net

A team of computational scientists are using new approaches to track the moves of terrorists and extremists online.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies, Hsinchun Chen and his Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona have created the Dark Web project, which aims to systematically collect and analyse all terrorist-generated content on the web.

Because of its vital role in coordinating terror activities, analysing web content has become increasingly important to the intelligence agencies and research communities that monitor these groups, yet the sheer amount of material to be analysed is so great that it can quickly overwhelm traditional methods of monitoring and surveillance.

This is where the Dark Web project comes in. Using advanced techniques such as web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis, Chen and his team can find, catalogue and analyse extremist activities online.

According to Chen, scenarios involving vast amounts of information and data points are ideal challenges for computational scientists, who use the power of advanced computers and applications to find patterns and connections where humans can not.