CrimeFighter: A Toolbox for Counterterrorism

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CrimeFighter A Toolbox for Counterterrorism

• Professor Uffe Kock Wiil
• Counterterrorism Research Lab
• The Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute
• University of Southern Denmark
• ukwiil_at_mmmi.sdu.dk

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Overview

• Counterterrorism Research Lab (CTRL)
• People, funding, collaborators, education
• Knowledge management approach
• Previous work
• Counterterrorism tool (iMiner)
• Tool for emergent structures (ASAP)
• CrimeFighter
• Knowledge management processes
• Tools and techniques

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Counterterrorism Research Lab

• People
• Associate Professor Nasrullah Memon
• investigative data mining, terrorism informatics,
  terrorism incident databases, web harvesting,
  mathematical models for analyzing, visualizing
  and destabilizing covert networks
• gt 40 papers on counterterrorism
• Professor Uffe Kock Wiil
• knowledge management, hypertext, software
  technology, computer-supported cooperative work,
  distributed systems
• gt 100 papers on knowledge management
• gt 1000 citations to papers
• Research Assistant Jolanta Gniadek
• Full time programmer is being hired
• Ph.D. student is being hired

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Counterterrorism Research Lab

• Funding
• 3 million DKK startup funding from University of
  Southern Denmark to establish CTRL
• Applied EU and Danish funding agencies for
  starting up additional research and development
  activities within CTRL
• Ph.D. students
• Research Assistants
• Programmers
• Visiting students from Asia (Master / Ph.D.)

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Counterterrorism Research Lab

• Collaborators
• Academic research partners all over the world
• Intelligence agencies
• Pakistani Intelligence Bureau
• Partner in EU project application
• May send 2-3 Ph.D. students to CTRL
• Open Source Intelligence Division, Ministry of
  Defense, The Netherlands
• Partner in EU project application
• Danish Military Intelligence (FET)
• Invited us to give a talk and discuss future
  collaboration

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Counterterrorism Research Lab

• Education
• Plan to start a new international master
  education in Intelligence and Security
  Informatics together with our collaborators

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Knowledge management approach

• Counterterrorism as knowledge work?
• Toolbox
• Knowledge base
• Software tools
• Techniques
• Investigative data mining, web harvesting, social
  network analysis, graph theory, knowledge
  management, handling emergent structure,
  knowledge base, visualization,
• Knowledge management support
• Automate existing tedious and time consuming
  activities
• Provide powerful tool support for manual
  activities
• Provide powerful tool support for new activities
• Knowledge worker
• Criminal investigator

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Knowledge pyramid
know- ledge information data
manual work
automated work
tool support
tool support
manual work
automated work
tool support
tool support
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iMiner a counterterrorism tool

• Principal investigator Nasrullah Memon
• Focus on automated activities
• Web harvesting
• Spider tools
• Knowledge base
• Terrorism incident database
• Investigative data mining
• Social network analysis
• Visualization
• Mathematical models for analyzing, visualizing
  and destabilizing covert networks

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iMiner a counterterrorism tool
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iMiner a counterterrorism tool

• Important results
• Memons Ph.D. dissertation
• gt 40 research papers
• Novel mathematical models for counterterrorism
• Novel algorithms for counterterrorism
• Used with success on real terrorism cases
  harvested from
• www.trackingthethreat.com

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ASAP a tool for emergent structures

• Principal investigator Uffe Kock Wiil
• Focus on supporting complex manual knowledge
  management activities where human creativity is
  needed
• Knowledge management
• Handling emergent structure
• Spatial hypertext structuring
• Structure parsing algorithms
• Versioning of knowledge structures

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ASAP a tool for emergent structures
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ASAP a tool for emergent structures

• Important results
• Current focus is on managing emergent structures
  for planning agile software projects
• Intuitive and easy to use tool
• Needs to be adjusted in some places to handle
  counterterrorism information
• A tool for handling emergent structures is
  central in the CrimeFighter toolbox

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CrimeFighter Toolbox idea

• Knowledge base
• Tools support different activities
• Data acquisition tools supporting web harvesting
• Knowledge structuring tools supporting emergent
  structures
• Explorer tools for searching, updating and
  exploring the knowledge base
• Algorithms for data mining
• Algorithms for visualization
• Algorithms for social network analysis (SNA)
• Algorithms for link analysis
• Etc.

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Toolbox idea
SNA tools
visualizer tools
known web sites
knowledge bases collected generated
knowledge
spider tools
explorer tool
other web sites
views
intelligence data
data mining tools
knowledge base tool
link analysis tools
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CrimeFighter Supported KM activities

• Data collection
• Information filtering
• Knowledge modeling
• Knowledge storing
• Knowledge structuring
• Knowledge processing
• Knowledge visualization

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CrimeFighter Supported KM activities
knowledge base
data collection
information filtering
knowledge modeling
knowledge storing
knowledge structuring
knowledge processing
knowledge visualization
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CrimeFighter Knowledge base

• Structure is just as important as information
  elements
• Techniques from
• Spatial hypertext
• Emergent structure
• Hypertext node link models
• Node and link types
• Graph theory
• Directed / undirected graphs
• Link analysis
• Weighted links

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CrimeFighter Techniques

• Web harvesting
• Investigative data mining
• Social network analysis
• Link analysis
• Graph theory
• Network visualization
• describe techniques in more detail!

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CrimeFighter Collaborators?

• We are looking for additional partners that would
  be interested in working with us
• Stage 1 Suggest toolbox functionality
  (requirements generation)
• Stage 2 Test and provide feedback on toolbox
  prototypes as part of the development process
• Stage 3 Use the toolbox on real intelligence
  data in your own secure settings and provide
  feedback on functionality, usability, etc.
• Stage 4 Commercialization turn the toolbox
  into a product

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Current status and future plans

• Research and development has started
• Overall toolbox specification has started
• Possible knowledge base formats are examined
• Different web harvesting tools are under
  development
• Specification of remaining tools and techniques
  has started
• We plan to write the first (overview) research
  paper on CrimeFighter before the summer 2009

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A quick note from Uffe

• Sorry that I could not make it!
• I was really looking forward to the event
• I hope that the event is successful
• My talk is unfortunately not quite finished
• I would have used time on the plane and at the
  hotel to finish it before the presentation
• I would have added more detail on iMiner
• I would have added more detail on the
  CrimeFighter techniques