Software can analyze, forecast terrorism

U.S. scientists have developed a software program that can analyze threats and forecast acts of terrorism.

Researchers at the University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies created the Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents, or SOMA, Terror Organization Portal, allowing analysts to query automatically learned rules on terrorist organization behavior, forecast potential behavior based on those rules and communicate with other analysts examining the same subjects.

The scientists said SOMA is a formal, logical-statistical reasoning framework that uses data about past behavior of terror groups to generate rules about the likely behavior of each of about 30 groups.

SOMA is a significant joint computer science and social science achievement that will facilitate learning about and forecasting terrorist group behavior based on rigorous mathematical and computational models, said Professor V.S. Subrahmanian, the project's lead investigator.

The project is funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Copyright 2008 by United Press International