BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Memento EPFL// BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:IC Colloquium - Reshaping Terrorist Networks DTSTART:20131111T161500 DTEND:20131111T173000 DTSTAMP:20260408T105208Z UID:43d7c222743e915bd7b7f47f1e6d2ed10b37b106110620ca28b41c55 CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars DESCRIPTION:VS Subrahmanian - University of Maryland\nAbstract:\nThough te rrorist networks have been extensively studied\, there has been limited wo rk on destabilizing them. We look at the problem of removing "k" people fr om a terror network (e.g. by capturing them\, buying them off\, relocating them) in order to minimize the operational effectiveness of the network. We solve this via 3 steps: (i) we develop a framework to predict who succe eds a terrorist when he is ``removed''. (ii) When a set of terrorists is r emoved\, we show how to infer a probability distribution on the resulting possible new networks. (iii) Using the solutions to the previous two probl ems\, we find a set of "k" people to remove from a terror network so that the expected effectiveness of the resulting network is minimized. We test our solutions to the first  problem using (i) a synthetic data set and (i i) data sets on terror networks associated with 4 terror groups. For the t hird problem\, we test our approach by comparing with expert opinion on da ta about 4 terror groups. Joint work with Francesca Spezzano and Aaron Man nes.Biography:\nVS Subrahmanian is a Professor in the Department of Comput er Science\, Director of the Center for Digital International Government ( CDIG)\, and Co-Director of the Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynam ics (LCCD) at the University of Maryland. From 2004 to 2010\, he was Direc tor of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) at the Univers ity of Maryland. He received the NSF National Young Investigator Award in 1993 and the Distinguished Young Scientist Award from the Maryland Science Center/Maryland Academy of Science in 1997. His research is at the inters ection of databases\, artificial intelligence\, and optimization methods w ith applications to tracking\, monitoring and forecasting behaviors of ter rorist groups\, socio-cultural groups\, global health care\, and other are as relevant to most human beings.  His work in AI spans rule-based expert systems and logic programs\, nonmonotonic reasoning\, probabilistic reaso ning\, temporal reasoning\, hybrid reasoning\, and software agents. His wo rk in databases focuses on heterogeneous database integration and interope rability\, logic databases\, probabilistic databases\, and multimedia data bases. In the last few years\, he has been studying how to reason about ma ssive collections of multilingual document collections and mine them for s entiment/opinion information as well as how to mine ontologies directly fr om text. He has applied his work to the study of foreign cultures and terr orist groups with a view to automatically extracting data about a group's organization and activities and mining this information in order to build stochastic behavioral models of the group which\, in turn\, can be used to come up with forecasts of future behavior of the group. LOCATION:BC 420 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20420 STATUS:CONFIRMED END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR