Sunday September 16, 02:00 PM
NRI scientists' software predicts political, economic and social group's behaviours |
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By ANI
Washington, Sept 16 (ANI): An Indian origin researcher at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) has developed a computer analysis software that can help policymakers or military planners predict the behaviour of political, economic, and social groups, predictions that can be critical for success of antiterrorism, military or diplomatic actions.
The study in the September 14 issue of the journal Science looks at these new computer models and databases that provide rapid information on terrorists or on the cultural and political climate on the ground in regions of critical interest, said UMIACS Director V.S. Subrahmanian.
Subrahmanian cited the example of the 2001 US military action against al Qaeda in the Middle East.
He said US commanders probably knew where Osama bin Laden was, but were unable to prevent his escape, in part because inadequate cultural knowledge prevented troops on the ground from successfully negotiating with local tribesmen.
Such failures could, however, be prevented if decision makers had access to all pertinent data and to accurate models of the behaviours of the relevant groups, he said.
According to Subrahmanian, the new tool tracks information about foreign groups in sources ranging from news sources to blogs to online video libraries.
The software almost instantly searches the entire Internet for information/links for a terrorist suspect or other particular person, group, of interest.
Subrahmanian said the team has, moreover, developed methods - in conjunction with social scientists at the University of Maryland, who have studied world trouble spots - to extract rules governing the behaviours of different groups in foreign countries.
For example, the scientists have already extracted 14,000 rules about the Hezbollah alone, Subrahmanian said.
"Currently we are able to find the most probable sets of actions a group could take when there are up to 10 to the power of 27 (i.e. 10 with 27 zeros after it) possible sets of actions the group can take," said Subrahmanian.
"Compare this with the number of atoms on earth which is about 10 to the power of 50," he said. (ANI)
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