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Collaborative analytics for biological facility characterization

Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

Caswell, Jacob C.; Cairns, Kelsey L.; Ting, Christina T.; Hansberger, Mark W.; Stoebner, Matthew A.; Brounstein, Tom R.; Cueller, Christopher R.; Jurrus, Elizabeth R.

Thousands of facilities worldwide are engaged in biological research activities. One of DTRA's missions is to fully understand the types of facilities involved in collecting, investigating, and storing biological materials. This characterization enables DTRA to increase situational awareness and identify potential partners focused on biodefense and biosecurity. As a result of this mission, DTRA created a database to identify biological facilities from publicly available, open-source information. This paper describes an on-going effort to automate data collection and entry of facilities into this database. To frame our analysis more concretely, we consider the following motivating question: How would a decision maker respond to a pathogen outbreak during the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea? To address this question, we aim to further characterize the existing South Korean facilities in DTRA's database, and to identify new candidate facilities for entry, so that decision makers can identify local facilities properly equipped to assist and respond to an event. We employ text and social analytics on bibliometric data from South Korean facilities and a list of select pathogen agents to identify patterns and relationships within scientific publication graphs.

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Social Media Account Resolution and Verification

Brounstein, Tom R.

In this SAND report, we discuss various authorship attribution techniques for social media platforms to identify separate accounts controlled by one user. We look at three main categories of techniques: stylometric, semantic, and temporal, and we test several algorithms in each category. We then combine these techniques to increase predictive power, and perform cross-platform account verification on Twitter and Stack Exchange datasets. Additionally, we briefly examine graphical techniques, and analyze the predictive power of unsupervised approaches. Finally, we apply our techniques to unbalanced data sets. Our experiments reveal that normalized compression distance shows great promise in analyzing social media.

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Inferring Organizational Structure from Behavior

Bauer, Travis L.; Brounstein, Tom R.

In this project, we researched new techniques for detecting hidden networks of individuals and institutions by introducing the use of temporal correlations among behaviors, leveraging both information sources and metadata. We validated the algorithms using the Wikipedia edit history. The rapid increase in crowd-sourced applications like Wikipedia is providing a rich set of data with both a record of behaviors and a set of direct interactions among individuals. Data sets with network ground truth are needed to develop and validate models, before applying them to national security settings where content and meta-data alone are available.

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9 Results
9 Results