European Intelligence
and Security Informatics Conference (EISIC) 2012
August 22-24, 2012
Odense, Denmark

The Premier European Conference on Counterterrorism and Criminology

EISIC 2012 Keynote Speech


James R. (Bob) Johnson

Title:
"Detecting Emergent Terrorism Events: Finding Needles in Information Haystacks"


Speaker:
Dr. James R. (Bob) Johnson
Former Chief Scientist, Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems,
Research Scientist, University of Texas at Dallas
Vice President, ADB Consulting LLC

Abstract

Terrorist groups tend to develop unconventional ways to disrupt or destroy economic and critical infrastructures. Examples of unconventional methods include setting up cyber-attack cells to disrupt critical infrastructures; using unmonitored financial resources to disrupt or bankrupt national economies; and establishing organizations within countries to desensitize the population to terrorist objectives. Sometimes there are patterns, but most often there are no obvious patterns. This presentation addresses the detection of emergent terrorist events by finding critical pieces of information buried in large volumes of data spanning many disparate data sources.

The first part of this talk defines the needle in the haystack problem and discusses the associated informatics issues. Disciplines such as computer science, law enforcement, intelligence, and health, are shown to have common technical issues such as searching through large volumes of unstructured text and across confidential databases as well as to have unique technical issues.

The second part of this presentation explores various example terrorist threats and how needles in the information haystack space could be identified; how hypothesis development and vetting techniques can lay a foundation for data collection using data mining approaches; and how analysis shaped by plausible means can be contrasted with the vulnerabilities and accessibilities of the terrorist objectives.

The last part of this presentation focuses on future research areas needed to expand the ability to detect needles in haystacks. The suggested research areas span the informatics domain and include new policies, hypothesis-based analysis, and data access techniques.

In summary, the presentation addresses the identification of unknown and unexpected needles in information haystacks for the purpose of identifying emergent terrorist activities. Specific examples and suggested research areas are provided.

James R. (Bob) Johnson, Ph.D.

James R. (Bob) Johnson has been working in the knowledge discovery and information systems areas for over 30 years. As the Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems Chief Scientist, Dr. Johnson was a senior advisor to high level US intelligence and military leaders. He was instrumental in establishing data visualization, data mining, and hypothesis generation for free text data sources at major federal information centers. Techniques were developed for rapidly searching and constructing situational pictures for large volumes of free text data. Dr. Johnson published over 50 papers on intelligence and data characterization techniques.

As a Vice President of ADB Consulting, he has lead the development of data mining and visualization approaches and operational deployment of a Greek Olympics terrorist threat alerting capability, a multi-disciplinary regional fusion system, and a law enforcement intelligence system. The Olympics alerting capability utilized Internet news and blogs as input to models of terrorist threats to Olympic venues and critical hotels, embassies and other official locations. Alerts were provided daily to the senior level of the Greek Ministry of Defence. As architect and advisor to the Chief of the North Central Texas Fusion System, data from hundreds of law enforcement agencies, hospitals, emergency response centers, schools and security organizations of large corporations were brought together into a common data format for analysts and epidemiologists to make decisions on emerging threats to a 16-county region of over 7 million people. Data from these various disciplines was secured and protected against improper access. A law enforcement intelligence system was developed for a major city. Real-time automated queries were performed of their SQL database to draw attention to activities involving part 1 offenders and of Internet sites to identify threats to dignitaries and threats from gangs.

He currently works as a research scientist with a University of Texas at Dallas, Department of Computer Science team including Bhavani Thuraisingham, Latifur Khan, and Anita Miller. The team has published six papers in the area of informatics techniques for the detection of related information of interest across free text law enforcement documents.