Call for Papers: Link Analysis, Counterterrorism and Security

The Call for the LACTS 2009 workshop is now available here.

The workshop takes place at the SIAM Data Mining Conference and brings together academics, practitioners, law enforcement, and intelligence people to talk about leading-edge work in the area of adversarial data analysis.

The workshop is intended primarily for early-stage work. The proceedings are published electronically, but authors may retain copyright.

The deadline for submissions is probably late December, but perhaps a little later (still being decided).

Knowledge Discovery for Counterterrorism and Law Enforcement

My new book, Knowledge Discovery for Counterterrorism and Law Enforcement, is out. You can buy a copy from:

The publisher’s website

Amazon.

(Despite what these pages say, the book is available or will be within a day or two.)

As the holiday season approaches, perhaps you have a relative who’s in law enforcement, or intelligence, or security? What could be better than a book! Or maybe you’d like to buy one for yourself.

(A portion of the price of this book goes to support deserving university faculty.)

Using private documents to improve search in public documents

I’m back from the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, and the 5th Workshop on Link Analysis, Counterterrorism, and Security, which I helped to organize. The workshop papers are now online, along with some open problems that were discussed at the end of the workshop.

I’ll post about some ideas that were tossed around at the workshop and conference in the next few days.

Let me start by talking about the work of Roger Bradford. Information retrieval starts from a document-term matrix, which is typically extremely large and sparse, and then reduces the dimensionality by using an SVD, a process sometimes called latent semantic indexing. This creates a representation space for both documents and terms. A query is treated as if it were a kind of short document and mapped into this representation space. Its near neighbours are then the documents retrieved in response to the query; and they can be sorted in decreasing distance from the query point as well.

Bradford showed that the original space can be built using a set of private documents and a set of public documents, and that the resulting representation space allows better retrieval performance than the space derived from the public documents, without allowing the properties of the private documents to be inferred.

In fact, the set of private documents can be diluted by mixing them with other documents before the process starts, making it even more difficult to work backwards to the private documents.

This process has a number of applications that he talks about in the paper. One of the most interesting is that it allows different organizations, for example allies, to share sensitive information without compromising it to each other — and still get the benefits of the relationships in the full set of documents.

Workshop and Link Analysis, Counterterrorism, and Security

If you’re interested in the content of this blog, and you live in the Atlanta area, you might be interested in coming to LACTS, the Workshop on Link Analysis, Counterterrorism, and Security. It’s being held on April 26th (Saturday) as part of the SIAM International Data Mining Conference. A one-day registration deal is available.

The proceedings will also be available online, both via my website and from SIAM after the workshop.

Here is the schedule:

0825-0830: Introduction
Antonio Badia and David Skillicorn

0830-0900: Detecting Hidden Passages in Documents
Saket S.R. Mengle and Nazli Goharian

0900-0930: Exploiting Sensitive Information in Background Mode using Latent Semantic Indexing
R. B. Bradford

0930-1000: Topic Detection Using Independent Component Analysis
Scott Grant, David Skillicorn, and James R. Cordy

1000-1030: Coffee Break

1030-1100: Using AI for Sensemaking in Investigative Analysis
Summer Adams, Ashok K. Goel, and Neha Sugandh

1100-1130: Vulnerability Assessment on Adversarial Organization: Unifying Command and Control Structure Analysis and Social Network Analysis
Il-Chul Moon, Kathleen M. Carley, and Alexander H. Levis

1130-1200: Torus Graph Inference for Detection of Localized Activity
Elizabeth A. Beer, Carey E. Priebe, and Edward R. Scheinerman

1200-1330: Lunch (on your own)

1330-1430: Workshop Keynote: “The Road to Link Intelligence”
Sherry Marcus, 21st Century Technologies.

1430-1500: Enhancing the Automated Analysis of Criminal Careers
Tim K. Cocx, Walter A. Kosters, and Jeroen F.J. Laros

1500-1530: Summarization and Information Loss in Network Analysis
Jamie F. Olson and Kathleen M. Carley

1530-1545: Summing Up
Antonio Badia and David Skillicorn