SBIR-STTR Award

Linguastat, Inc. proposes to develop technology for Countering Cyber Terrorism through Internet Media by combining key components in a way that has not been done before: 1) Collecting a baseline data set of target terrorist group web sites as well as responses found on the open internet including blog comments, Twitter posts, and linking websites; 2) Using content analysis and linguistic processing to characterize the media mix and media messages used by terrorist groups as well as the statements made by respondents to build up a set of characteristic features found in terrorist internet media; 3) Using statistical language approaches to determine patterns of media messages, sentiments, and demographic cues found in the content; 4) Leveraging direct and indirect measures of effectiveness including blog comments, the link structure of the Web, and web traffic metrics; 5) Performing a regression analysis to correlate characteristic features with effectiveness and develop predictive models for determining the likelihood of influencing different types of behavior within respondents; 6) Designing a system to perform near real time content analysis terrorist group internet media campaigns and prediction of threat levels and likely behaviors.

Benefit:
Application is applicable to the intelligence, security i.e. psychological operations, influence operations, counter insurgency, cultural communications. Commercialization of this research is applicable to the Department of State, business intelligence and security programs, as well as the Department of Homeland Security. The marketing research models into the Islamic and Muslim communities could also provide insight into commercial advertising and marketing campaigns.

Keywords:
Information Ops, Influenceops, Marketing, Cultural, Behavior, Modeling, Cyber Terrorism, Quantitative Analysis