Thursday, December 10, 2009

Spatio-Cultural Abductive Reasoning Engine

Captain Paulo Shakarian, a Ph.D. student in my lab, recently presented a project to which I contributed at the International Conference on Computational Cultural Dynamics (ICCCD 2009). SCARE, the Spatio-Cultural Abductive Reasoning Engine, describes a software system we implemented that analyzes patterns of improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in a war zone in an effort to predict the locations of insurgent-run weapons caches.

The test data used -- publicly available records of IED attacks in Baghdad over the last twenty-one months -- provided a way to test the predictive algorithms. After training on the first seven months of data, the SCARE system accurately predicted (within 0.5km) the locations of real weapons caches found in the region during that time period.

The paper describing this work is located here. The SCARE system is online here. You'll need the Google Earth plugin and an LCCD-provided login.



The video above is provided as a tutorial to those using the SCARE system. For the tutorial, we use publicly available data on a series of church burglaries in the St. Paul, Minnesota area. Please excuse the voice-over!

Popular Science has a nice article on the project here.

Media Coverage
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