Building Intent

From MilcordWiki

Overview

The urban terrain shapes the strategy and tactics of both our adversaries and our military in the Global War on Terror. Hostile actors use man-made structures (facilities, buildings) for specific tasks and purposes (planning, supply, reconnaissance). The structures they use can be profiled in terms of their attributes (location, size, access, features, egress, utilities) and their utility (safe house, IED factory, observation post).

Building Intent is a data-driven, decision aid for facility and spatiotemporal profiling system that, given a set of adversary goals, finds the utility function from observed adversary behavior and generates inferences and predictions regarding the location of facilities that support adversary operations in the urban environment.

Need

• Kicking down the doors of homes around an incident location loses hearts and minds of families and doesn’t catch perpetrators
• Exhaustive sweep of an area to find the terrorist support infrastructure (residences, weapons depots, meeting places) is not feasible
• Given a specific target, finding best areas for terrorist buildings is laborious and generates vast areas for pre and post-incident analysis

Approach

Using American Terrorism Study cases, our approach learns the utility function that the adversaries are using, and classifies and predicts the potential utility of a facility to the adversaries based on the derived metadata of each facility using belief networks. The figure on the left shows the prediction for the location of terrorist Yu Kikumura's residence [Japanese Red Army].

• Analyze terrorism case studies to discover terrorist utility functions for buildings (e.g. residence, target, storage facility, etc)
• Study terrorist manuals to discover utility function indicator variables
• Develop computable models for utility functions; learn model parameters from data
• Aggregate multiple dimensions of data about facilities (features, demographics, spatial context)

Benefits

• Government:

  • Reduced search space to increase the success of prevention measures (e.g. surveillance, reconnaissance) in the field
  • Increased efficiency in finding the perpetrators of terrorism incidents

• Commercial:

  • Residential and commercial location based services

Applications

• Military: DoD and Intelligence GIS and C4ISR (Command, Control, Communication, Computer, Information, Surveillance and Reconnaissance)
• Civilian: Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Institute of Justice for Critical Infrastructure Protection and First Responder Applications
• Competitive Advantages:

  • Unlike geographic profiling systems for investigating serial crime, Building Intent learns models that identify the causal connection between building features, spatial and temporal contexts and facility use classifications
  • Unlike Law Enforcement Analytics (LEA) systems, Building Intent brings terrorist process preferences, building characteristics and social network knowledge into the utility model in addition to incident data

References

• Smith, B., "Look at Terrorist Behavior: How They Prepare, Where They Strike", NIJ Journal, Issue No. 260, July 2008.
• Smith, B. L., Cothren, J., Roberts, P., Damphousse, K. R. "Geospatial Analysis of Terrorist Activities: The Identification of Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Preparatory Behavior of International and Environmental Terrorists", National Institute of Justice Document No. 222909, May 2008.
• Caglayan, A., Burke, D., Windholz, T., Smith, B., and Paxton, R. (2007) “Building Intent”, Technical Report, DTIC AD No. ADB333832, Milcord LLC, Waltham, MA Nov. 2007.
• Smith, B. L. and Damphousse, K. R. "American Terrorism Study: Patterns of Behavior, Investigation and Prosecution of American Terrorists", National Institute of Justice Document No. 193420, May 2002.