Finding The Invisible In The Visible

A team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a computer program that reveals colors and motions in video that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye.

Death By Algorithm

In a paper to be presented later this month before the Academy of Science and Engineering’s International Conference on Social Informatics, Shakarian and his West Point colleagues argue for a new way of using social-network analysis to target militants. Forget going after the leader of an extremist group, they say. At least right away.

“If you arrest that guy, the number of connections everyone else has becomes more similar. They all become leaders. You force that terror group to become more decentralized. You might be making it harder to defeat these organizations,” Shakarian says.

This chart shows how West Point’s “GREEDY_FRAGILE” algorithm renders a network brittle by removing relatively few nodes.

The second illustration depicts a terror network, as the algorithm centralizes it — and makes it easier to break. Photos: West Point

Instead, counterterrorists should work to remove militant lieutenants in such a way that terror leaders actually become morecentral to their organizations. That’s because a more centralized network is a more fragile one. And a fragile network can ultimately be smashed, once and for all.

The West Point team — which includes professors Devon Callahan, Jeff Nielsen, and Tony Johnson – wrote up a simple (less than 30-line) algorithm in Python they named GREEDY_FRAGILE. It looks for nodes that can be taken out to “maximize network-wide centrality” — concentrate connectivity in the terror leader, in other words. The professors tested GREEDY_FRAGILE against five data sets. the first is the social network of the al-Qaida members involved in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam; the other four are derived from real-world terror groups, but anonymized for academic use.

“In each of the five real-world terrorist networks that we examined, removal of only 12% of nodes can increase the network-wide centrality between 17% and 45%,” the West Point authors note in their paper. In other words, taking out just a few mid-level players make the whole organization much, much more fragile.

Interestingly, GREEDY_FRAGILE works even when the exact shape of the network is unknown — or when certain nodes can’t be targeted, for political or intelligence reasons. In other words, it takes into account some real-world complications that counterterrorists might face.

Now, this is just a lab experiment. No actual terrorists were harmed in the writing of this paper. The algorithm only looks at “degree” centrality — the number of ties a node has. It doesn’t examine metrics like network “closeness,” which finds the shortest possible path between two nodes. Nor does it take into account the different roles played by different nodes — financier, propagandist, bomb-maker. That’s why the work is funded by the Army Research Office, which handles the service’s most basic R&D efforts.

What’s more, the authors stress that their network-breaking techniques might not be a good fit for every counterterror plan. “It may be desirable to keep certain terrorist or insurgent leaders in place to restrain certain, more radical elements of their organization,” they write.

In fact, the authors strongly hint that they’re not necessarily on board with the Obama administration’s kill-don’t-capture approach to handling terror networks.

“We would like to note that the targeting of individuals in a terrorist or insurgent network does not necessarily mean to that they should be killed,” Shakarian and his colleagues write. “In fact, for ‘shaping operations’ as the ones described in this paper, the killing of certain individuals in the network may be counter-productive. This is due to the fact that the capture of individuals who are likely emergent leaders may provide further intelligence on the organization in question.”

Via: "Wired"

Predicting The Future Through Online Data Mining

The information to predict whether tomorrow it will rain is limited by the number of weather sites available, but sites that might refer to upcoming anti-American demonstrations in the Middle East are infinitely more numerous [AFP]

Recorded Future predicts When and Where A Demonstration Will Occur After Mining From The Web All The Related Activities.

By Santiago Zabala,

Martin Heidegger's greatest concerns when it came to technological innovations was the formation of existential conditions where, as he said, the "lack of emergency is the only emergency". In this condition human beings would be completely "uprooted" from the earth, that is, "framed" ("Ge-stell") by a technological power they are no longer able to control.

As it turns out, the software company Recorded Future (which has recently been praised by Wired, the MIT Technology Review and other media outlets, after the CIA and Google invested millions in their services) seems to be offering its clients something similar: a world where emergencies, that is, future events, can be calculated in advance. But how does this start-up actually function, and why are the German philosopher’s concerns relevant to its services? 

Recorded Future is based in Gothenburg and has offices in London, Boston, Arlington and New York. A team of 20 computer scientists, statisticians and experts in linguistics "calculate" the future. While Yahoo, Google and Bing use links to connect and rank different web pages, Recorded Future goes further by scouring (in real time) thousands of available information sources such as blogs, websites and Twitter comments in order to find "invisible links", that is, relationships among actions, people and institutions that refer to related events in the future. 

"Recorded Future is based in Gothenburg and has offices in London, Boston, Arlington and New York. A team of 20 computer scientists, statisticians and experts in linguistics 'calculate' the future."

After mining from the web all the related people ("Bashar al-Assad"), places ("Syria") and activities ("military interventions") that refer to a possible demonstration, Recorded Future uses algorithms to predict when and where a demonstration will occur. 

An example of a predicted demonstration is available in a video on the company website which illustrates how its powerful engines monitor these protests not only in the Middle East, but also in South America and North Africa. The fact that Google and the CIA have already invested millions in this company is an indication that it will be used to conserve certain interest against others as the example above indicates.

The different fee levels for the customers of Recorded Future are probably related to the quality and quantity of information they wish to purchase, making this, and similar companies, at the service of the wealthiest and most powerful. 

From a philosophical point of view, the most interesting feature of all this is not that these demonstrations can be predicted, but rather how technology has finally uprooted and dislodged man from the world, that is, has given human existence to a power beyond human control. The secured, comfortable and calculated environment that allowed the creation of society has now become so functional and rationalised that we cannot help but become victims by existing in it.

This existential dilemma does not arise from the fact that it’s finally possible to organise all the things the web already knows about the future, which could certainly become useful to prevent diseases or famine, but rather that a private company now means to know everything, that is, all human projects. 

We have entered an age where only those framed within the approved interests of Recorded Future clients will be able to live freely, that is, without being predicted. But how free is an existence that is completely revealed to the modern "lack of emergencies"?

As Heidegger explained, emergencies do not arise when something doesn't function correctly, but rather when "everything functions … and propels everything more and more toward further functioning". It's within this logic that as soon as something critical to the interests of those who can afford it fails to function, Recorded Future will alert its customers, who will then take the appropriate measures to conserve the previous condition.

In sum, Heidegger's concerns over a world lacking "emergencies" more than 50 years ago was meant to point out how technologies such as that employed by Recorded Future (and similar companies) aim to avoid the future, that is, to change the world.

Via: "Al-Jazeera"

Stanford Researchers Discover The 'Anternet'

The Behavior Of Harvester Ants As They Forage For Food Mirrors The Protocols That Control Traffic On The Internet.

Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at Stanford, has been studying ants for more than 20 years. When she figured out how the harvester ant colonies she had been observing in Arizona decided when to send out more ants to get food, she called across campus to Balaji Prabhakar, a professor of computer science at Stanford and an expert on how files are transferred on a computer network. At first he didn’t see any overlap between his and Gordon’s work, but inspiration would strike soon.

“The next day it occurred to me, ‘Oh wait, this is almost the same as how [Internet] protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for transferring a file!’” Prabhakar says. ”The algorithm the ants were using to discover how much food there is available is essentially the same as that used in the Transmission Control Protocol.”

Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is an algorithm that manages data congestion on the Internet, and as such was integral in allowing the early web to scale up from a few dozen nodes to the billions in use today. Here’s how it works: As a source, A, transfers a file to a destination, B, the file is broken into numbered packets. When B receives each packet, it sends an acknowledgment, or an ant, to A, that the packet arrived.

This feedback loop allows TCP to run congestion avoidance: If ants return at a slower rate than the data was sent out, that indicates that there is little bandwidth available, and the source throttles data transmission down accordingly. If ants return quickly, the source boosts its transmission speed. The process determines how much bandwidth is available and throttles data transmission accordingly.

It turns out that harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) behave nearly the same way when searching for food. Gordon has found that the rate at which harvester ants—which forage for seeds as individuals—leave the nest to search for food corresponds to food availability.

A forager won’t return to the nest until it finds food. If seeds are plentiful, foragers return faster, and more ants leave the nest to forage. If, however, ants begin returning empty handed, the search is slowed, and perhaps called off.

Prabhakar wrote an ant algorithm to predict foraging behavior depending on the amount of food—i.e., bandwidth—available. Gordon’s experiments manipulate the rate of forager return. Working with Stanford student Katie Dektar, they found that the TCP-influenced algorithm almost exactly matched the ant behavior found in Gordon’s experiments.

“Ants have discovered an algorithm that we know well, and they’ve been doing it for millions of years,” Prabhakar says.

They also found that the ants followed two other phases of TCP. One phase is known as slow start, which describes how a source sends out a large wave of packets at the beginning of a transmission to gauge bandwidth; similarly, when the harvester ants begin foraging, they send out foragers to scope out food availability before scaling up or down the rate of outgoing foragers.

Another protocol, called time-out, occurs when a data transfer link breaks or is disrupted, and the source stops sending packets. Similarly, when foragers are prevented from returning to the nest for more than 20 minutes, no more foragers leave the nest.

Prabhakar says that had this discovery been made in the 1970s, before TCP was written, harvester ants very well could have influenced the design of the Internet.

Gordon thinks that scientists have just scratched the surface for how ant colony behavior could help us in the design of networked systems.

There are 11,000 species of ants, living in every habitat and dealing with every type of ecological problem, Gordon says. “Ants have evolved ways of doing things that we haven’t thought up, but could apply in computer systems. Computationally speaking, each ant has limited capabilities, but the collective can perform complex tasks.

“So ant algorithms have to be simple, distributed, and scalable—the very qualities that we need in large engineered distributed systems,” she says. “I think as we start understanding more about how species of ants regulate their behavior, we’ll find many more useful applications for network algorithms.”

The work is published in the Aug. 23 issue of PLoS Computational Biology.

Via: "Stanford University"