From Terrorism Informatics to Dark Web Research

Abstract

In this paper, we provide an overview of “Terrorism Informatics,” a new discipline that aims to study the terrorism phenomena with a data-driven, quantitative, and computational approach. We first summarize several critical books that lay the foundation for studying terrorism in the new Internet era. We then review important terrorism research centers and resources that are of relevance to our Dark Web research. The University of Arizona Artificial Intelligence Lab’s Dark Web project is a long-term scientific research program that aims to study and understand the international terrorism (Jihadist) phenomena via a computational, data-centric approach. We aim to collect “ALL” web content generated by international terrorist groups, including web sites, forums, chat rooms, blogs, social networking sites, videos, virtual worlds, etc. We have developed various multilingual data mining, text mining, and web mining techniques to perform link analysis, content analysis, web metrics (technical sophistication) analysis, sentiment analysis, authorship analysis, and video analysis in our research. We report our recent Dark Web Forum Portal research, which provides web enabled access to critical international jihadist web forums. The portal has several significant technical extensions from our previous work: increasing the scope of our data collection, adding an incremental spidering component for regular data updates; enhancing the searching and browsing functions; enhancing multilingual machine-translation for Arabic, French, German, and Russian; and advanced Social Network Analysis (SNA). A case study on identifying active participants is shown at the end.