February 04, 2005 Laurel, Maryland

A Capitol College adjunct professor and alumnus will give a presentation on how to apply artificial intelligence in the fight against terrorism at an international conference this month in Innsbruck, Austria.

Jami M. Carroll, who teaches coursework in the graduate programs for network security and information architecture, will present his paper on “OSINT Analysis Using Adaptive Resonance Theory for Counterterrorism Warnings” at the International Association of Science and Technology for Development (IASTED) Artificial Intelligence Applications conference, to be held Feb. 14-16.

Carroll, who holds a master of science in network security from Capitol, will be one of the presenters lined up. The conference is a forum for researchers and practitioners to present and observe the latest research, results and ideas in the area of artificial intelligence.

Carroll's research and paper were the result of doctoral-level coursework completed at Nova Southeastern University in Florida.

In his paper and presentation, Carroll suggests using a theory called adaptive resonance to sift through large amounts of data, such as the types of information gathered in counterterrorism efforts.

“A key problem is making sense of this large amount of data in time to prevent a catastrophic situation like what occurred on Sept. 11, 2001,” Carroll said. “These events might have been mitigated had U.S. intelligence agencies had better information technology tools for analyzing the situation.”

Open source intelligence is the type of information that is publicly available and can be circulated through a variety of methods, such as print media, radio transmissions, company financial statements and scientific research reports. While analyzing open source intelligence has its advantages -- it's certainly much less expensive to gather, for example -- there are times (such as terrorism-related “chatter”) when analysis can be ineffective. Artificial intelligence has an ability (called feature extraction) to find patterns in data.

Improved information and communication technology is necessary to properly support the missions of the Department of Homeland Security, he stated in his paper.

» View Professor Carroll's paper (PDF)