A half-century ago Claude Shannon, mathematician and innovative engineer at what was then called the Bell Telephone Laboratories, formulated the idea of information content residing in a message, and in a seminal paper of 1948, he established the discipline that became known as information theory. Though its influence is chiefly in communication engineering, information theory has come to play an important role in more recent years in elucidating the meaning of chance.

Uncertainty and Information

The Four Dimensions of Social Network Analysis: An Overview of Research Methods, Applications, and Software Tools

Social media channels, such as Facebook or Twitter, allow for people to express their views and opinions about any public topics. Public sentiment related to future events, such as demonstrations or parades, indicate public attitude and therefore may be applied while trying to estimate the level of disruption and disorder during such events. Consequently, sentiment analysis of social media content may be of interest for different organisations, especially in security and law enforcement sectors. This paper presents a new lexicon-based sentiment analysis algorithm that has been designed with the main focus on real time Twitter content analysis. The algorithm consists of two key components, namely sentiment normalisation and evidence-based combination function, which have been used in order to estimate the intensity of the sentiment rather than positive/negative label and to support the mixed sentiment classification process. Finally, we illustrate a case study examining the relation between negative sentiment of twitter posts related to English Defence League and the level of disorder during the organisation’s related events.

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Improved lexicon-based sentiment analysis for social media analytics

An open source sample of 111 lone actor terrorists from the United States and Europe were studied through the lens of the Terrorist Radicalization Assessment Protocol (TRAP-18) This investigative template consists of 8 proximal warning behaviors and 10 distal characteristics for active risk management or active monitoring, respectively, by national security threat assessors Several aspects of criterion validity were tested in this known outcome sample Seventy per cent of the terrorists were positive for at least half or more of the indicators When the sample was divided into Islamic extremists, right wing extremists, and single issue terrorists, there were no significant differences across all eighteen indicators except for four When the sample was divided according to successful vs thwarted attackers, the successful attackers were significantly more fixated, creative and innovative, and failed to have a prior sexually intimate pair bond They were significantly less likely to have displayed pathway warning behavior and be dependent on a virtual community of likeminded true believers Effect sizes were small to medium (phi = 0190-0317) The TRAP-18 appears to have promise as an eventual structured professional judgment risk assessment instrument according to some of the individual terrorist content domains outlined by Monahan (2012, 2016)

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The lone-actor terrorist and the TRAP-18.

Islamic State (IS) terrorist networks in Syria and Iraq pose threats to national security. IS' exploitation of social media and digital strategy plays a key role in its global dissemination of propaganda, radicalization, and recruitment. However, systematic research on Islamic terrorist communication via social media is limited. Our research investigates the question: How do IS members/supporters use Twitter for terrorism communication: propaganda, radicalization, and recruitment? Theoretically, we drew on microeconomic network theories to develop a theoretical framework for multi-sided Twitter networks in the global Islamic terrorist communication environment. Empirically, we collected 3,039 tweets posted by @shamiwitness who was identified in prior research as "an information disseminator" for the IS cause. Methodologically, we performed social network analysis, trend and content analyses of the tweet data. We find strong evidence for Shamiwitness-intermediated multi-sided Twitter networks of international mass media, regional Arabic mass media, IS fighters, and IS sympathizers, supporting the framework's utility.

https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6056&context=eispapers

Tweeting propaganda, radicalization and recruitment: Islamic state supporters multi-sided twitter networks

Lone-wolf terrorism is a threat to the security of modern society, as was tragically shown in Norway on July 22, 2011, when Anders Behring Breivik carried out two terrorist attacks that resulted in a total of 77 deaths. Since lone wolves are acting on their own, information about them cannot be collected using traditional police methods such as infiltration or wiretapping. One way to attempt to discover them before it is too late is to search for various “weak signals” on the Internet, such as digital traces left in extremist web forums. With the right tools and techniques, such traces can be collected and analyzed. In this work, we focus on tools and techniques that can be used to detect weak signals in the form of linguistic markers for potential lone wolf terrorism.

Detecting Linguistic Markers for Radical Violence in Social Media

The developments of the new European construction standard (Eurocodes) and the new European chemical legislation (REACH) have taken place in parallel, and they are now both in their final stages. Both consist in European harmonization of safety regulations that concern major industries. In this paper, we compare Eurocodes and REACH in terms of purpose, intended level of harmonization, the science-policy interface and controversies about the costs of the regulations. We have found that the science-policy interface of REACH is characterized by public controversy and by attempts to keep risk assessment and risk management apart while the science-policy interface of Eurocodes is characterized by trust in experts, limited public involvement and organizational confluence of risk assessment and risk management. Furthermore, the costs of REACH have been a major issue in discussions between the Commission and the chemical industry while, in contrast, the costs of Eurocodes have not even been calculated either by the Commission or by the construction industry. A major reason for this is that construction industry does not seem to regard possible cost increases due to Eurocodes as a threat to their business interests. Regulators seem to have treated the cost issue as a business interest, not as an aspect of the decision that they should be concerned with even in the absence of external pressure.

Eurocodes and REACH: Differences and Similarities

The last 20 years or so has seen an intense search carried out within Dempster–Shafer theory, with the aim of finding a generalization of the Shannon entropy for belief functions. In that time, the ...

Uncertainty, credal sets and second order probability

Safety factor rules are used for drawing putatively reasonable conclusions from incomplete datasets The paper attempts to provide answers to four questions: “How are safety factors used?”, “When a 

Reasoning With Safety Factor Rules

Recent years has seen a renewed interest in the philosophical study of information. In this paper a two-part analysis of information gain – objective and subjective – in the context of doxastic cha ...

Jonas Clausen Mork

Papers

Detecting Linguistic Markers for Radical Violence in Social Media

Eurocodes and REACH: Differences and Similarities

Uncertainty, credal sets and second order probability

Reasoning With Safety Factor Rules

Information Gain and Approaching True Belief