Title: Analysing covert social network foundation behind terrorism disaster

Authors: Yoshiharu Maeno, Yukio Ohsawa

Addresses: Social Design Group, Sengoku 1-6-38F, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112-0011, Japan. ' School of Engineering, University of Tokyo, Hongo 7-3-1, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8563, Japan

Abstract: This paper addresses a method to analyse the covert social network foundation hidden behind the terrorism disaster. It is to solve a node discovery problem, which means to discover a node, which functions relevantly in a social network, but escaped from monitoring on the presence and mutual relationship of nodes. The method aims at integrating the expert investigator|s prior understanding, insight on the terrorists| social network nature derived from the complex graph theory and computational data processing. The social network responsible for the 9/11 attack in 2001 is used to execute simulation experiment to evaluate the performance of the method.

Keywords: communication; complex networks; graph theory; node discovery; social networking; terrorism; terrorist social networks; simulation; performance evaluation; covert social networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSCI.2009.024936

International Journal of Services Sciences, 2009 Vol.2 No.2, pp.125 - 141

Published online: 04 May 2009 *

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