IARPA Proposes Monitoring of Publicly Available Data

By Dennis Kuba
July 8, 2011

IARPA, a research arm of the intelligence community, is looking to fund the development of an Open Source Indicator (OSI).
The proposed OSI is intended to gather publicly available information in order to analyze, anticipate and/or detect societal disruptions, such as political crises, disease outbreaks, economic instability, resource shortages, and natural disasters.
From their proposal: “Many significant societal events are preceded and/or followed by population-level changes in communication, consumption, and movement. Some of these changes may be indirectly observable from publicly available data, such as Web search trends, blogs, microblogs, Internet traffic, webcams, financial markets, and many others. Published research has found that many of these data sources are individually useful in the early detection of events such as disease outbreaks and macroeconomic trends. However, little research has examined the value of combinations of data from diverse sources. The OSI Program seeks to develop methods for continuous, automated analysis of publicly available data. The Program will aim to develop methods that ‘beat the news’ by fusing early indicators of events from multiple data sources and types.”

Topics: IARPA, Internet Traffic, Microblog, OSI

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