You’ve probably never heard of the Soma Terror Organization Portal (STOP) – Soma stands for Stochastic Opponent Modelling Agents, a “logical-statistical reasoning framework.” Very few have. It’s been developed by researchers at the University of Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies to help fight terrorism by predicting what actions terrorists might make. Although that might seem unlikely, given that most of us think there’s little logic to what most terrorists do, the scientists believe otherwise. They’ve generated rules, literally thousands of them, based on the previous actions of some 30 different terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Hezbollah. By looking at past behaviour, they can predict what the terrorists are likely to do in the future and work with analysts in other, related disciplines. At least that’s the idea. Professor V. S. Subrahmanian, the head of STOP, told Vnunet, "Soma is a joint computer and social science achievement that will facilitate learning about and forecasting terrorist group behavior based on rigorous mathematical and computational models. But even the best science needs to work hand-in-hand with social scientists and users. In addition to accurate behavioral models and forecasting algorithms, STOP acts as a virtual roundtable for terrorism experts to gather round and form a rich community that transcends artificial boundaries." Four defense agencies currently use the program, which is funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
