Conflict Prediction Through Geo-Spatial Interpolation of Radicalization in Syrian Social Media.

摘要

While there is widespread agreement amongst scholars and practitioners that processes of popular radicalization frequently underlie the generation of insurgent violence, an absence of high-resolution data has prevented existing work from directly modeling this relationship. A spatio-temporal map of extremist discourse would allow planners to monitor the emergence of social radicalization prior to the eruption of large-scale violence. Moreover, by utilizing newly developed statistical techniques for geo-spatial causal inference, such data can provide a basis for generating systematic predictions of the location and timing of future episodes of collective violence. As an initial demonstration of the value of this approach, this project focuses on estimating spatial-temporal quantities from the content of Twitter messages originating within Syria. Geo-spatial interpolations of these quantities will then be used to generate predictions of the locations of violent events within Syria.