Andrew Conway '04 presented a paper at the North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science (NAACSOS) Conference, held June 27-29 in Pittsburgh. Conway, the only undergraduate invited to present at the conference, gave a paper titled "Collapsing the al-Qaeda Network." It was based upon his senior honors thesis for government, an interdisciplinary approach to assessing terrorist networks and creating policies to combat them. Conway's idea was to view terrorist networks like computer networks and attack terrorists in equivalent ways. He worked with advisor Hamilton Professor Carlos Yordan.
CASOS, based at Carnegie Mellon University, is a university-wide center drawing on a group of world class faculty, students and programming staff in multiple departments. CASOS fosters multi-disciplinary research in which students and faculty work with students and faculty in other universities as well as scientists and practitioners in industry and government. CASOS research leads the way in examining network dynamics and in linking social networks to other types of networks such as knowledge networks.
This conference provides an international forum for interdisciplinary research that combines computation, organizations and society. The goal is to advance the state of science in formal reasoning, analysis, and system building drawing on and encouraging advances in areas at the confluence of social networks, artificial intelligence, complexity, machine learning, sociology, business, political science, economics, and operations research. Such research will lead to the development of new theories that explain and predict the behavior of complex adaptive systems, new computational models and technologies that are responsible to society, business, policy, and law, new methods for integrating data, computational models, analysis and visualization techniques.
A link to Conway's paper follows.
