ISIS vs. CySIS
ISIS, an infamous terrorist group, is unusual in that the period of it’s ideology and the period of it’s methods lie on the opposite ends of time. It is more or less understood that their goal is to push an extreme, “medieval-style” ideology on the Islamic State, but their recruitment strategy is very modern — the majority of it takes place online through social media networks.
Dr. Hasan Davulcu, from the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering at ASU, believes that “the best way to fight a network is with another network.” This belief lead to the creation of the CyberSocio Intelligent-Systems Laboratory (CySIS), which combines social science research with data analysis in an effort to stop the development of extremist ideologies online.
The concept of information cascades has played a major part in developing CySIS. According to professor Paulo Shakarian, a researcher at the laboratory, “the spread of messages, memes or news items that go viral can have a structural diversity which is telling.” Shakarian explained the importance of who and where the messages are coming from, and the effect that it has on the recipients mental association. A person is much more likely to equate significance with a message coming from multiple different sources, as opposed to the same message coming from multiple similar sources. The concept of information and how it spreads has helped “developed metrics to assess the significance of how a message or micro blog spreads online”, which is essential to tearing down the extremist messages which attract isolated members of society to ISIS and other extremist groups online.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/27/researchers-from-arizona-state-university-take-the-war-online-back-to-isis/
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/