Network Theory to Thwart Terrorists
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/magazine/312wwln_essay.html?_r=0
The idea of catching terrorists in America has been extremely important within the administration, and what the administration calls the “terrorist surveillance program” has depicted more innocent people than actual terrorists. Without an actual science to detect the connections between people and terrorism, it is extremely inaccurate in deciding where and how a terrorist attack came to be. A new concept has arisen that is changing the way detection of terrorists is executed. This new concept is network theory. Network theory has been developed by mathematicians that can be applied to find common patterns among individuals (nodes). These common patterns are relationships between individuals (edges). The most basic form of a network is just connecting the dots where the dots are nodes and the connections are edges. By using only a couple nodes, analysis of the network graph can show that connections that seem to be unrelated at all, are actually closer than expected. For example, a study on the network of webpages shows that two completely unrelated webpages are actually separated by only nineteen links. In a more relevant example, analysis of the two hijackers Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi showed a myriad of interconnections. Eventually, all the hijackers in the group were discovered by using network analysis. The hijackers all converged to the leader, Mohamed Atta.
Despite the success of network theory to effectively catch terrorists, the concept is still in its infancy. It is difficult to trace information when there is very little to start with. Essentially it is much easier to read through a network when a couple nodes are already known to be accurate. Because the number of connections between people in the world are almost infinitesimally large, it is difficult to figure out where to begin when it comes to catching terrorists. Starting from scratch requires fishing through huge databases of information and using general characteristics of terrorists to narrow down to individual nodes.
This is relevant to our coursework because we have recently been applying the concepts taught before the midterm to real world situations such as the market clearing prices concept. Applications of triadic closure and network/graph algorithms is the basis for methodically tracking down terrorism. Basic definitions and concepts of graph theory are the underlying basis of network theory, and the application of these concepts can be used to solve practical world problems.