APTIMA INC — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: N15A-T020

Description

The importance of social media in the information ecosystem has created strong incentives for the development of human-mimicking social bots. Bots may be part of the information strategies of terrorist organizations, aiming to inflate perceptions of support for their activities. Bots may be involved in manipulating information in emergencies to stoke hysteria. The increasing prevalence and sophistication of bots and the information campaigns they underpin makes detecting bot campaigns and understanding their tactics an urgent goal. Aptima and Indiana University propose to develop the DOISAC system for Detecting Orchestrated Information and Synthetic Account Campaigns. Building on Indiana Universitys state-of-the-art approaches to detecting bots and information campaigns, DOISAC will address key challenges in detecting and characterizing bot-fueled information campaigns. When complete, DOISAC will be a social media monitoring system that enables large-scale, real-time processing, storage, and querying of social media data; provides validated algorithms for bot and campaign detection in multiple languages of interest; and presents sophisticated analysis of detected campaigns and target audiences.