DARPA MAA program aims to predict the terrorist threat of using weapons of mass terror (WMTs) through modeling and computational methods

DARPA launched the program Modeling Adversarial Activity (MAA) program with a goal  to develop mathematical and computational techniques for modeling adversarial activity for the purpose of producing high-confidence indications and warnings of efforts to acquire, fabricate, proliferate, and/or deploy weapons of mass terror (WMTs).

MAA assumes that an adversary’s WMT activities will result in observable transactions. While the probability that any one source alone will reveal a WMT threat may be low, the probability of detecting a WMT threat can be increased by appropriately integrating multiple sources of transaction data. The MAA  is focused upon the development of mathematical and computational methods that integrate multiple data sources to detect relevant activities and events with high probability of detection and low rates of false alarms.

The US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has awarded a new contract to advanced software engineering company IvySys Technologies for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) programme. Valued at $4.6m, the contract will enable the US software company to support DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) four-year programme, Modelling Adversarial Activity (MAA).

IvySys Technologies president and CEO Dr James A DeBardelaben said: “It would be difficult to overstate the lack of meaningful test data for evaluating tools that produce indications and warnings of adversarial efforts.

As part of the project, IvySys Technologies intends to provide an automated synthetic data generation capability that would easily integrate observation data associated with terrorist threat activities of interest within a data-dense and realistic background environment. The company is also expected to deliver synthetic transaction data generation software for WMT activity detection applications and realistic data sets comprising ten billion entities and one trillion transactions.

“As a leader in advanced analytics, modelling and simulation, information sharing, and interoperability, IvySys looks forward to building on our partnership with DARPA to confront this intelligence analysis challenge and support the government’s mission to protect our country and save lives.”