GlobalECCO is Helping to Build the Global Network

Global ECCO's (Education Community Collaboration Online) mission is to build and strengthen the Regional Defense Fellowship Program's (RDFP) global alumni network of Combating Terrorism (CbT) experts and practitioners through innovative and engaging technologies and techniques that both enable and encourage collaborative partnership between individuals, nations, organizations, and cultures.

Global ECCO enables communication between members who may otherwise be isolated physically, and allows multiple community members to interact, facilitating collaboration and continuing education on critical security issues. It also helps to maintain a network of skilled operators with a wealth of expertise to share and to draw on.

Global ECCO hosts a variety of innovative, interactive modules, including a progressive multimedia journal (CTX), strategic gaming applications, and an original and ongoing collection of operator archives from those who have fought in the war on terrorism. It also provides access to daily counter-terrorism news and a ‘curated' collection of blogs and resources on all facets of terrorism, violent extremism and radicalization.

Defense Analysis hosts DoD’s Information Strategy Research Center

• The DoD Information Strategy Research Center exists to:
• advance the goal of information operations as a core military competency
• support the DOD commitment to transform our military capabilities
• provide avenues for research for information operations, asymmetrical warfare, The Global War on Terrorism and unconventional thought

The curriculum is designed for both the specialist who will be assigned to an information operations position and the generalist who will be assigned to the operations directorate. The curriculum includes a core of military art and operations, the human dimension of warfare (psycho-social), analytical methods, and atypical sequence customized for each student. Additionally, each student will have an elective sequence designed to further develop an in-depth understanding of joint information operations.

The CORELab is DoD's Premier Academic Network Analysis Lab

• Fuses Relational, Geospatial, and Temporal Data to Illuminate Dark Networks
• Leading Research Center on Social Media Exploitation, e.g., ISIS Study (SOCOM/Joint Staff/SOCCENT)

CORE Lab Products Include:

• Social Media Exploitation

CORE develops methodologies to exploit social media for use in mapping dark networks and understanding the operational environment by analyzing open source social media.

• COREMercury

Mercury is a structured data collection platform to supplement ASOMs and MLE activities.

• Lighthouse

The Lighthouse project focus on the integration of commercial-off-the-shelf and open-source technology and analytic methods developed in the Common Operational Research Environment to help solve complex problems

• IEDNa

IEDNA can rapidly identify potential bomb-making cells by virtue of the overall similarities of IEDs.

• CORE SSE

A solution to resolving current shortfalls with Sensitive Site Exploitation (SSE) is to design a mobile device application with back end structure that can process, structure, and fuse the captured data near real-time from the objective with intelligence databases.

• CORE DTNA

CORE DTNA allows an analyst the ability to: 1) collect information on Twitter (by hashtag, username, or keyword); 2) visualize this information or network in real-time; 3) change initial search criteria based on the visualization and applied social network analysis properties; 4) monitor sentiment or emotion of a particular keyword; and 5) create a word ontology or taxonomy to sway opinion on this particular keyword. Get info on how to use it here.

The Littoral Operations Center (LOC) Studies, Analyses, and Advances Military Operations

The Littoral Operations Center (LOC) is dedicated to the study, analysis, and advancement of concepts related to military operations that extend from seaward approaches, across the shores, and into the near-ashore regions of the littorals. This is the complex environment where Department of Defense leaders have said we must expect to operate on land, in the air, on and below the littoral seas, in coastal waters, and in the space and cyber domains. Special emphasis is placed on the technological-tactical complementarity of the Navy and Marine Corps. By necessity of its warfighting domain, the LOC inspires collaboration between DoD offices and agencies, national commercial enterprise, international industry, education, and friendly foreign defense departments. The LOC supports international workshops in many parts of the world and interdepartmental faculty and student research at NPS. It adapts its efforts to the changing geopolitical environment, whether irregular warfare, small and medium wars in critical regions, to the recent rise of major powers.

Working cooperatively through the NPS Academic Departments of Defense Analysis, Systems Engineering, Operations Research, Information Sciences and others, the Littoral Operations Center (LOC) routinely supports or collaborates with a broad spectrum of U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and other Services, DoD agencies/offices, COCOMS, International Partners, Law Enforcement Agencies, academic institutions, and FFRDCs/NGOs.

CODA LAB Aims to Create a New Generation of Data Warriors

The Coalition for Open-Source Defense Analysis (CODA) Lab represents a hub of faculty and student collaboration, designed to leverage the unique strengths of the “information science” and “social science” communities at NPS, and to enhance scientific understanding of the role of information and influence in contemporary security.

Our lab emphasizes the use of open-source data and software, and the development of new open-source tools and analytic results, so that our products can be freely shared with public, private, and foreign partners. We have also focused on the development of hybrid computational infrastructures, designed to bypass the bottlenecks of conventional tools, through highly scalable in-memory analytic approaches. By leveraging the rise of large-scale open-source data streams, combined with novel approaches to the design of computational architectures, we aim to foster a new generation of information warriors, capable of operating effectively in complex informational environments.

Our efforts have been funded by a variety of interested stakeholders, including ARL, TRADOC-TRAC, SOCOM, JWAC, MARFORCYBER, ONR, and DI2O/OUSD. Recent projects have focused on cross-domain applications of new approaches to machine learning, including:

• Artificial neural networks for the detection of hostile information campaigns
• Multi-scale anomaly detection in maritime shipping networks
• Geospatial conflict prediction through analysis of global online media
• Automated semantic learning for real-time situational awareness of emerging threats