Praescient prides itself on providing the best minds equipped with the best analytic technologies. In the Praescient Analytics Blog below, you can find the latest musings of our analysts, as well as thoughts from our engineers, and news about the company. You can also learn more about our Partnered Research Organizations and Praescient’s Knowlton Project discussion series.
The Algorithmic Network Science Group (ANSG) at West Point’s Network Science Center is studying disease by running simulations to identify “spreaders” in complex networks through the use of the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model. This has the potential for creating novel algorithms to apply not only to biology, but to counter-insurgency, intelligence analysis, cyber security and social… Read more »
Over the past year and a half, Praescient has grown from a small team of individuals focused on a handful of clients to an international organization with well over one hundred employees. Our dedicated field personnel service a range of customers at law enforcement agencies, military deployments, and public policy institutes all over the globe…. Read more »
At Praescient, we are always excited to highlight superlative analysis achieved through the use of powerful and innovative technology. That’s why we’re thrilled to be presenting at the upcoming Kapow Software User Summit in San Francisco. Kapow’s tools allow for the rapid, automated collection and integration of massive amounts of data from the web—which presents incredible… Read more »
This post was written by Alis Wang Academics at West Point’s Network Science Center recently published a paper introducing a new algorithm developed to help officials more effectively dismantle terrorist and insurgent networks. Their work focuses on how organizations regenerate their leadership cadres following an attack and argues that “shaping” networks to maximize network-wide centrality… Read more »
The careful study of conflict requires access to data to make substantive conclusions. Often, because of the nature of working in conflict zones or with government secrets, that data can be very difficult to acquire for academics and open-source analysts. The high barriers to entry for scholars and practitioners made serious unclassified research difficult to… Read more »
This post was written by Alis Wang Gun violence has been a vexing problem for law enforcement and policy makers for decades. This is partially because of the difficulty of predicting which individuals will perpetrate the next mass shooting. Big data, however, could give us a way to objectively analyze this issue and find ways… Read more »
Film piracy is one of the largest economic threats to the US motion pictures industry, costing US movie studios over $6 billion a year and the global film industry more than $18 billion a year. About three-fifths of this loss is due to DVD piracy while the other two-fifths can be attributed to online piracy…. Read more »
In the past few years, Iran has used its cargo line, IRISL (Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines), to evade international trade sanctions in place to prevent the movement of illicit cargo to and from Iran. The shipping line has been blacklisted by the US, the EU, and the UN, but IRISL continues to use ships… Read more »
Praescient Analyst Dominic Lisanti published a piece with Critical Threats Project Analyst Katherine Zimmerman on the changing landscape of transnational jihad. In particular, they focus on the new battlefront of Mali. They write that the arrest of two Americans headed for West Africa “may reveal a shift in popular destinations for those looking to participate… Read more »
In the aftermath of last month’s presidential election, the media has increasingly focused on both campaigns’ use of big data technology to track, target, and persuade potential voters. According to Ethan Roeder, Data Director for the Obama campaign, “what’s really new in politics today is not the data itself but how campaigns make sense of… Read more »