UNCC-ParallelTopics-MC3 
VAST 2011 Challenge 
Mini-Challenge 3 - Investigation into Terrorist Activity

Authors and Affiliations:

Wenwen Dou, Univ. of North Carolina at Charlotte, wdou1@uncc.edu [PRIMARY contact]
Xiaoyu Wang, Univ. of North Carolina at Charlotte, xwang25@uncc.edu 

Tool(s):

The tool we used to investigate potential terrorist threats is called ParallelTopics, which is a visual analytics system that supports analysis of large text corpora by integrating a state-of-the-art probabilistic topic model – Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The tool was built by our team and the paper describing the system has been conditionally accepted by VAST. We have attached the paper along with this submission. Our team spent a large amount of time processing the news data and customizing the ParallelTopics system for the news corpus. The investigation of terrorist activity presents a few challenges to the original ParallelTopics system, therefore new functionalities such as filter by specific date and topic are added.

ParallelTopics employs coordinated multiple views to support exploration of text corpora. Specifically, we utilized three views in this investigation, namely Topic Cloud (a summary of major topics in the news corpus), ThemeRiver (how topics evolve over time), and Detailed View (inspect and search for news articles). The three views are coordinated in that operations performed in one view will be immediately shown in other views so that information regarding topics, time and new articles can be quickly synthesized by users.

Video:

Index_MC3_files\MC3.mp4

ANSWERS:

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MC 3.1 Potential Threats: Identify any imminent terrorist threats in the Vastopolis metropolitan area. Provide detailed information on the threat or threats (e.g. who, what, where, when, and how) so that officials can conduct counterintelligence activities. Also, provide a list of the evidential documents supporting your answer.

Analysis process: Our analysis started with examining the 30 topics extracted from the news corpus and identifying topic and potential keywords of interest for further investigation.

The topic view in Figure 1 shows that we quickly discovered that topic 13 is highly relevant to potential terrorist threats. The topic also provided keywords such as “crash”, “bomb” and “terrorism” as possible search terms to identify more related news.

To investigate news that are related to this topic, we performed multiple rounds of filtering within the ThemeRiver (bottom view in Figure 1) in order to examine relevant news day by day. Figure 2 shows a Document view that supports detailed examination of news related to topic 13 on a selected date (May 2 in this case). When reviewing news filtered through the ThemeRiver, we discovered new keywords such as “explosive”, “explosion” and “weapon”. Therefore we use them as keyword to retrieve more news from the corpus. This line of investigation lead to the “Bomb and weapon threats” we summarized below.

We have also discovered very important news regarding a potential bioterrorism. After we have found several bomb and weapon threats, we discovered that several terrorist group names were mentioned by the city officials. We further investigated news related to each group which ultimately led us to the bioterrorism threat which is also summarized below.

Then based on the timing and other evidence we have gathered from challenge 1 and 3, we believe that the bioterrorism particularly the microbes might have been the cause of the current epidemic. Terrorists might have planted the microbes manufactured by them into a local food preparation plant. Two news articles further validated our hypothesis. One news article is on food supplies being the most likely target by bioterrorists. The other news article provided information on local hospital correspondent commenting that the flu this year appears to be out of control, which indicated that it might be more than a regular flu season.

Figure 1: Top - Document Cloud, topics are extracted using LDA. Bottom – ThemeRiver, each vertical time frame denotes a day.

Figure 2: Examining related news articles published on May 2, 2011.

Figure 3: News related to Professor Patino.

1. Bioterrorism

A few incidents had lead us to believe that a terrorist group called “Paramurderers of Chaos” had probably launched an bio-attack by planting dangerous microbes in a food preparation plant in Vastopolis. Below we listed the incidents our conclusion was based on chronologically.

a. On April 11, 2011, Professor Edward Patino, a molecular professor, gave a talk at Vast University in Uptown about the threat of bioterrorism. He raised the fact that it is much easier than before to engineer dangerous microbes with the right equipment.

On April 26, 2011, Vast University in Uptown reported that Professor Edward’s large amount of equipments was stolen from his lab. The equipments could potentially be used to manufacture microbes. Figure 3 shows news results by searching for keyword “Patino”.

On May 13, 2011, Police authorities apprehended three people suspected to be part of a terrorist group – Paramurderers of Chaos. Source revealed that the suspects were in the middle of construction of some type of laboratory in a basement which location authorities refuse to disclose. Before escaping, the suspects destroyed most of the equipment and evidence. But what was left looked like expensive high-end workbenches along with stacks of Petri dishes. The description of the remaining evidence and the timing lead us to suspect the equipments are the ones stolen from Professor Patino’s lab, and the terrorist group members were manufacturing microbes before apprehended.

Following up on the lead of the terrorist group “Paramurderers of Chaos”, on May 15, 2011, a suspected member of the group was arrested for trespassing near the loading docks at a food preparation plant in Vastopolis shortly after midnight. Although further investigation on “food preparation plant” did not yield more related information, we suspect the individual was deploying the microbes manufactured by the same group to the food preparation plant based on the provided evidences, especially given the fact that CDC (Center for Disease Control) believes the food supply has the highest probability of being a bioterrorism target due to ease of dissemination. The CDC also said that targeting the food supply allows for widespread consumption by the populace that can be difficult to identify until it is too late.

List of the evidential documents
CDC Publication on Bioterrorism	April 18, 2011
Manufacturing Dangerous Microbes	April 11, 2011
Robbery at Vast University	April 26, 2011
Suspects Apprehended	May 13, 2011
Dangerous Suspect Arrested at Local Plant	May 15, 2011

b. On a side note, on April 11, 2011, Professor Patino had mentioned that he has been repeatedly harassed by members from the Citizens for the Ethical Treatment of Lab Mice who have recently trashed his garage and screamed at his neighbors.

On May 09, 2001, the VastPress has reported that they have been receiving threatening emails from the Citizens for the Ethical Treatment of Lab Mice, stating that the experiments cause stress and pain to mice. The group threatened to “free” all mice in the city and use humans for experimental purposes.

c. On April 1, 2011, mass deaths of livestock have been reported on farms a short distance outside of the Vastopolis metropolitan area. Officials are unsure of the cause.

On April 14, 2011, there was an update on the animal death. Several suspicious individuals were trespassing at farms where the mass livestock deaths were reported. But no trespassers were identified.

On April 20, 2011, the city has received a report from Department of Agriculture on the deaths of the animals outside Vastopolis. The problem was a spore-forming microbe, but officials emphasized that the variant is not a threat to humans.

Through connecting the news from group b and c, we suspect that the trespassers might have been related with animal rights group such as the Citizens for the Ethical Treatment of Lab Mice. And by obtaining the microbes from dead livestock, the group could implement their threat to the VastPress by deploying the microbes to food or water sources. But since the officials reported that the variant is not a threat to humans, we concluded that this isn’t how the current epidemic started.

List of the evidential documents
Mass Animal Deaths	April 01, 2011
Robbery at Vast University	April 26, 2011
Update on Animal Deaths	April 14, 2011
Animal Deaths in City Caused by Microbes	April 20, 2011
Animal Activist Threatens Press	May 09, 2011
Dangerous Suspect Arrested at Local Plant	May 15, 2011

2. Bomb and weapon threats

We have also identified several imminent terrorist threats that are related to bombs and military weapons.

a. On April 26, city officials reported that dangerous weapons were missing from the Vastopolis Armed Forces compound in Westside. The missing weapons include three shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missiles and twenty rifles with ammunition.

On May 16, 2011, police arrested one individual during traffic stop of a truck in Cornertown. The individual was believed to be connected to the terrorist group called Network of Hate. Inside his vehicle, police found three surface-to-air missiles.

On May 20, 2011, the TSA seized a large container with twenty military grade rifles at Vastopolis airport. Until this point, we concluded that all weapons stolen from the Armed Forces compounded are accounted for. However, what the terrorist group was intended to do is worth investigating.

b. On May 07, a truck with out-of-state license plate was suspected to be a bomb threat, although the Commissioner denied any findings. On May 16, Downtown Vastopolis Courthouse switchboard received a bomb threat. Although the police bomb squad found nothing, the threat still caused panic in the public schools, which closed because of the threat.

Around May 17, there has been an explosion within the chemical plant at Smogtown. Local residents believed that the explosion was caused by terrorist act but authorities denied such conclusion.

c. On May 17, information regarding a plot to detonate a “dirty bomb” on the streets of an American city was released by DHS. The suspect was a former member of the terrorist group called Network of Dread. Accidentally, about a week ago Vastpress has released an interview with DHS official on the threat of dirty bombs on a city such as Vastopolis. The DHS officials said that target was probably Washington and the radioactive material was extremely dangerous.

We believe all three possible leads need further investigation.

List of the evidential documents
Terrorism Expert Speaks Out	April 25, 2011
Military Weapons Missing	April 26, 2011
Vehicle Downtown Checked for Bomb Threat	May 07, 2011
Homeland Security Talks About ``Dirty'' Bombs	May 09, 2011
Bomb Makers Apprehended	May 12, 2011
Courthouse Bomb Scare Closes Schools	May 16, 2011
Large Number of Weapons Found During Traffic Stop	May 16, 2011
Explosions at Smogtown Chemical Plant	May 17, 2011
DHS Foils Plot	May 18, 2011
Military Weapons Discovered at Airport	May 20, 2011