Dark Web: Exploring and Mining the Dark Side of the Web

This talk will review the emerging research in Terrorism Informatics based on a web mining perspective. Recent progress in the internationally renowned Dark Web project will be reviewed, including: deep/dark web spidering (web sites, forums, Youtube, virtual worlds), web metrics analysis, dark network analysis, web-based authorship analysis, and sentiment and affect analysis for terrorism tracking. In collaboration with selected international terrorism research centers and intelligence agencies, the Dark Web project has generated one of the largest databases in the world about extremist/terrorist-generated Internet contents (web sites, forums, blogs, and multimedia documents). Dark Web research has received significant international press coverage, including: Associated Press, USA Today, The Economist, NSF Press, Washington Post, Fox News, BBC, PBS, Business Week, Discover magazine, WIRED magazine, Government Computing Week, Second German TV (ZDF), Toronto Star, and Arizona Daily Star, among others. Recent Dark Web research includes: (1) epidemiological and social network modeling of internet radicalization and violent intents; (2) Dark Web Forum Portal and Video Portal for researchers and analysts; and (3) Geopolitical Web research of social media and news tracking for multi-cultural at-risk regions.