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Full Programme and Schedule   Hot Contemporary Topics: Youth, ‘Lonewolves,’ OSINT #emotion – Youth, Social Media and ISIS Debra Smith: Victoria University Online Violent and Non-violent Radicalisation of Afghan Youth Weeda Mehran: York University The Rise of Open Source Jihad – Autodidactic Lone Wolves or Bumbling Ideological Illiterates Akil Awan: Royal Holloway, University of London ...

By Lisa Kaati and Fredrik Johansson Lone wolf terrorists can come in a variety of shapes and backgrounds and they are in general very hard to detect before they attack. As argued by previous research, there are no clear profiles for lone wolf terrorists since they have a large variation in factors such as social status, ...

Twitter has become a key social media platform used by non-state actors in Syria to send propaganda to the rest of the world. For the most part Twitter has done a good job of clamping down on ISIS presence on the website. Twitter routinely bans ISIS supporter’s accounts and is quite fast at deleting ISIS propaganda ...

By Timothy Holman “I think it’s — there are several networks. There are several facilitators. There are plenty of ways to get information back and forth: go through mosques, go through the Internet, go through phones, and you go through former regime elements that are located in Syria and other countries. There is a vast ...

By Daniel Falkiner Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate provides detailed answers to a number of pressing questions: What exactly is ISIS? Where did it come from? Who is behind it? How does it function? What are the reasons for its success? Daniel Falkiner welcomes the rich description and analysis and finds Abdel Bari Atwan does an admirable job of explaining the ways Islamic ...

Identifying key knowledge gaps in the area of preventing violent extremism was the main focus of a recent EU Radicalisation Awareness Network Centre of Excellence (RAN CoE) research seminar in Vienna (12-13 April 2016). The seminar brought together the RAN editorial board, leading researchers, and practitioners to discuss and debate the latest radicalisation research findings ...

Title Python for Social Scientists Date and time Wednesday, 22 June at 9:00am Conveners Prof. Padraig Cunningham, Dr. Derek Greene, and Dr. Tania Malik – School of Computer Science, University College Dublin Workshop Descriptor This workshop will provide an introduction to Python and Python Notebooks for Social Scientists. At the end of the workshop participants will have ...

By Matteo Vergani We (myself and Ana-Maria Bliuc) just published a brief research-paper in the Italian magazine “Security, Terrorism and Society“. We used the computerized text analysis program LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) to investigate the evolution of the language across the first 11 Issues of Dabiq. Our paper shows ISIS’ increasing concern with ...

Title Human Reasoning Meets Machine Learning: Hands-on Workshop Using Mixed-Media Analytics Tools on Violent Online Extremism Data. Date and time Wednesday, 22 June from 2:00pm to 6:00pm Convener Heather Griffioen-Young – A social psychologist and manager of TNO’s Dark Web programme, Dr. Griffioen-Young has been involved in multiple projects involving radicalisation and violent extremism. Recent focus is ...

By Prof. Keith Martin Since so much of life has moved online, a clash has emerged between the opposing values of internet freedom, and internet control. Should the internet be a public arena free of all interference and influence from the authorities? Or does too much freedom result in anarchy, turning the internet into a ...