Social network monitoring: Aiming to identify periods of unusually increased communications between parties of interest

Abstract

Social networks are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers. Monitoring communications within clusters of suspicious individuals is important in flagging potential planning activities for terrorism events or crime. Governments are interested in methodology that can forewarn them of future terrorist attacks or social uprisings in disenchanted groups of their populations. This paper will examine a range of approaches that could be used to monitoring communication levels between suspicious individuals. The methodology could be scaled up to either understand changes in social structure for larger groups of people, to help manage crises such are bushfires in densely populated areas, or early detection of disease outbreaks using surveillance methods. The methodology could be extended into these other application domains that are less invasive of individuals’ privacy.