GlobalECCO is Helping to Build the Global Network

Global ECCO's (Education Community Collaboration Online) mission is to build and strengthen the Regional Defense Fellowship Program's (RDFP) global alumni network of Combating Terrorism (CbT) experts and practitioners through innovative and engaging technologies and techniques that both enable and encourage collaborative partnership between individuals, nations, organizations, and cultures.

Global ECCO enables communication between members who may otherwise be isolated physically, and allows multiple community members to interact, facilitating collaboration and continuing education on critical security issues. It also helps to maintain a network of skilled operators with a wealth of expertise to share and to draw on.

Global ECCO hosts a variety of innovative, interactive modules, including a progressive multimedia journal (CTX), strategic gaming applications, and an original and ongoing collection of operator archives from those who have fought in the war on terrorism. It also provides access to daily counter-terrorism news and a ‘curated' collection of blogs and resources on all facets of terrorism, violent extremism and radicalization.

Defense Analysis hosts DoD’s Information Strategy Research Center

• The DoD Information Strategy Research Center exists to:
• advance the goal of information operations as a core military competency
• support the DOD commitment to transform our military capabilities
• provide avenues for research for information operations, asymmetrical warfare, The Global War on Terrorism and unconventional thought

The curriculum is designed for both the specialist who will be assigned to an information operations position and the generalist who will be assigned to the operations directorate. The curriculum includes a core of military art and operations, the human dimension of warfare (psycho-social), analytical methods, and atypical sequence customized for each student. Additionally, each student will have an elective sequence designed to further develop an in-depth understanding of joint information operations.

The CORE Lab is DoD's Premier Academic Network Analysis Lab

• Fuses Relational, Geospatial, and Temporal Data to visualize, analyze, and model courses of action to weaken or improve network performance 
• Leading Research Center on Social Media Exploitation, e.g., ISIS Study (SOCOM/Joint Staff/SOCCENT)

CORE Lab courses and tools include:

Social Network Analysis (SNA)

SNA is a multi-disciplinary approach that combines mathematics, theories, and methodologies to understand human behavior from a network perspective. SNA holds that interactions among actors give rise to network structures that can help us examine human behavior quantitatively. Analysis can help practitioners understand central actors, how the network breaks down into subgroups and subcommunities, leadership and influence, and how quickly information travels. The SNA curriculum introduces students to basic terminology, crucial assumptions and tenets, data extraction/engineering techniques, network visualization, and analysis—culminating in a final analytic product that students will use to showcase their mastery of the material and interpret their results for non-practitioners.

Visual Analytics and Data Science for Irregular Warfare

Optimal decision-making requires the most accurate information available. With more information available than ever before, the ability to collect, process, refine, and analyze data quickly requires specialized training and tools. Students will learn practical skills in basic social network, geospatial, temporal, and text analyses to gain insights that directly support assessments, planning, and decision-making. They will gain critical thinking skills in data and functional data management. Students will gain an understanding of appropriate uses of data visualization techniques for analytical, presentation, and dissemination purposes, and of how to automate the production of these products to support ongoing operations (such as situation report compilation, identification of measures of effectiveness, changing friendly and threat unit locations and activities, and administrative reporting such as supply status and quantities).

Community and Conflict Assessment

Community resilience, the community’s ability to withstand adversity, is fundamentally linked to its capacity to manage conflicts. Conflict over resources, social issues, or political influence can erode social cohesion, reduce trust, and leave a community vulnerable to disasters or malign influence by external actors. By leveraging community and conflict assessment methods and tools, practitioners can build community resilience by strengthening social bonds and addressing drivers of conflict. Students will apply ethnographic approaches to community assessment, coupled with interagency tools and frameworks for sharing and describing communities and conflict variables, and uncover the root causes of conflict, dynamics, and key actors in conflict resolution.

snExplorer

SNExplorer is an SNA tool designed to streamline data-gathering processes and automate key steps in data preparation for SNA. It allows analysts to conduct in-depth analysis with access to numerous SNA statistics. It includes interactive visuals, tables, search features, and built-in cheat sheets to help users analyze data efficiently. Based on practitioner feedback, this custom analytic tool offers Summary, Knowledge Graph, Map, and Explore Data windows to facilitate descriptive, spatial, temporal, and relational analyses.

The Littoral Operations Center (LOC) Studies, Analyses, and Advances Military Operations

The Littoral Operations Center (LOC) is dedicated to the study, analysis, and advancement of concepts related to military operations that extend from seaward approaches, across the shores, and into the near-ashore regions of the littorals. This is the complex environment where Department of Defense leaders have said we must expect to operate on land, in the air, on and below the littoral seas, in coastal waters, and in the space and cyber domains. Special emphasis is placed on the technological-tactical complementarity of the Navy and Marine Corps. By necessity of its warfighting domain, the LOC inspires collaboration between DoD offices and agencies, national commercial enterprise, international industry, education, and friendly foreign defense departments. The LOC supports international workshops in many parts of the world and interdepartmental faculty and student research at NPS. It adapts its efforts to the changing geopolitical environment, whether irregular warfare, small and medium wars in critical regions, to the recent rise of major powers.

Working cooperatively through the NPS Academic Departments of Defense Analysis, Systems Engineering, Operations Research, Information Sciences and others, the Littoral Operations Center (LOC) routinely supports or collaborates with a broad spectrum of U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and other Services, DoD agencies/offices, COCOMS, International Partners, Law Enforcement Agencies, academic institutions, and FFRDCs/NGOs.

CODA LAB Aims to Create a New Generation of Data Warriors

The Coalition for Open-Source Defense Analysis (CODA) Lab represents a hub of faculty and student collaboration, designed to leverage the unique strengths of the “information science” and “social science” communities at NPS, and to enhance scientific understanding of the role of information and influence in contemporary security.

Our lab emphasizes the use of open-source data and software, and the development of new open-source tools and analytic results, so that our products can be freely shared with public, private, and foreign partners. We have also focused on the development of hybrid computational infrastructures, designed to bypass the bottlenecks of conventional tools, through highly scalable in-memory analytic approaches. By leveraging the rise of large-scale open-source data streams, combined with novel approaches to the design of computational architectures, we aim to foster a new generation of information warriors, capable of operating effectively in complex informational environments.

Our efforts have been funded by a variety of interested stakeholders, including ARL, TRADOC-TRAC, SOCOM, JWAC, MARFORCYBER, ONR, and DI2O/OUSD. Recent projects have focused on cross-domain applications of new approaches to machine learning, including:

• Artificial neural networks for the detection of hostile information campaigns
• Multi-scale anomaly detection in maritime shipping networks
• Geospatial conflict prediction through analysis of global online media
• Automated semantic learning for real-time situational awareness of emerging threats