You might think your anonymous online rants are oh-so-clever. But they'll give you away, too. A federally-funded artificial intelligence lab is figuring out how to track people over the Internet, based on how they write.
The University of Arizona's ultra-ambitious "Dark Web" project "aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web," the National Science Foundation notes. And that analysis, according to the Arizona Star, includes a program which "identif[ies] and track[s] individual authors by their writing styles."
The Arizona group has been at this sort of research for a while, now -- sifting through more than 900,000 Islamist web pages. Here's a report Xeni filed last year for NPR on the Dark Web project. And here's a meaty blog post from Dancho Danchev on related projects.
Strangely, the Arizona AI lab's website seems to be down right now. But, thanks to the magic of Google, you can read a whole bunch of the the group's "Dark Web" research papers here. As the Star notes:
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/09/do-you-write-li.html
No comments:
Post a Comment