Staying Vigilant, Confronting Terrorism

Proposal	Project Presentation	Poster	Application	Research Paper

Group Information

We are Group 7. Our team comprises of:

• Gwendoline Tan Wan Xin
• Lim Kim Yong
• Tan Kee Hock

Problem & Motivation

The threat of terrorism is growing everyday and many countries, including Singapore, have taken steps to mitigate the risks of terrorism. In the National Day Rally 2016, PM Mr. Lee Hsien Loong mentioned that diplomats and security forces have been doing their job well but despite their efforts, it does not mean that terrorism will not happen in Singapore. As such, we are interested to find out and understand the behavior of terrorists organizations and their attack patterns (e.g. bombing, assassination, shooting) globally. This allows respective policy makers, government or intelligence agencies to better analyze terrorist organizations and their spread internationally so that they could devise appropriate policies/measures to prevent potential attacks in future.

Objectives

The aim of the visualization includes:

1. Allow understanding of each terrorist organization and their attack activities regionally/globally
2. Allow understanding of the types of attacks that a country may face, when they receive threats from a terrorist group

Selected Dataset

The dataset for analysis will be retrieved from the Global Terrorism Database (https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/using-gtd/).

Related Works

Many visual and data analysts have made use of data collected from the Global Terrorism Database to visualize and understand the extent of terrorist attacks around the world. Some of their works include the following:

• A visualization created to visualize geographic data (http://start.umd.edu/gtd/globe/index.html)
• An animated time-lapse visualization of terror attacks on the world map (https://www.visualnews.com/2015/12/01/15-years-world-terror-attacks-visualized-one-map/)
• An interactive visualization developed by 2 visual analysts to show trends and events that shaped the history of terrorism overtime (http://parano.github.io/Global-Terrorism-Visualization/)
• An analysis of death tolls & terrorist incidents around the world (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3322308/Number-people-killed-terrorists-worldwide-soars-80-just-year.html)

Project Approach

Our group attempts to perform self-learning on the respective visualization tools and technologies that we may apply throughout the course of this project. Peer learning will take place during meetings for us to learn from each other and apply these techniques to our project. During the process of data cleaning, preparation and analysis, our group aims to conduct these activities together. After we have performed a detailed analysis, we will then derive the respective deliverable that will be included in the final visualization application. Tasks (e.g. visual design, animation, application development, etc.) will be delegated to each group member for the project completion.