Stern Awarded Research Incubation Award
Jessica Stern, Research Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, has been awarded Boston University’s Hariri Institute Research Incubation Award for her research project titled “Towards Developing Computational Models to Predict the Spreading of Radicalizing Content on the Web.”
Twice a year, Boston University’s Hariri Institute for Computing identifies and awards funding to faculty researchers whose projects involve data science and computing at their foundation. Projects are identified for their cross-disciplinary characteristics and their ability to bring in other colleges and schools from across the university.
Stern, along with her CO-PI, Gianluca Stringhini, a Research and Junior Faculty Fellow at the Hariri Institute for Computing, plan to merge the theories that predict which extremist content is at risk of going viral through computational analysis techniques. The team plans to qualitatively label extremist content following the existing theories, leveraging clustering techniques to identify similar content across multiple platforms. They will also apply statistical methods to quantify its spreading, and finally, use classification techniques to learn the traits of radicalizing content that succeeds in becoming viral. Stern and Gianluca plan to produce two research papers from this research.
Learn more about the research project here.
Jessica Stern is a Research Professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. She is the coauthor with J.M. Berger of ISIS: The State of Terror; and the author of Denial: A Memoir of Terror; Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill; and The Ultimate Terrorists. Learn more about her here.