Pulse Radar for Inferring Intent from Social Media (PRIISM)

PRIISM (Pulse Radar to Infer Intent from Social Media) will advance IST Research’s Pulse Platform for online data monitoring and active audience engagement to build a tool that automatically detects intent to act to harm US overseas forces expressed through publicly available information (PAI). PRIISM will revolutionize the way intentions and threats are detected online by combining Pulse’s innovative means of social media collection and population engagement with cutting edge theory in intent inference, to operationalize and empirically validate a system to uncover nefarious intentions through information freely available online. To assess PRIISM accuracy, we will devise and execute a series of validation studies to empirically examine whether PRIISM intent indicators are associated with offline behaviors. We will generate hypotheses about the relationships between our intent indicators and test these hypotheses against ground truth data collected both from online sources and from direct, offline engagement with representative samples from populations of interest. We will consult with the Marine Corps Information Operations Command (MCIOC) to ensure that PRIISM use cases are relevant to DoD interests and that PRIIMS is both useful and usable by DoD operators.