COLLEGE PARK -- Army Capt. Paulo Shakarian took a crash course in the tactics of Iraqi insurgents during his second deployment to Iraq in 2006 and 2007. Now he's using that hard-won knowledge to develop a technology that might help fellow soldiers locate enemy bomb supplies before they can be used.
<snip>
"We knew the ... triggermen had to be able to see the vehicles," Shakarian said. "If you're waiting to blow up a guy, you've got to be hiding out, sitting there quietly for a long period of time."
But where? Patrols soon found evidence of the insurgents' overnight camps, he said, "so we focused on those areas for patrols, and we cut off the enemy from using those places for attacks."
Shakarian, 29, is now a doctoral candidate in computer science at the University of Maryland, College Park, relying on his combat experience to help UM computer scientist V.S. Subrahmanian develop a technology to help soldiers figure out where insurgents are hiding their bomb supplies.
If it works, lives might be saved. And initial experiments have been promising, he said.
Using data from a series of related bombings in Baghdad, their system was able to predict - within less than a third of a mile in eight out of 14 cases - where explosives caches were actually found.
By crunching the attack data, the scientists determined that bomb supplies were most likely stored roughly 1 to 2 kilometers from the site of an attack. The system refined its predictions even more by accounting for ethnic differences, and the fact that insurgents from one group would likely try to avoid neighborhoods populated by different sects or protected by the U.S. military.
<snip>
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2009-12-29/news/0912280062_1_bomb-attacks-bomb-supplies-iraqi-forcesSmart. A new idea. it's only in the early stages, but it could really help.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
