Ushahidi is an interesting open source platform for information collection and interactive mapping. In a one day project with the Swedish Defence Research Agency, we connected the Recorded Future system with Ushahidi via our API.

Our focus was on showing protest events and other events indicating emerging conflicts. The project illustrates the simplicity with which structured information from Recorded Future can be visualized using freely available 3rd party tools.

For further information, see conference details at OSINT-WM 2011 or read the full report [PDF].

Mantech International Corporation is hosting the 1st Annual WoW Technical Conference next week on September 20, and we’re excited to announce that Recorded Future’s CEO Dr. Christopher Ahlberg will be giving a presentation entitled “Unlocking the Predictive Power in you Data”.

The conference will cover a wide variety of technologies focused on the agile implementation and smart visualization of data. The event is free to attend, and you can find the full list of presenters as well as register for individual sessions here.

Want a taste of what Dr. Ahlberg will discuss before you register? Check out how Recorded Future works for intelligence analysis.

Excerpt from UCLA Today:

“They didn’t get his address quite right, but five UCLA undergraduates and a geography professor came fairly close to pinpointing the whereabouts of the world’s most wanted terrorist — and they did it more than two years before Osama bin Laden was actually found…

Cleverly, they did it using theories typically used by biogeographers to determine the likely location of endangered birds or plants, high-resolution satellite imagery, remote sensing data and an analysis of life history characteristics.

In a prescient paper that was published in MIT International Review on Feb. 17, 2009, geography students taking the class “Remote sensing in the environment” taught by Professor Thomas Gillespie came up with a probability model that pointed to a city in northwest Pakistan, Parachinar, as bin Laden’s most likely hideout. Although that location turned out to be 230 miles from Abbottabad, where he was found and killed Sunday, the UCLA researchers’ model turned out to be on track. Based on concentric circles identifying probability over large areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the model predicts that there would be an 88.6 percent chance that bin Laden would be found in the area where Abbottabad is located.”

Via the Sandfire blog. See the full study details at the MIT International Review [PDF].

If you’re interested in learning more about the statistics behind predictive analytics check out Bill Ladd’s blog Predictive Signals. In his most recent post Bill, a well seasoned stats PhD, uses Recorded Future to analyze and cluster news flow. For those looking for deeper mathematic examples demonstrating the power of Recorded Future keep an eye on Bill’s Predictive Signals blog. Software developers may be interested in checking out our news analytics API.