Miller-McCune magazine features former SFI Omidyar Fellow Aaron Clauset and his search for universal patterns hidden in human conflicts -- patterns that he hopes might one day allow scientists to predict long-term terrorist threats.
“When you start averaging over the differences, you see there are patterns in the way terrorists’ campaigns progress and the frequency and severity of the attacks,” he says. “This gives you hope that terrorism is understandable from a scientific perspective.”...
In December 2006, Clauset took a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute, an incubator for big ideas that brings together scholars with vastly different backgrounds — from computer scientists and physicists to linguists, economists and anthropologists. “You’re encouraged to think outside the box and interact with people from other disciplines — to find new ways of attacking old questions and to come up with new questions that no one had thought of before,” he says.
Read the full Miller McCune article (December 13, 2010)
Read more about Clauset's terrorism work in the SFI Update newsletter (September 2009)
Watch an online video in which Clauset describes the physics of terrorism (June 16, 2010)
Read an August 3, 2010 New Scientist article about Clauset's work (subscription required)