鈥淜athleen is an amazing American. She has done so much for this country and the current war on terrorism. My security clearance prevents me from telling you even a fraction of what her research has meant.鈥�
鈥� Major Ian McCulloh, U.S. Army
The small, round beam of a flashlight pinpoints a circle of words on a page in a darkened room. A 12-year-old, huddled in bed, gratefully surrenders herself to the futuristic world of sci-fi author Isaac Asimov. It had been another typical, long day鈥攕tarting with frustration at Catholic school. Not that learning was frustrating, of course. Learning was exhilarating. And math was particularly fascinating. No, it was the way they continually discouraged her. 鈥淜athleen, a girl shouldn鈥檛 waste her time on mathematics!鈥�
Pueblo, Colo., of the 1960s is just a small town like Mayberry R.F.D. And it鈥檚 a poor town, especially her side, where many鈥攈er family included鈥攍ive below the poverty line. Her father works for a local company, triple time, and in his spare time builds swimming pools with his tractor. Her mother helps with the pool business. Much of the family responsibility falls on her, the eldest of their four children.
After school that day, she had headed back to her grandmother鈥檚 small house, two blocks from her own, to do the family laundry. They didn鈥檛 have a washing machine at her own house. She loaded the clothing into the old contraption, using 鈥渢hat stick鈥� to agitate the clothes up and down. To speed the mind-numbing work, she counted the stabs. Up, down. One, two. Up, down. Three, four. She had always been a counter, lining things up to tick off, enthralled with the numbers. She then fed the clothes through the ringer, cranking to squeeze the water out. One. Two. Three.
Her thoughts wandered back to their farm. They鈥檇 had to move here, to town, two years ago, after they were flooded out by the Arkansas River. They鈥檇 lost everything, even her baby kittens. She missed her animals. She missed her friends. On to the ironing. The small, windowless room was stifling. She鈥檇 constructed a small stand next to the ironing board where she could balance her beloved science fiction books. She was an avid, avid reader and it passed the time, but she had to be careful. She had to hide the book each time her grandmother came in, for no one believed she could both read and iron.
After hanging the clothes on the line, she walked to her own similarly small house in time to make dinner. Corned-beef hash that night. And then it was time for TV. She was expected to sit with the family after dinner. It was insisted upon. They鈥檇 paid good money for that little black and white, and it was the only time the family was all together. She was eager to do her math homework, but rules were rules.
In fact, her parents preferred that she focus more on her tasks stuffing envelopes and answering phones for the pool business than on schoolwork. Her mother joked that her eldest鈥檚 first words were, 鈥淚鈥檓 going back East to college.鈥� Funny, considering no one in the family had finished college. Many hadn鈥檛 graduated from high school. Pencil and math text in hand, she tried her best to tune out the drone of the show.
Bedtime. She鈥檇 come upstairs, not to sleep, but to finish her math. And now, tucked in bed, flashlight in hand, she devours another Asimov book. It鈥檚 inspiring, this Foundation series, all about a system of social mathematics that can predict the future. She smiles. This book represents her destiny. She knows she can鈥攕he will鈥攎ake this reality.
More than four decades later, the phone rings in the Carley household. It鈥檚 Christmas break, and the Carleys are gathered together鈥擪athleen, husband Rick, and their two daughters, Cassandra and Arianna. Kathleen had followed her dream to MIT, through loans, scholarships, and numerous student jobs. She鈥檇 been so hell-bent to get there, she鈥檇 purposely flunked the Colorado School of Mines鈥� scholarship test. She鈥檇 met Rick during her freshman year at MIT. Within two years, they were engaged. They married right after her graduation.
Unbelievably, she鈥檇 faced familiar hurdles along the way. There was the MIT professor who warned she鈥檇 never make it as a female mathematician and should find a different field, even as she was taking every artificial intelligence course offered. And there was the cousin at her engagement party, relieved that Kathleen could now forgo that bachelor鈥檚 degree for her 鈥淢rs.鈥� with Rick.
Instead, she鈥檇 gone on to Harvard for a PhD, following the goal she鈥檇 set years before鈥攖o combine social science and artificial intelligence. She studied under Harrison White, a pioneer in the use of mathematics in social network analysis, the mapping and measuring of relationships between people and groups. Rick, meanwhile, had stayed at MIT for his own doctorate in electrical engineering.
While visiting a relative at Carnegie Mellon soon after earning their degrees, the Carleys decided to pop in to their respective academic departments: Kathleen to social science, Rick to electrical and computer engineering. They walked out with invites to return and talk about possible faculty appointments. Kathleen couldn鈥檛 pass up the opportunity to work with , a world-renowned researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology. So, both she and her husband followed through on the invites and, sure enough, the young couple received Carnegie Mellon appointments and settled in Pittsburgh.
At Carnegie Mellon, founded CASOS, the . She developed the multi-disciplinary center to bring together social scientists, organizational theorists, statisticians, and computer scientists鈥攃ombining their skills to further understand and predict how and why groups behave the way they do.
CASOS developed sophisticated tools, including , which employs mathematical algorithms that represent general social findings, like the tendency of friends to be similar. With vast quantities of data gathered from sources as varied as texts, news reports, interviews, blogs, and email, the system uses algorithms to analyze social networks. ORA has the unprecedented capability of keeping results up to date, tracking networks as they move through time. And, as Carley puts it, 鈥渋t lets you look at not just who talks to whom, but the who, what, where, when, how, and why. It puts it all together.鈥�
For example, the team can gather timely data from a group鈥檚 email and text interaction, as well as articles and blogs that reference them. From this data and more, ORA鈥檚 algorithms are then able to identify the most prominent leader. This information, combined with other tools, can then help pinpoint the target鈥檚 location.
Carley鈥檚 network science techniques and software can be used to study diverse social issues and problems, from how beliefs spread through cities to evolving revolutions to drug and terrorist networks. People call from every discipline and field, from academia to U.S. Homeland Security. With Rick, she is exploring methods to assess a region鈥檚 capability for building weapons of mass destruction. And then, of course, there is the military.
The phone rings insistently through the Carley house.
鈥淜athleen? It鈥檚 Ian McCulloh. I鈥檓 in Bagram, Afghanistan, trying to map out terrorist networks. I鈥檓 having a problem. Can you help?鈥�
McCulloh is a professor at West Point who had started teaching a social network analysis course in 2005, the first such course ever offered anywhere, according to the . He had 19 cadets working on social network research projects when he met Carley at an intelligence meeting and subsequently brought some of his work to her attention. They began a collaboration. One of their early network-analysis projects involved open source videos of sniper attack areas. In one kill zone, for example, the analysis detected a blue truck driving through multiple correlated videos, one time with a license plate visible. Identifying that license plate led to the eventual takeout of an insurgent cell. According to McCulloh, when the military in Iraq adopted the video-analysis technique, it resulted in an 80% decline in sniper attacks that year.
McCulloh was so pleased with the results and intrigued with Carley and her work that he applied to Carnegie Mellon to study full-time with her for his doctorate in Computation, Organizations, and Society. After earning his PhD in 2009, he returned to West Point, adding his newfound knowledge to his course curriculum. Evidently, the news spread quickly. He received an email from some prior students, then serving as intelligence officers in Afghanistan. They鈥檇 heard there were analytical tools鈥擟arley鈥檚 tools鈥攊n use at West Point that were better than those actually in use in Afghanistan. Could McCulloh do something?
McCulloh flew over to work with the task force. Running some of their data through ORA, he identified insurgent targets in 15 minutes. These were targets the officers believed would have taken an analyst with decades of experience more than a week to identify. Even more important, ORA鈥檚 mathematical analysis resulted in verifiable outcomes. This was in contrast to current methods, which too often were based on hunches and weak connections, leading to improper arrests and botched results.
After finishing his initial analysis, McCulloh stayed in Afghanistan, training the other officers in understanding network analysis and how the underlying ORA system worked. He continued his analytical work while he taught. One day, while performing a key analysis, McCulloh encountered a difficult problem. He couldn鈥檛 convert the data files into a usable format for ORA. At wits end, he reluctantly made that phone call to Carley, at home with her family, celebrating Christmas.
McCulloh can鈥檛 believe how quickly she drops everything to spring into action, immediately devoting herself and the resources of her lab to the problem. Even though it鈥檚 Christmas break, she manages to enlist her fellow CASOS researchers, as well as necessary military personnel. Phone calls fly back and forth from Pennsylvania to Afghanistan for four days. McCulloh barely sleeps. Carley and her group are faced with the challenges of working without personal access to the classified data. Finally, the group develops a technique to translate the data. McCulloh feeds it into ORA and is able to identify a group of insurgents moving from Afghan village to village. They鈥檙e training people how to build IEDs, or improvised explosive devices鈥攎ore commonly known as roadside bombs.
Months later, McCulloh hears that U.S. troops were able to find and neutralize the group. And without the insurgents鈥� bomb training, he learns, the level of sophistication in IED technology has fallen sharply, meaning fewer soldiers and civilians killed. He鈥檚 delighted, but only wishes that Carley and her colleagues could be compensated for their critical efforts. He knows it isn鈥檛 the first time or the last that they won鈥檛 be recognized. With or without explicit recognition, McCulloh sees the ORA software, and software developed from it, permeate the military and other U.S. agencies as more and more officers are trained and disseminate their knowledge.
Almost a year after McCulloh鈥檚 phone call to Carley, he is stationed in Iraq, spending a lonely Thanksgiving holiday. He and a colleague walk into an establishment frequented by U.S. personnel. The two spot a group of CIA analysts and sit down to chat, voices lowered. It鈥檚 an interesting conversation, and McCulloh can鈥檛 elaborate on it. Months later, he receives a call from a reporter for The Economist. The reporter鈥檚 anonymous source claims that Carley鈥檚 software may have been involved in finding Bin Laden. Can McCulloh comment? He replies he cannot.
Today, McCulloh is stationed back in the States. He had been training Iraqi intelligence officers to use the ORA software until he was identified by the insurgents and targeted three times for assassination. That鈥檚 when the U.S. military spirited him out of Iraq on a flight home. The assassination attempts were a sinister validation of the effectiveness of Carley鈥檚 technology. 鈥淪he is probably doing more for the U.S. military in academic research than anyone else in the country,鈥� says McCulloh.
Melissa Silmore (TPR鈥�85) is a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer and a regular contributor to this magazine.
Related Links:
