Alessandro Zanasi

Alessandro Zanasi Abstract Security Research Advisor. ESRIF. University of Bologna. Temis SA.

Since the end of the Cold War, the threat of large scale wars has been substituted by new threats: terrorism, organized crime, trafficking, smuggling, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. To react to them a new security and intelligence strategy is necessary but to be effective it requires several instruments including new technological means.

Seen that all these new threats are knowledge intensive, the most useful means to fight them are those ones who allow the detection and extraction of this knowledge. Text mining is an advanced knowledge management technology allowing intelligence analysts to automatically analyze the content of information rich online data banks, suspected web sites, emails, chat lines, instant messages and all other digital media, detecting links between people and organizations, trends of social and economic actions, topics of interest also if they are “sunk” among terabytes of information.

This capability pushed European Commission to rank text mining as a primary technology to be funded through its new specific funding line dedicated to security and intelligence technologies, endowed of several billions Euros and started in 2007. Text mining typical users are intelligence analysts, in military as in business or political fields.

In his speech the speaker will present real cases regarding intelligence for industries and government and will give some highlight about EC funding to security and intelligence technologies.