Indian origin scientist's team's new 'SCARE' software to help locate hidden arms, IED's

Washington, Dec.11 (ANI): Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed and successfully tested a new computer software and computational technique to analyse the patterns of improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan or other locations, and predict the locations of weapons caches that are used by militants to support those strikes.

The software, named SCARE (Spatio-Cultural Abductive Reasoning Engine) allows human analysts to combine available intelligence with this analytical computational technique to identify the most probable locations of IED weapons caches.

The software, which has been developed by Professor V.S. Subrahmanian, together with Maryland University computer science Ph.D. student Paulo Shakarian and computer science Professor Maria-Luisa Sapino of University of Torino (Italy), is a tool which the military commanders can use with perfection to locate the hidden cache of arms of ammunitions.

"The SCARE software is not a stand-alone tool. Military commanders and intelligence analysts would use SCARE in conjunction with their own experience and knowledge of a region, and together with available intelligence to pinpoint likely cache locations," said Subrahmanian.

Shakarian, who has spent over two years in Iraq, said the techniques would help the field commanders to better deploy resources, and in many cases, catch insurgents in the process of re-supplying such locations or actually carrying out IED attacks.

"SCARE is designed to address a very real tactical problem our soldiers encounter on a regular basis," said Shakarian, who is a U.S. Army Captain enrolled in the Army's Advanced Civil Schooling program.

To test the latest technique, its developers ran the SCARE program publicly available data on the locations of IED attacks in Baghdad that occurred over a 21-month period. The locations of IED caches predicted by SCARE were then compared with actual locations of caches found in that region during that time. The predictions usually were within a half mile of actual locations. (ANI)