A First Week in Research

Hello and welcome to my first blog post!

Since this is my first ever blog, you may have to bear with me while I figure out firstly what I’m actually going to use this blog for and, secondly, how I am actually going to make these posts interesting!

I thought I would use this post to talk about what I have been doing over the past week. I have just started work on the Enfolding project at UCL. Enfolding is a multi-disciplinary, multi-departmental project whose aim is to build models and a ‘global intelligence system’ that can help us better understand the social and economic world around us. The project is focused on four areas: Migration, Trade, Security and Development Aid. I will be working on Security.

The broad remit of my work is to consider various aspects of global security, which may include terrorism, conflict, international organised crime, trafficking and the black market in order to collect data and build models which can then be integrated into the other areas of the project. The following are three things I have been thinking about this week which will no doubt be important to both my research and the Enfolding project over the coming years.

Data
Gathering data for construction and validation of models will be a large part of my work, at least initially. The availability of good data is likely to have an impact on the subjects of study. For example, for a lot of criminal activity the data is patchy at best. Many crimes go unreported and even the definition of crimes vary considerably from country to country. Useful sources of data will include the Global Terrorism Database and the Correlates of War project. Clearly with vast amounts of data, various methods for data analysis will be needed.

Agent-based models
By their nature, social systems lend themselves well to Agent-based modelling. This is due to the large heterogeneity of agents within these systems and the fact they often exhibit emergent behaviour. For this reason it will be interesting to think of some security related issues in the context of social systems. I have been playing with Netlogo a bit this past week – a simple yet powerful piece of software which not only allows you to investigate a bunch of preset ABMs but also adapt these and build your own from scratch.

Entropy
Entropy is a useful concept in modelling social systems with a very large number of particles (people, organisations, money). It is a measure of uncertainty in the system which, when maximised, gives the most likely state of the system. Entropy can be used to determine the distribution of flows from a set of origins to a set of destinations, and is therefore particular relevant to the Enfolding project, when we model global migration and trade.