DIMACS
DIMACS REU 2019

General Information

me
Student: Dawn Park
Office: CoRE 448
School: Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program
E-mail: dp863@scarletmail.rutgers.edu
Project: Protecting Vulnerable Communities from Mass Casualty Attacks

Project Descripton

The overarching goal of the Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience (Miller Center) and its partners is to implement programs and projects that protect vulnerable populations by identifying and disseminating best practices, offering police-community workshops, consulting with and assisting vulnerable populations on security and civil liberties issues, and engaging in research relevant to the protection of vulnerable populations.

The Center is in the process of developing an online guide of best practices to better protect vulnerable communities in the United States from mass casualty attacks and targeted violence. Student researchers will assist in updating this guide by employing quantitative analysis to assess the levels of preparedness and resilience demonstrated by houses of worship and vulnerable communities. Students will analyze social media and other components to further understand the relationships and networks between vulnerable communities, law enforcement, the public and the private sector in protecting communities and preventing incidents.

Weekly Log

Week 1:
During the 1st week of DIMACS REU, I started adjusting to my new work for the Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience (CPR). It is currently working on an online guide of best practices for vulnerable communities, specifically for houses of worship, to protect themselves from mass casualty attacks and targeted violences. I believe this is a very interesting topic to research about and I hope to do my best in assisting this development. So far, I had to code two interview transcripts, one from Pete Huller and one from George Salim. I also got into a conference call with my group and we discussed about our progress and what else we need to do for the project. Overall, it went pretty well and I think it is nice to get in contact with Teresa, Chris, Sassi, and the others every now and then. We are also preparing our presentation that we need to present on Monday. We're also thinking about a conference, which was heavily related to best practices, that we were invited to go to. I think it sounds interesting. Overall, this has been a decent beginning. I can't wait to see what else is in store for me in DIMACS REU.
Week 2:
This week, I have been working on a case study based on the Easter bombings in Sri Lanka. It was an interesting case to research about and relate to with the R.E.S.I.L.I.E.N.C.E. model. After that, I had to create visuals that showed the total number of tallies for each pillar of the R.E.S.I.L.I.E.N.C.E model from every interview we've done so far. I had to do this by creating bargraphs from Excel. Then I had to look for significant quotes from a few coded transcripts. Each of those quotes needed to relate to a pillar from the R.E.S.I.L.I.E.N.C.E model. Eventually, I was able to get all of this work done quickly but it was interesting to go over. I wonder what upcoming work I will have to do next week and I am looking forward to the conference Teresa, Chris, and I will be going to next week.
Week 3:
From 6/10-6/12, my coworkers and I attended to a conference at Stockton University: "Building Resilience in the New Threat Paradigm: Targeted Violence Against People of Faith". While we spent some time enjoying Atlantic City, we also got to hear many discussions about ways to build resilience for vulnerable communities against targeted violence. Throughout each keynote and panel, we wrote down notes on what each panelist had to say about a certain topic. It was very interesting to hear so many perspectives and insights on how houses of worship can protect themselves and what law enforcement can do to assist them. One of the topics that I had the most interest in was the uses of social media and falling victim to it.

After the conference was over, we had to send our notes to Sassi and Ava and write a summary of the conference. The conference was a great experience and I'm glad I could expand my knowledge and interest in best practices.
Week 4:
On Monday, we went on a field trip to Nokia Bell Labs, an industrial research and scientific development company. There, we got to see some presentations about some of the technology the Labs were working and went on a tour around the company. We even got to see the Anechoic Chamber, a room that could absorb echoes and reflections which was useful for Fundamental Acoustic Research. It was fascinating to go into that room and learn about what Nokia Bell Labs does to impact technological advancement.

On Wednesday, my coworkers and I were assigned to write rough drafts about a specific pillar of the R.E.S.I.L.I.E.N.C.E model. I chose the 3rd pillar, "Share Information and Intelligence". Our team is now preparing to write a full draft for our online guide, so we had to start with writing drafts for the first four pillars. Overall, I wrote about the goal of "sharing information", its significance in building resilience within vulnerable communities, its analytics compared to other pillars, and some examples of information sharing hubs, such as the FB-ISAO. I also included some relevant quotes from the people we've interviewed. I'm not sure if this draft is good enough so hopefully I can improve it for the next draft. The week ended with a seminar about machine learning.
Week 5:
During this week, my coworkers and I searched through software tools that can be useful for visualizing qualitative data. At first, we thought NVivo was the best option, but we were still assigned to write a list of the top 3 tools and why each tool would be useful to us. Ultimately, we found 12 different software for qualitative data and listed their prices, sources, pros, and cons. The top 3 tools we found were NVivo, Dedoose, Quirkos, and Dovetail Research. Teresa had sent the list to Dr.Clark, and we are expected to try out each of their free trials starting next week. That way, we can decide which software will be the most useful for our research project.

While we were working on that, we moved on to the second round of pillar drafts, which were the remaining pillars of the R.E.S.I.L.I.E.N.C.E model. I was assigned to write about the 7th pillar, "Enlist Guardians". I wrote about the importance of enlisted guardians, their responsibilities, the distinction between internal and external guardians, and its analytics compared to other pillars. I found this pillar to be similar to the 2nd pillar "Engage Partners", but it focused more on who is responsibile for building resilience rather than how resilience is built and who should be involved. Again, I hope this draft will be good enough.

On Tuesday, there was a seminar about network algorithms being used to analyze trajectory data. I found the usage of statistical analysis in these algorithms very interesting. It offers an insightful perspective on how one's personal information can be spread through social media networks and how this affects their privacy.
Week 6:
For this week, I tried out a free trial of Dedoose, one of the top 3 software for visualizaing qualitative data. After trying it out for a while, I thought it was an interesting program to use. I can access its interface not only through a desktop application, but also through the internet, even though it was laggy at times. In Dedoose, you can import any kind of document, such as text files, images, audio, and video, and use them to record down relevant excerpts that can be coded. I used the pillars of the R.E.S.I.L.I.E.N.C.E. model and used them to code all of the coded interview transcripts that I imported. (I spent the following week trying to code all of them.) You can also add 'descriptors' that can be linked to each source of media, but that is more on the quantitative aspect. However for this test project, I included every interviewee as a descriptor and linked them to each of their coded transcipts. Once you are done coding excerpts and linking descriptors, you can analyze the results in various ways; there are code co-occurance charts, code application charts, code x descriptor charts, and even word clouds based on the codes.

Overall, I think Dedoose is a fun program to use for visualizing qualitative data. It is great for coding and visualizing the results from that coding. Some data can even be exported as spreadsheets and pdfs, which can be used for more visuals from other software. I would definitely recommend using Dedoose for our research project, especially for its visuals and data exports. Since it allows multiple users to access projects, it would be great for out team to use and work together on it.

On Tuesday, there was a seminar about scientific writing. It summarized the basic outline of a scientific paper that we need to write for our DIMACS REU experience. My coworkers and I are going to start working on it starting next week.
Week 7:
This week, I finished testing out Dedoose and summarized my data visuals in a powerpoint presentation. After that, my coworkers and I shared each others' results to collaborate on an optimal analysis of our data. One notable things that we've found were that many of the pillars from the R.E.S.I.L.I.E.N.C.E. model co-existed with each other, especially Pillars 2, 3, and 6. Pillar 2 has the greatest number of co-occurances and overlaps, which makes sense since it is considered the most important pillar of the model. This indicates that all of these pillars have some sort of connection with each other, which could help in developing a stronger strategy for best practices.

On Thursday, we had our final presentation and summarized what we have done throughout our research and what we have found. It was a success and I was glad that we were able to show our findings to everyone at DIMACS. As of now, I wonder what else we'll have to do for the next two weeks of this program.
Week 8:
There is nothing much that is happening this week. After we finished our final presentations and our reports on the software we've used, we were then asked to wait for Dr.Clark to review them and give us feedback. In the mean time, Teresa, Chris, and I worked on our research paper and sent it to our mentors for review. We also worked on our experience reports individually. Other than that, there's nothing much we can do for this week. But since the program is almost ending, I suppose that makes sense.
Week 9:
For the final week of our fellowship, Teresa, Chris, and I got in contact with Dr.Clark. We talked about the data visualizations we worked on and he told us to continue playing with it to see if we can find any more findings or ways to visualize our data, particularly the co-occurrences. I added the conference notes of best practices to see if anything has changed among the top mentioned pillars as well as their co-occurrences. But nothing much has changed. However, I found out that we can use our case studies of mass casualty attacks in Dedoose by including the points they scored per pillar and visualize ratios between them. That way, we have a clear comparision between case studies to see which one was the most effective in best practices. Perhaps this is something we can include to our analysis and our guide.

Our research team agreed to work with Dedoose for the rest of the project, since it is the most viable tool in visualizing the data we want. Dr.Clark is willing to pay for the subscriptions, but we also talked about it with Ava and she says they might be able to receive funding for it instead. I created a secondary Dedoose account so that any future research fellow can access the project I tested out. I'm sure they'll have a fun time working with it. Overall, Dr.Clark was impressed with our visuals and wants to collect the ones that would be great for our guide. We did so in a simple word document.

We also finished and submitted our research paper. Ava and Sassi reviewed it several times and gave feedback on how to improve it, so we took their advice until the final draft. We also met with them for lunch on Thursday. They were proud of the work that we've done and glad that we all have a great experience working for them and the Miller Center. We all agreed to keep in touch even after we leave from the program. I'm really happy to meet people like Ava, Sassi, Dr. Clark, Chris, and Teresa. In case I need life advice in the future, I am always free to talk to them about it.

And with that, my experience in the DIMACS REU program comes to an end. I'm sad that it has to end, but I enjoyed it a lot and I am grateful to have this opportunity. It gave me a whole new experience in research and data analysis and I would love to do more of it in the future. Not to mention, I am now more aware about the increase of targeted violence and ways for vulnerable communities to build resilience against it. I wish luck to our research team at the Miller Center and I look forward to see what our best practices guide looks like in the end. I would also like to thank the DIA grant that made all of this possible and everyone I've worked with throughout the DIMACS REU program for making my summer experience a great one. Thank you for reading.


A visual representation of the R.E.S.I.L.I.E.N.C.E Model


A visual representation of Pillar Co-Occurrences


A word cloud of the R.E.S.I.L.I.E.N.C.E. model pillars



Pie charts of Case Study Point Ratios.

Presentations

Additional Work

Additional Information

Acknowledgements

"This work was carried out while the author was a Rutgers IC CAE Research Fellow, supported through the DIA grant for Intelligence Community Centers for Academic Excellence - Critical Technology Studies Program."