DIMACS
DIMACS REU 2019

General Information

me
Student: Teresa Ngo
Office: CoRE 448
School: Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program
E-mail: teresa.ngo98@gmail.com
Project: Protecting Vulnerable Communities from Targeted Violence and Mass Casualty Attacks

Project Description

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 have been assisting in updating this guide by employing quantitative and qualitative analysis to assess the levels of preparedness and resilience demonstrated by houses of worship and vulnerable communities. Students have analyzed social media and other components, such as interviews and case studies, 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:
This week was a fun, introductory period for learning more about the project and meeting the people I am working with. After meeting Sassi, Ava, Dr. Clark, Dawn, and Chris, we discussed our tasks for the next couple of weeks before the Building Resilience Conference. My first task was to create a visual representation of mass casualty incidents globally. I found a few options, one of which is Datawrapper. Using this site, I created an interactive map that details the events in each city. I also used Excel to create a 3D globe of the incidents; however, the Datawrapper site will most likely be used for the Conference. After attempting to embed the visualization into Microsoft PowerPoint, I ended up taking a screenshot, placing it on a slide, and hyperlinking it to the website. I then started my next task, which is to code a case study on the Jeffersontown, KY church shootings based on the RESILIENCE model. This task will be completed over the weekend and into Week 2.
Week 2:
A lot occurred this week. On Monday, my group and I had our first presentation, during which we talked about introductory tasks and the RESILIENCE model on which our research is based. Afterwards, I continued researching into the Jeffersontown, KY church shootings, wrote up a case study and analysis using the model, and submitted it. Tuesday through Thursday was spent participating in the Rutgers IC CAE Intelligence and National Security Certificate Program in Critical Technology Studies. I learned a lot about big data as well as how to present this data using Tableau. Along with three other individuals, I analysed a fictional scenario about white supremacist protests in Trenton and presented the findings to a panel of experts. While doing this program, I also continued doing work by visualizing tallies in the RESILIENCE model using Tableau and Excel, as well as going through coded transcripts of interviews and picking out meaningful quotes to be used in the conference next week.
Week 3:
The first half of this week was dedicated to attending the "Building Resilience in the New Threat Paradigm: Targeted Violence against People of Faith" conference. Together with Dawn and Chris, we took a Lyft down to Tropicana Resort, Atlantic City on Monday and attended the Meet & Greet the night before the first day of the conference. For two days, Jitney bus services took us to Stockton University, where the conference was held. We heard from multiple speakers in the law enforcement from Europe and the U.S. as well as religious leaders from houses of worship. A lot was said regarding best practices in keeping communities of faith safe, and a common theme was partnering up with local police and enlisting guardians within the congregation. There was also a brief exercise during which we were escorted to a local church and discussed ways to educate the youth and prevent crises from occurring. I also met Dr. Ronald Clark for the first time and, using my interactive visualizations of the international incidents of mass casualty attacks (both the online and Excel versions), he presented the RESILIENCE model to all 180 participants in the conference. I learned a lot about interfaith relationships during the conference, along with the importance of communication and sharing information. The conference then ended with a closed roundtable of selected leadership. Following the conference and our return to Rutgers, we wrote up an article summarizing the last few days to send to our mentor. I also compiled a list of Best Practices that I gathered from the conference. After Culture Day with the rest of DIMACS and learning so much about our friends' cultures, I completed this week with an article about the certificate program I attended the week before.
Week 4:
The week started off with a really cool trip to Nokia Bell Labs. My father, who works there, met me with coffee and showed me around the offices during the break. We also listened to some researchers about really interesting work they have been conducting, such as data acquisition and analytics. One that I found most concerning was research on cell phone data and how to use it to differentiate Syrian refugees from Turkish civilians. After learning about the many G's (from 1G to 5G), we visited the Antichamber and Anechoic chamber. There, we were met with a lot of sound (from a multitude of speakers) and a lack of it (respectively). The Anechoic chamber was a really cool place to sit down in silence. For the remainder of the week, I researched various methods of visualizing qualitative data and worked on Pillar 2 of the RESILIENCE model: Engage Partners. I did a writeup of it (from analysis to recommendations) and included quotations from the conference and interviews. I then submitted it to the shared Google Drive. The week ended with a seminar on machine learning.
Week 5:
We began this week with a conference call with one of our mentors and the rest of the team (outside of DIMACS). We discussed possible software to use for qualitative visualization, including NVivo. We also discussed the next pillar writeups and the next steps in the project. After the call, I was assigned to do Pillar 9 of the RESILIENCE model: Constant Communication. The following day, we had another conference call to go more in depth about various software. I was tasked to start a Google doc of a compository of different qualitative software. I shared this with Dawn and Chris and together, we worked on this list (name, source, price, pros, cons, and the top 3 that we found). We also continued working on the pillar writeups. By Thursday morning, I completed my 7-page writeup and submitted it to the shared Google Drive. After this task was completed, I was able to work more on the software list, adding on Atlas.ti, Dedoose, Transana, Quirkos, and Provalis (among others that my teammates added). Before close of business on Friday, I sent this list to our mentors and team to go through and pick the ones best suited for our project.
Week 6:
This week was dedicated to testing out the free trials of the qualitative visualization softwares. I was tasked to test out Quirkos, which was fairly confusing at first. There are some useful aspects to it, such as coding interview transcripts and visualizing the codes. However, there were some elements that were confusing and redundant. For this project, we had already coded the interviews, but these codes were not visualized in Quirkos. Therefore, I had to re-code them using word-searches in order to view the data overlaps and Word Clouds. At the end of the week, we were tasked on analyzing what we had, visualizing the current data set, and finding new meanings and connections between the pillars in the RESILIENCE model. Once we develp some visualization options and complete analysis, we are to upload a writeup to the shared Google Drive. Next week, I will continue testing out Quirkos and uploading the rest of the transcripts.
Week 7:
I started this week by downloading all 31 interview transcripts, editing them, and uploading them to Quirkos. After the graduate panel on Monday, I then re-coded every transcript according to the RESILIENCE model. I found that almost every pillar was off from the original count - some would be close to 20 counts under, whereas others were over. This could be due to an error in re-coding or an error in counting originally. I then continued to use Quirkos to create a powerpoint with all analysis based on the data. This includes overlaps between each pillar, as well as a Word Cloud. However, this software was unable to create any other kind of qualitative visualization. After completing this, I then collaborated with Chris and Dawn to create a collaborative qualitative analysis of the results. We found many overlaps between Pillar 2 and the other pillars, as well as many co-occurrences. On Thursday, we presented our Final Presentation, which consisted of our findings thus far. We will continue to work on qualitative analysis, either with current or new software, to help in creating an online guide of best practices.
Week 8:
This was a very slow week compared to previous ones. My team and I worked on our collaborative scientific paper and sent it in to our mentors for review. I then started and completed my personal review of the DIMACS REU program as a whole. Next week, we will continue editing our paper.
Week 9:
I was expecting this week to be another slow one, since I assumed that we would only have to work on our final paper. However, one of our mentors got back to us and gave us a new list of things to do. This week, after speaking with him, were tasked with trying out NVivo, another software that Chris was assigned, looking more into the relationships between the pillars and how they interacted together, parsing down the Word Cloud, and continuing to visualize trends using Dedoose. I quickly managed to cut down the Word Cloud to give it more meaning by taking out words such as "sort," "like," and "actually," among others (the Word Cloud can be found below). The following day, we continued working on our paper by combining our new edits with ones that our mentor sent back to us. As I mentioned before, the tally counts for each pillar that I gathered from Quirkos was fairly off from the original - this was the same for Dedoose and Dove Tail, the other two software that were tested. I compared the tallies of each pillar of the RESILIENCE model from each software to the original count and found large differences: while the software were similar to each other, there was (at most) a difference of about 20 tallies in some pillars. I relayed this to our mentor, and we decided that the software tallies were more accurate than the original count. After this, we all switched to using Dedoose to data mine it and figure out the funding for future fellows. Lastly, we created a slide presentation and a word document of the best visuals we created: we created verbal narratives to explain the meaning behind the visualizations. The last tasks we did were to capture all the material in an alternative backup (in case we couldn't get funding for Dedoose) and make the final edits to our paper. To finish off this week, the other fellows and I had a nice lunch with our mentors and the other IC CAE fellows. We talked about our goals and next steps for the summer, as well as life advice.

Datawrapper World Incidents
A Screenshot from an Interactive World Map of Incidents

Excel World Incidents

A Screenshot from an Interactive Spinning Globe of Incidents

Word Cloud

A Word Cloud from 31 Interviews

Presentations

Additional Work

Additional Information

Acknowledgements

The authors conducted this work during their time as Rutgers IC CAE Research Fellows, supported through a grant from the Defense Intelligence Agency for the Intelligence Community Centers for Academic Excellence - Critical Technology Studies Program.

We would like to thank our mentors, Ava Majlesi, Sassi Rajput, and Dr. Ronald Clark, for their continued guidance and the DIMACS REU staff for their support.