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COLLEGE PARK, Md., Apr 11 (UPI) -- An upgraded analytical-computational grouping from the University of Maryland module support U.S. troops better post rebel assets in Afghanistan, officials say.

The upgraded profession â€" called Spatio-Cultural Abductive Reasoning Engine S2 -- combines a variety of geographical, social and incident information with an computational psychotherapy technique called geospatial abduction to create an analytical tool that was first developed to dissect patterns of temporary exploding figure attacks in Iraq and predict the locations of IED weapons caches.

"U.S. commanders crapper ingest our geospatial abduction techniques to ascent in on regions that hit a high probability of containing HVTs (high continuance targets)," said the authors of a essay on the technology, which is to be published in the 2011 International Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence.

"In our think in Helmand and city provinces, half the regions we identified definitely contained an HVT. In addition, another regions we identified may well hit contained an HVT because our connector actuality accumulation said there was an HVT in the province, without pinpointing the location."

The authors inform that the regions they discover with SCARE-S2 contain, on average, meet 4.8 villages, and hit a density of high-value targets (including weapons caches and targeted commanders ) that is 35 nowadays greater than in the Helmand and city provinces as a whole.

"In order to attain this, we had to understand both the tribal geography of these digit provinces and the geospatial constraints that rebel groups hit to control low -- and to do so, we had to assemble a multidisciplinary team, intend them to work together on understanding which tribes were where in the region, and then amend the computational models to refer regions containing HVTs," said V.S. Subrahmanian, a professor of computer science and administrator of the university's Lab for Computational Cultural Dynamics.

The Lincoln said the investigate boost advances previous SCARE results on IED attacks in Baghdad by the same University of Maryland team, where they utilised a simpler form of geospatial abduction to pinpoint locations of small IED caches to within 0.45 miles.

Unlike that effort, where the attacks were carried out in a small, but dense, urban surround this effort convergent on a much larger location prefabricated up of digit whole provinces of Afghanistan that are sparsely populated and where open maker accumulation to circularize out the think was of much poorer quality.

The SCARE and SCARE-S2 mathematical formulas are both based on abductive reasoning. Classical inferential rational tries to land what follows from a ordered of facts, while abduction tries to find the prizewinning account for a ordered of observations.

"The location geospatial abduction technique utilised here module support connector commanders focus intelligence assets on small, target-rich areas," said U.S. Army Capt. Paulo Shakarian, a Ph.D. candidate at the Lincoln and a co-author of the investigate paper. "The content of this investigate was to support the warfighter better post the enemy. We crapper deal a momentous blow to an rebel assemble by targeting large caches and activity in this way."