02 November 2018
Big data and non-proliferation: The Alpha Proliferation Open Source Tool (Alpha-POST)
Ian J Stewart, Director, Project Alpha
Over the last two years, Ian Stewart, director of Project Alpha, has been developing a ‘big data’ platform for non-proliferation purposes. This platform is used to inform Project Alpha’s work and acts as a test bed for big data and machine learning approaches in the non-proliferation sphere. Today, Project Alpha is publishing a paper on Alpha-POST’s design and capabilities to provide background on the platform.
The abstract of this paper, which can be downloaded HERE, reads as follows.
This paper outlines the Alpha-Proliferation Open Source Platform (Alpha-POST), developed by Project Alpha to leverage big data analysis for non-proliferation purposes. The article demonstrates how a variety of open source software tools can be fused together into a ‘software stack’ capable of ingesting, processing and leveraging vast quantities of data to aid human analysts. While Alpha-POST leverages tools such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), link chart analysis and machine learning in the non-proliferation domain, Project Alpha argues that the approaches outlined in this paper could be applied to any discipline or sphere .
A forthcoming article in the Journal of Nuclear Material Management will examine how the big data approaches developed in this platform can be used more generally in the non-proliferation domain. Additionally, the platform will be demonstrated at the 2018 IAEA safeguards symposium.