On 23 February 2023, CTED held a brownbag conversation with Development Services Group (DSG) who showcased their Global Terrorism Trends and Analysis Center (GTTAC) database. Ambassador Adam Blackwell, DSG’s Vice President of International Development, and Dr. Eoin Healy, senior research scientist specialising in quantitative statistical analysis and methodology, terrorism research, and risk assessment, briefed CTED on the GTTAC platform.
GTTAC is a platform used to: (i) collect data from open-source, multimedia data aggregators to identify reports of potential terrorist incidents; (ii) process data for text analysis, predictive modelling, and feature extraction; (iii) finalise incident creation and validation by team of data analysts; (iv) result in a database of global terrorism incidents with their many attributes. The database and access to terrorist incidents are available, accessible and gratis.
GTTAC was created by DSG and its partner the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) of George Mason University, to support its work for the United States Department of State’s Counterterrorism Bureau.
The CTED Brownbag Series emerged as a result of a suggestion from its Global Research Network (GRN) to hold more frequent and targeted communication to keep abreast of the latest empirical research and available data on terrorism and counter-terrorism trends, issues, and developments.