Defense Department awards nearly $4M to University of Maryland to fund terrorism data collection efforts

The University of Maryland (UMD) has secured a Department of Defense (DOD) award totaling nearly $4 million to support data collection efforts on terrorism-related projects and other asymmetric threats.

The DOD would fund data collection on several projects that include the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) dataset, the Bias Incidents and Actors Study (BIAS), the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and a suite of datasets on non-state actor pursuit and use of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) capabilities building on earlier START datasets.

The PIRUS data set contains deidentified individual-level information on the backgrounds, attributes, and radicalization processes of over 2,200 violent and non-violent extremists who adhere to far right, far left, Islamist, or single-issue ideologies covering 1948-2018.

“We’re grateful to our partners at the Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS) for working with us to secure this important work,” START Director William Braniff said. “This will help inform national security decision-making for the DOD and the broader interagency.”

Last month, the DOD released its Report on Countering Extremist Activity Within the Department of Defense, an effort highlighting ARLIS and START that included references to research on extremism within the military using PIRUS and BIAS datasets.