Dr Gentry White

Position:Research Fellow
Sub-organisation:Institute for Social Sciences Research
Organisation:THe University of Queensland
Email:gentry.white@uq.edu.au
Personal Webpage:http://
Phone:07 3365 9869
Mobile:0406561133
Address:The University of Queensland
City:Brisbane
State:QLD
Postcode:4072

Research Areas

  • Counter Terrorism
  • Modelling and Simulation
  • National Security
  • Risk - Modelling

Current Project Grants

Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Grant PR0009-0076 2010

"Modelling the patterns of transnational and organised crime: the effectiveness of government based interventions in international crime reduction"


Harvest is a software-based expert system that was developed to automatically identify, assess and store information on terrorism interventions recorded in the public domain.   This software can be adapted for a range of analytical contexts for public or private data resources.  Harvest can automatically generate a codebook for users based on content contained in the data sample, and to “learn” from results to further refine the codebook and analyses.
Harvest produces “vignettes” that capture explanatory models of user-selected events. These models reveal meaningful
relationships between concepts present in the event descriptions using   semantic dimensions, such as who, what, where, when, and how.  Vignette models can change rapidly as situations change and multiple vignettes can be supported for multiple situations of interest at any one time.  Any report or sub-database created in response to a vignette model can be stored, refreshed and modified with input from the user.  Through its use of facet-based semantic analysis and vignettes, Harvest has the potential to build on the capabilities of current text analytic software tools that identify relationships between different concepts.

Completed Projects

Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Grant PR0009-0007 2009

Modeling the Effectiveness of Counter-Terrorism Strategies in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand

This project uses a variety of advanced analytical techniques to examine the data provided by the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and other open-source data.  The aim of this project is to provide a comprehensive description of terrorism in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand and to determine what if any interventions have been successful in reducing the risk of terrorism in these countries.