Kathleen M. Carley, director of the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) in the School of Computer Science's Institute for Software Research, received the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation's (USGIF) Academic Achievement Award at the organization's annual symposium this week in Tampa, Fla.

The USGIF, which seeks to advance the geospatial intelligence tradecraft as it relates to national security, cited Carley's development of Dynamic Network Analysis (DNA) theory, her work on social network analysis techniques, and her development of the geospatial dynamic social network analysis and visualization tool ORA as watershed contributions to the field.

"The theory of dynamic network analysis developed by Professor Kathleen Carley has enabled the development of a whole generation of geospatial network analysis and visualization tools," the USGIF said in their award announcement."By supporting ORA and by training a vast number of researchers in the use of ORA, Carley has greatly facilitated this field. ORA allows students and researchers to explore multidimensional analysis and visualization techniques on many classes of data without having to write code."

ORA is used worldwide for such tasks as assessing disaster response, for gang and drug interdiction, and by NATO for social media analytics.

A fellow of the IEEE, Carley has received the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence, the American Sociological Association (ASA) Lifetime Achievement Award and the International Network for Social Network Analysis' (INSNA) 2011 Simmel Award. She has also served as president of the North American Association for Computational and Organizational Simulation and of the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.