# Kathleen M. Carley **Entity class:** Person; computational social scientist **Affiliation:** Carnegie Mellon University **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Kathleen M. Carley** is a computational social scientist whose research joins cognitive science, sociology, organization science, computer science, machine learning, and network analysis. She directs Carnegie Mellon's Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems and Center for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity. Her program treats organizations, beliefs, information campaigns, epidemics, criminal networks, terrorist networks, and online communities as evolving, multidimensional systems that can be measured, simulated, and subjected to intervention. Carley established [[wiki/Dynamic Network Analysis|Dynamic Network Analysis]] and led the development of [[wiki/ORA|ORA]], a platform for analyzing dynamic, geospatial, multi-mode networks. Her wider research ecosystem includes BioWar for epidemic simulation and Construct for modeling information diffusion, belief change, and social influence. This is a direct institutional demonstration that epidemiology, information propagation, social cybersecurity, organizational behavior, and threat-network analysis can share a computational vocabulary without becoming the same substantive phenomenon. ## Why This Person Is Included Carley is the collection's closest methodological neighbor. Her work shows in one career why [[wiki/Epidemiological Modeling|epidemics]], [[wiki/Complex Contagion|complex contagion]], belief diffusion, organizations, [[wiki/Social Network Analysis|social networks]], terrorism-relevant networks, and computational intervention belong inside one systems framework. The overlap with Bryant McGill is methodological rather than ideological: both approaches look past inherited disciplinary labels and ask how relations, information flows, beliefs, state transitions, and feedback change a dynamic network over time. Her work supplies the clearest academic lineage for the [[wiki/Counterterrorism Predictive Graph|Counterterrorism Predictive Graph]]. It also marks an important difference: Carley's public research program is an empirical and computational science; Bryant's collection assembles a broader civic, institutional, and historical synthesis around the interfaces among those sciences and the national-security system. ## Relationships - **methods:** [[wiki/Dynamic Network Analysis|Dynamic Network Analysis]], [[wiki/Meta-Matrix|Meta-Matrix]], [[wiki/ORA|ORA]], [[wiki/Agent-Based Modeling|Agent-Based Modeling]], and [[wiki/Social Network Analysis|Social Network Analysis]]. - **problem domains:** [[wiki/Epidemiological Modeling|Epidemiological Modeling]], [[wiki/Information Diffusion|Information Diffusion]], [[wiki/Complex Contagion|Complex Contagion]], [[wiki/Dark Network|Dark Network]], and [[wiki/Network Disruption|Network Disruption]]. - **collection role:** close methodological neighbor in [[wiki/Intellectual Neighborhood of the Counterterrorism Collection|Intellectual Neighborhood of the Counterterrorism Collection]] and [[collections/Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and the Intelligence Environment|Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and the Intelligence Environment]]. ## Sources / Provenance - [Carnegie Mellon University, “Kathleen Carley”](https://www.cmu.edu/cmist/about-us/people/faculty-affiliates/kathleen-carley.html) (accessed 2026-09-23). - [[research/A Network-Epidemiological Analysis of Radicalization and Real-Time Counterterrorism Observability|A Network-Epidemiological Analysis of Radicalization and Real-Time Counterterrorism Observability]]. **As of:** 2026-09-23