Two years of tracking ISIS online communities has led Dr. Neil Johnson Ph.D, a physicist at the University of Miami in Florida, to some remarkable findings that might help predict future moves of the murderous Islamic terrorist organization.

Dr. Johnson and his multinational team studied nearly 200 pro-ISIS online communities starting in 2014 to develop a mathematical model that tries to explain the online activity of ISIS sympathizers, and by so doing help predict terrorist attacks before they're launched. His algorithm might even be effective in predicting the actions of "lone wolves" such as the Orlando murderer.

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Dr. Johnson said the study's goal was to start "a proper quantitative science of online extremism to replace the black-box narrative that is currently used."

His team tracked the connectivity of more than 100,000 people who follow online communities that support ISIS. They focused on small groups because these better reflect current activity in the ISIS community and, if followed, might point to where that activity is going. Dr. Johnson said this kind of tracking can help identify when conditions are ripe for terrorist acts to occur.

The 200 small groups they discovered and followed had over 100,000 members. The groups' postings included pledges of allegiance to ISIS; fund raising appeals and tips on how to protect oneself during a drone attack.

Dr. Johnson noted the pull of small groups is quite strong. He also said lone wolf sympathizers don't remain alone for long. They usually join a small group within weeks, and this is a weakness that can be exploited.

A surprising discovery was the key role women played in ISIS' online effort.

"We were surprised to find that 40% of followers declared themselves to be female," said Dr. Johnson.

"Women hold an unexpected position in the pro-ISIS networks -- they tend to be centers of information-flow between followers, and to increase the lifespan of the communities. They typically do not have similarly prominent roles in comparable networks from the everyday world, such as innovation networks for patents in industry and academia."

Dr. Johnson said a key implication of their work is that once the communities are found, "you have your hand on the pulse of the entire organization. Instead of having to sift through millions of Internet users and track specific individuals, an anti-ISIS agency can simply follow the relatively small number of communities."

"Pro-ISIS support will quickly grow into one large super-community -- which could very rapidly spread material across the Internet -- if anti-ISIS agencies aren't active enough in shutting the smaller groups down. But we show mathematically that it should be possible to prevent the development of large aggregates by breaking up smaller ones."

Dr. Johnson believes that counter terrorism agencies can focus on breaking up groups of 100 persons.

"Without these smaller pieces, the larger ones cannot develop," he said.

TagsISIS, Dr. Neil Johnson, University of Miami, online groups