Hindsight 2024
Looking back at an eventful year from 2025
As I enter 2025, I find myself reflecting on a year that had its share of challenges and unmet expectations. Yet, despite and defying the disappointments, there remain many achievements and course-steering moments I can and will celebrate. I marked my first full year in the UK—a journey of adjustment and discovery (including of many “Briticisms”). While there's much I yet need to figure out, I’m chuffed for the progress made in launching initiatives and laying foundations in this new adventure. With 2024 behind me, I aim to build on that momentum, looking for and seizing new opportunities to grow and contribute.
Near the start of 2024, a serendipitous event involving my Britain-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni group resulted in a wintertime walk through a park alongside Ben Brabyn. We discussed my past research into and applications of the computational social science of incentivized social search/mobilization, from my time at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology and at the MIT Media Lab. Soon after, I began working with his company, Amitypath, bringing together that and other career experiences towards solving client organizations' challenges with their prize/award programmes and business development. Having cut my teeth on our first project together—the award programmes for the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering—we continued developing our signature "Pathfinder" model for incentivizing the activation of network "betweenness" value, and have already begun launching it for some of our current clients. As 2025 progresses, I look forward to further refining the concept in this context, over campaigns for clients current and new, as well as other applications of my research experience to consulting work.
His Walkabouts were another wonderful project to which Ben introduced me on that wintertime walk. I have met and connected with many fascinating people over the year, through having gone on these monthly walk+icebreaker+demo+hangout experiences. Walkabouts have now proliferated beyond London's Green Park, to multiple cities across the UK, and even in other countries. The events clearly meet needs, as we have grown a contingent of regular walkers, and are aware of many productive exchanges of knowledge and contact information that have happened during them. The year to come will surely see further growth of the Walkabouts, and perhaps even me dropping in on those in some of the other cities to which they have spread. The next one (for London) is on Tuesday the 28th of January.
2024 was also the year I was able to properly fill out another hat I wear—that of an open-source intelligence investigator of misinformation spread and influence operations. Having been interested in these phenomena for several years now, I had begun working on investigations of my own in early 2022, shortly after which I also joined and trained with the Digital Forensics Research Lab's "Digital Sherlocks" cohort. Early in 2024, another serendipitous encounter led to my investigation, with seasoned MDM/CIB researcher and investigator Marc Owen Jones, of an influence operation we dubbed "The Qatar Plot". Working outwards from a few sketchy-looking social media ads, we uncovered what turned out to be one of the largest known influence operations, targeting the population of this sceptered isle (as well as those of the US, EU, and other regions), with well over a million dollars in artificially boosted and often bigotry-laced propaganda, pushed through coordinated inauthentic assets, across several platforms, using content farms on the other side of the planet.
The tragedy in Southport this summer, and the rioting that followed across the UK (in the aftermath of millions in the country having been reached by the aforementioned propaganda), also resulted in me, Marc, and others tracking the spread of associated misinformation—and the infrastructure supporting and incentivizing it—in real time. I was thereby afforded opportunities to get my ideas on the topic out in the media—including Al Jazeera, Times Radio, BBC Radio, and ABC News—in addition to raising further interest in our earlier investigation.
I soon found myself consulting on or otherwise involved with other investigations—with SVT Verifierar, on the infamous "Europe Invasion" network; with counter-disinformation organization Valent Projects, on an infop of international import; and with counter-infop sleuth
, on the YouTube content flip phenomenon in the lead-up to the 2024 US elections. As we head into the election seasons of Ireland, the Philippines, Germany, Australia, and Canada, as well as political transitions that will likely bear implications for ongoing conflicts, many opportunities will emerge to face information environment challenges from evolving adversary tactics, and I join the pro-facts/-authenticity community in maintaining the needed vigilance.
Another highlight of the year for my OSINT work was my two-week trip to Berlin at the invitation of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development's Center for Humans and Machines. While there, I delivered a seminar on my work investigating misinformation and influence operations using OSINT, and ran a 3-day workshop on the subject, in addition to engaging with researchers there on data access and techniques relevant to OSINT. I was delighted to continue my relationship with the Institute since, commencing my affiliation as a Visiting Researcher with Director Iyad Rahwan's group there. I was also able to meet others in the field while in Berlin, such as researchers at the Weizenbaum Institute, and some residency participants of Tactical Tech.
Speaking of Tactical Tech, the "Investigating the Influence Industry in Elections" Mastercourse I took with them early in the year proved additionally helpful in rounding out my OSINT and counter-infop skillset, with tools especially useful for the events of 2024. I also put some of my time into getting acquainted with generative AI using Hugging Face libraries. And I was especially pleased to have come into contact with Neo4j, with whom I took two workshops and a half-day lab, on their graph database tech and its genAI applications. This appears to be a technology that promises to be useful both for my incentivized networking consulting work, and for my OSINT investigations, and I aim to master those aspects of it in 2025.
I got acquainted with it during Neo4J’s GraphSummit Europe (h/t Vlad Galu). This was one of a diversity of professional events I was privileged to have attended in 2024, including the tech event CogX Leadership Summit (h/t Ben Brabyn), the defence tech industry event Resilience Conference (h/t Tobias Stone), Hedayah’s International Research Conference & Communications Expo for countering extremism, and the Coordinated Sharing Behaviour Detection Conference at the University of Sheffield (h/t Fabio Giglietto). I look forward to opportunities to make connections and learn at more such events in 2025.
As I step into this new year, I’m grateful for the lessons learned, the progress made, and the support of those who’ve been part of this journey. Here’s to a year of connection, discovery, resilience, and opportunity. I wish everyone a successful and fulfilling year ahead!
Mirrored at LinkedIn.