Social Radar Technologies

The suite of MITRE's Social Radar technologies allows a deeper understanding of the human domain, providing sociocultural situational awareness through lenses focused on networks, groups, sentiment, and behaviors.

Social Radar technologies allow analysts to detect, track, and understand social change in information-dense environments faster than humans alone are typically able. A combination of tools does so by processing and analyzing news, blogs, and tweets in near-real time to:

  • Detect and track trends in sentiment
  • Identify major shifts in emotion
  • Isolate influence campaigns
  • Identify author age and gender, and
  • Develop short-term forecasts, and support option analysis and decision making


MITRE's Social Radar tools have been integrated as a prototype system and applied in multiple real-world use cases. The tools have broad application across industry sectors, including defense, intelligence, security, and health. Using these tools, we can answer the following questions:

  • Does the public feel positive or negative about a topic, including individuals, organizations, events, ideas, or things? Is sentiment trending over time?
  • How are levels of emotion (such as anger, or happiness) around a given topic changing? Has emotion entered a new phase? When did the change begin?  
  • What tweets say about a topic? Who are key influencers?
  • What do we know about who is tweeting? How does content vary by gender, age, and location?
  • Are any groups or organizations manipulating the social media environment? Is it working? What ideas are taking hold?
  • Can we evaluate courses of action such as messaging campaigns, and visualize what may happen? Can we then assess how effective the campaign is?


Social Radar technology allows us to rapidly achieve situational awareness of the human environment, identify alternative courses of action—whether through words or deeds—and better understand the potential outcomes of those actions. In complex environments, where understanding human sentiment, emotion, and behavior is critical to success, Social Radar helps see through the noise, signals changes in the human landscape, and provides a path for effective interaction.

Learn more about specific Social Radar technologies available for licensing through MITRE's FastLicense program. We also license numerous additional technologies through our Technology Transfer Office.