It was December 2015, and Dr Weisi Guo was having dinner and listening to the grim news about the conflict in Syria.
Over the previous decade, Dr Guo had grown increasingly troubled by the amount of violence towards civilians. He had worked in UNHCR refugee camps in Algeria and seen the human cost at first hand.
His own expertise - as an academic specialising in communication networks and telecoms - seemed a world away. But as a physical scientist he wanted a model to help understand the nature of conflict, and so a highly innovative approach began to take shape.
That night he looked at a map of where the Islamic State group was operating and noticed an overlap with locations on the old Silk Road - the route that had taken traders from China through Asia and the Middle East to the Mediterranean thousands of years ago.
Source : BBC
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