VAST Challenge 2014

VAST Challenge 2014

Two teams from IDC submitted entries to the 2014 VAST Challenge. In response to Mini-Challenge 2, a team led by Simon Attfield collaborated with a team at MASS Consultants Ltd. led by Dr. Adrian Wagstaff and James Bulloch to create a suite of visualisation tools which they used to analyse GPS and financial transaction data of employees working for a fictional company. The task was to characterise regular and unusual behaviours. The work culminated in an ‘Analyst’s Day’ in which IDC staff worked on the problem with a group of ex-military intelligence analysts at MASS’s training facility. Another team led by Kai Xu, together with Bob Fields and Phong Nguyen, addressed the mini-challenge 3, whose goal is to provide real-time situation awareness using Twitter-like data for a fictitious kidnaping case. A visual analytics tool, SAVI (Social Analytics Visualisation), was developed to provide text analysis and geo-temporal visualisation. Findings from SAVI were further analysed in SenseMap, a sense making tool developed by the same team, for hypothesis and narrative generation. Both teams were awarded ‘honourable mention’ by the VAST Challenge Committee. They will present their solutions at the IEEE VIS2014 conference in Paris in November.

Chris Rooney

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