VAST Challenge 2008 Participant Workshop

Grand Challenge Summary

VAST Challenge 2008 Participant Workshop

Sunday Oct 19, 2008(draft slides included in DVD distributed to participants)

VAST Challenge 2008 Participant Workshop

Grand Challenge Overview• 4 Questions

• Brought together all four mini challenges

• 4 Datasets from Mini Challenges– Heterogeneous data

• Submissions differed in their approach to:– Data integration– Support for analysis– Support for collaboration

VAST Challenge 2008 Participant Workshop

6 Participants

• Penn State & Drexel NEVAC / Composite tools• SPADAC, Inc./ Composite tools• Palantir Technologies / Palantir• Oculus Info Inc. / GeoTime & nSpace2 • Vision Systems & Technology, Inc. / Prajna• Beijing University of Posts &

Telecommunications / GeoTemporalNet

VAST Challenge 2008 Participant Workshop

Questions for the Grand Challenge

• Based on ALL the data available (i.e. using the data from all 4 mini - challenges) what is the social network of the Paraiso movement at the end of the time period?

• What name or names can be associated with individual activities?

• What is the geographical range of the Paraiso Movement and how does it change over time?

• How do the major beliefs of the Paraiso movement affect their activities?

VAST Challenge 2008 Participant Workshop

The Story – Ground Truth• See the scenario write up• Key are the Paraiso principles: importance of Head of

Household, at home medical care, females educated at home. See the Manifesto.

• Catalano establishes movement on Island; then reaches out to US; boat migration starts

• Paraiso establishes local presence in FL• Conflicts with DOH; incident in Miami; Ramon is a brother of

Ferdinando• Wiki edits illustrate controversial nature of movement• Boat migration shows popularity of movement• Cell calls show the social structure of some of the major

characters, but also shows how difficult tracking a cell phone is (a structure disappears and is resurrected with other phones)

• Each mini-challenge is modeled after real situations (e.g., boat migration is very similar to Cuban situation over the years)

VAST Challenge 2008 Participant Workshop

Data Integration

VAST Challenge 2008 Participant Workshop

Data IntegrationPalantir Technologies

•Dynamic ontology allows disparate data to be combined and searched.•Can build structured data from unstructured text.•Meta data is stored with entries (can be edited and shared).

VAST Challenge 2008 Participant Workshop

Data IntegrationNevac

Association Graph

VAST Challenge 2008 Participant Workshop

Support for Integrated Analysis

• No integration– Approach used by a number of teams. Provided means for

analysts to analyze each data set but integration of those analyses was left to analysts.

• Integrated analysis support– Collaboration – Area for analysis

VAST Challenge 2008 Participant Workshop

Integration of AnalysisOculus Info, Inc.

•Analysts do separate analysis of minis•Share folders which contain sandbox analysis•Another analyst can pick this up and combine in another sandbox.

VAST Challenge 2008 Participant Workshop

Analysis SupportPalantir Technologies

- History mechanism allows analyst to back up to a previous state.- Using the meta data and the history mechanism, the analyst can generate a Powerpoint presentation.

video?

VAST Challenge 2008 Participant Workshop

Analysis SupportNevac Team

Hypotheses can be added as nodes and links into graphs

VAST Challenge 2008 Participant Workshop

Conclusions

• Grand Challenge efforts became mostly analytic challenges

• Need more technical support for:– Integrating data– Integrating analyses– Supporting report generation