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National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC), USA

Entry acceptance for the 2010 IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Symposium Challenge recently closed, and 57 submissions were received.  The NVAC Threat Stream Generator team led the development of the Challenge datasets and the evaluation process.  This year, the challenge centers on a combined threat scenario concerning illegal arms dealing and a worldwide pandemic.  To puzzle out the entire challenge, teams had to untangle synthetic intelligence reports concerning arms transactions in 13 counties, hospitalization and death records for the dreaded and deadly “Drafa Fever,” and genetic fingerprints that would point to the person and place of origin of the disease.  Of the 57 entries, 14 addressed text-based intelligence report and social network analysis, 22 attempted the hospitalization and death records investigation, 16 submitted to the genetics analytics, and 5 tackled the grand challenge that ties together each of the mini-challenges. 

The VAST Challenge helps test the current efficacy of visual analytics systems and prompts technology development in new areas.  This year involved larger-scale datasets (for example, the pandemic data contained over one million records and requiring 1.5GB of disk space) and addressed a new domain for the challenge: bioinformatics.  Entrants included teams from Germany, Spain, United Kingdom, India, Canada, China, Austria, Norway, Hungary, Italy, Greece, Brazil, and the United States.  Winners will be announced during IEEE VisWeek in Salt Lake City, October 24-29, 2010.

The VAST Challenge is a participation category of the IEEE VAST 2010 Symposium (part of VisWeek 2010). The VAST 2010 Challenge continues in the footsteps of the VAST 2009 Challenge, VAST 2008 Challenge and the 2007 and 2006 contests with the purpose of pushing the forefront of visual analytics tools using benchmark data sets and establishing a forum to advance visual analytics evaluation methods. We also hope it will speed the transfer of visual analytics technology from research to commercial products, and increase the availability of evaluation techniques. 

Chairs for this year’s VAST Symposium include:

IEEE VAST Conference Chairs

Brian Fisher, Simon Fraser University, Canada
William Pike, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), USA

IEEE VAST Paper Chairs

Alan MacEachren, The Pennsylvania State University, USA
Silvia Miksch, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

VAST Poster Chairs

Jonathan Roberts, Bangor University, UK
Chris Shaw, Simon Fraser University, Canada

VAST Challenge Chairs

Georges Grinstein, University of Massachusetts-Lowell, USA
Catherine Plaisant, University of Maryland, USA
Jean Scholtz, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA
Mark Whiting, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA

For more information on the 2010 VAST Challenge, visit: http://hcil.cs.umd.edu/localphp/hcil/vast10/index.php

For more information on VisWeek 2010, visit: http://vis.computer.org/VisWeek2010/index.html