NEVAC — Evac.viz
VAST 2008 Challenge
Mini Challenge 4: Evacuation Traces
Authors and Affiliations:
Anthony Robinson, Penn State, arobinson@psu.edu [PRIMARY
contact]
Chris Weaver, Penn State, cweaver@psu.edu
Student team:
NO
Tool(s):
Improvise
is a desktop application for building and browsing a wide range of flexible and
powerful visual analysis tools. Live design of visual queries facilitates fast
and flexible interactive drill-down into fine-grain relationships buried in
spatiotemporal and social network information spread across multiple data sets.
Cross-highlighting
queries across multiple views provides analysts with the means to seek out and
dissect subtle patterns in complex information spaces.
We used Improvise to
build evac.viz, an interactive+animated visualization of the evacuation trace
data. The interface enables analysis of the movements of people not only in
space and time but also in terms of motion behaviors suggested by speed,
direction, and curviness of paths through rooms, hallways, and parking lots.
Individuals can be selected based on particular motion characteristics at
specific times, then observed in their earlier or later movement behaviors
relative to those of other persons. (Click the preceding two links above to get
the visualization and instructions for running it.)
Two Page Summary: NO
ANSWERS:
Traces-1
Where was the device set off?
Grid
cell number of where the device went off:
66x32
Short
Answer:
We
watched an animation of the tracking data and noticed that several individuals stop
moving in the northeast part of the building shortly after the explosion,
indicating possible casualties. We then used the spatial filter to show people
in that area, animated again, and noticed that Ramon Katalanow
moves between offices in the area before, during, and after the explosion. Then
we filtered the occupants to show Ramon's movement. Animating his track, we saw
that he moves from Fawn Sparks' office to one next door, pauses, then leaves
that office shortly before the explosion (Fig. 1). In the second office, Gale
Welsh doesn't move after the explosion, and Lottie Staley moves a little before
stopping. We assume they are the first casualties of the blast and were in the
same room as the IED. We then stepped through each frame near the time of the
explosion to identify Ramon's position in the Staley/Welsh office. We used the
mouse crosshair (which reports x/y on rollover) and saw that he pauses at
66x32.
Figure 1: Sequence of positions for Ramon Katalanow before, during, and after the explosion.
Traces-2
Identify potential suspects and/or witnesses to the event.
List
of RFID tag numbers :
21,
50, 18, 76, 1, 56, 29, 44, 28
Short
Answer:
Using
the animation tool, we watched the video several times to note patterns of
movement before and after the explosion. Ramon Katalanow
(21) appears to be a suspect for the bombing. First, he leaves the office where
he is with Fawn Sparks (76). He goes next door, pauses (presumably to
set/activate the bomb) and leaves shortly before the explosion. He heads south
down the hallway at X=73 and after the explosion he backtracks in time for
Lindsey Bowles (1) to witness him as he appears to evacuate like everyone else
(from a direction that would not implicate him).
Figure
2 shows all five people who were moving around the office before the explosion.
Cleveland Jimenez (56) is a suspect because he moves quickly to where the
explosion will occur, and waits in a doorway moments before the explosion,
indicating he knew it would happen. Maxwell Lopez (29), Karissa
Graham (44), and Cecil Dennison (28) also accelerate early on, indicating that
they might have known what would happen. Lopez and Graham stop at an exit
shortly before the explosion and then immediately head outside. Dennison (28)
tries to get near the site of the explosion and then backtracks before
evacuating.
Fig.
2: Screenshot showing the five suspects moving around the office shortly before
the explosion occurred.
Traces-3
Identify any suspects and/or witnesses who managed to escape the building.
List
of RFID tag numbers :
21,
1, 29, 44
Short
Answer:
By
selecting only the individuals who were located near casualties of the blast and
watching the filtered animation result, we saw that of the individuals who
could have directly witnessed the explosion, only Ramon Katalanow
(21) escapes the building. He joins the same escape route as Lindsey Bowles (1)
who is probably able to see him evacuating and therefore a witness to the
actions of the suspect (Fig. 3). We also used the occupant filter controls to
select the people who were moving at high speed from the start of the video to
discover that Maxwell Lopez (29) and Karissa Graham
(44) ran to, and then paused near the exit shortly before the explosion, and
then left the building immediately following the explosion, leading us to
believe they had prior knowledge of the attack.
Fig.
3: Ramon and Lindsey were the closest surviving witnesses to the explosion.
Traces-4
Identify any casualties.
List
of RFID tag numbers :
18,
19, 56, 36, 76, 50, 39, 78, 65, 60, 47, 69, 59
Short
Answer:
The
animation shows that shortly after the explosion several individuals near the
explosion stop moving, or move a short distance before stopping. We used the
timeline, occupant, and spatial extent filters to select all of the people who
stopped inside the building following the attack - probable casualties since
they failed to escape (Fig. 4). Gale Welsh (18) appears to be the first
casualty, as she does not move following the explosion and we believe she was
in the room where the bomb went off. Lottie Staley (50) gets to the doorway
before stopping. Fawn Sparks makes it to her doorway before stopping. A second
group of potential casualties appears near the northeast exit after the
original group of five casualties stops moving (around tick 600). This group
includes Phil Marin (39), Cleveland Hutchison (78), Dian Crum (65), Lavon
Lockhart (60), Rosario Oakley (47), and Morton Kilgore (69). One outlier is
Olive Palmer (59), who does not leave the building and stops at 38x11.
Considering her distance from the explosion we hypothesize that she was overcome
by smoke or fire from the explosion.
Fig.
4: Cross-filtered view to show all people who stopped moving while still inside
the building (likely casualties). The yellow boxes highlight the two primary
casualty groups, group 1 stopped moving shortly after the explosion, while
group 2 developed later during the evacuation. Olive Palmer is the only
suspected casualty not part of either group.
Traces-5
Describe the evacuation
Detailed
Answer:
Click
here to download the video that accompanies this
section.
The
scene at the Florida DOH building begins with what we would expect is a pretty
typical day in the office. Most people are located inside the various offices,
and a few are moving around. If we animate the office overview, things change
dramatically around tick 370. The explosion occurs about that time, and
everyone changes their behavior quickly. Most people flee the building via
various exits, presumably according to some sort of evacuation plan that had
been in place for the DOH building. Some workers are more efficient at exiting
than others, and some appear to be in a state of panic, which we discovered by
exploring the sinuosity of different people's paths, under the assumption that
someone who was very erratic was probably panicking compared to someone who
moved in a more direct manner.
In
the animation, a group of individuals appear to stop moving shortly after the
explosion. This causes us to infer that the explosion took place near those individuals
and that the reason for not moving anymore is because they are casualties of
the blast. Based on this knowledge, if we explore that area in detail we notice
that Ramon Katalanow is moving between offices in
that area before and after the explosion. If we highlight only Ramon's path and
animate again we can see that he leaves one office, enters another next door
and pauses for several moments, leaves that office at high speed and heads down
a hallway, and shortly thereafter the explosion occurs. The only casualty who
appears to be killed instantly is Gale Welsh, who is located in the second
office that Ramon visits. This leads us to believe that the explosion
originated in Gale Welsh and Lottie Staley's office.
We
used the velocity timeline view and the spatial extent filter to show only
those people who stopped inside the building to develop our understanding of
the casualty picture. Two groups of casualties are apparent from this
visualization. First is a group of workers located near the explosion who stop
moving shortly after the attack around tick 400 (Max Valdez, Lottie Staley,
Gale Welsh, Fawn Sparks, Francisco Salter, Cleveland Jimenez). Then around tick
600, several workers who take a path along the northeast side of the office
stop moving after appearing to have trouble reaching the exit (Phil Marin,
Cleveland Hutchison, Dian Crum, Lavon Lockhart, Rosario Oakley, Morton
Kilgore). Olive Palmer stops inside the building before evacuating and slows to
a stop right at the end of the datastream. She is not
very close to the other two casualty groups, but we suspect she may have been
overcome by smoke or fire due to her chosen evacuation route.
When
we animated the whole dataset we noticed that a few people were moving across
the office building at high speed before the explosion occurred. To explore
these individuals, we used velocity to sort the occupants and select who was
moving quickly from the beginning of the datastream.
One of the fast movers is Cleveland Jimenez. If we select Jimenez and watch the
animation from the beginning, Jimenez moves at high speed from the west side of
the office building over to the east side up until shortly before the
explosion. He appears to duck into a doorway across from the two offices that Katalanow visits and wait until the explosion occurs, then
he comes out of the doorway and approaches Fawn Sparks, and both stop moving at
that time. If Jimenez had prior knowledge of the explosion and was trying to
save a colleague (he and Fawn are in a relationship, perhaps), we find it
unlikely that he would duck into the doorway and wait until after the blast to
continue on his heroic quest (either that or he decides that he is not the
hero-type after all). Another possibility is that Jimenez has the task of
making sure that Fawn and/or other workers in that part of the office do not
survive the attack. Because both Jimenez and Sparks appear to become casualties
when they meet in the hallway following the explosion, we suspect Jimenez
either completed some sort of suicide attack to kill Fawn Sparks, or that both
were consumed by the after-effects of the explosion.
Five
workers are considered surviving witnesses and/or suspects in our analysis.
Ramon Katalanow is at the scene and escapes to the
outside after the attack. He is our key suspect for setting off the explosion
(and oddly enough, his last name seems to be a play on Catalano, an important
connection to the Paraiso movement). His escape is
suspicious, as he moves south down one hallway after turning the corner and
then backtracks following the explosion so that it appears he is escaping in a
way that does not incriminate him. We think that Lindsey Bowles would have been
able to see him escaping this way, and therefore she is a witness to the key
suspect's action, and the two of them are relatively close to one another
outside once they have evacuated, so Bowles may be able to provide important
clues about Ramon's behavior following the attack. We also consider Cleveland
Jimenez, Cedric Dennison, Maxwell Lopez, and Karissa
Graham as potential suspects. They move at high speed across the office
building before the attack in a way that suggests they may have known it was
about to happen. We also note that Carlos Vidro,
located in the room in the lower left corner of the building, is one of the
first five people out, and the first one out through the entrance in that
corner, suggesting anticipation of the event.