STUDENTS:
Dustin Dunsmuir, Simon Fraser University, dtd@sfu.ca
Saba Alimadadi, Simon Fraser University, salimada@sfu.ca
Mahshid Z. Baraghoush,
Simon Fraser University, mzeinaly@sfu.ca
Victor Chen, Simon Fraser University, yvchen@sfu.ca
Minoo Erfani Joorabchi, Simon Fraser University, mea18@sfu.ca
Mona Erfani Joorabchi,
Simon Fraser University, mea16@sfu.ca
Eric Lee, Simon Fraser University, ela10@sfu.ca
Cheryl Qian, Purdue University, cherylq@sfu.ca
FACULTY:
John Dill, Simon Fraser University, dill@sfu.ca
Chris Shaw, Simon Fraser University, shaw@sfu.ca
Robert Woodbury, Simon Fraser University, rw@sfu.ca
CZSaw:
CZSaw is a visual analytics tool for sense-making
across text documents with extracted entities that focuses on the analysis
process and provides a variety of flexible data visualizations. It records the
analysis process and model, and visualizes them in a history view (providing
quick access to past states in the process) and dependency graph respectively.
The dependency graph allows quick rerunning of parts of the analysis process on
new data. What makes this possible is capturing all semantically meaningful
interactions in a script language which can be edited by an expert.
CZSaw was developed in the School of Interactive Arts and
Technology at Simon Fraser University by Victor Chen, Dustin Dunsmuir, Eric
Lee, Nazanin Kadivar,
Cheryl Qian, John Dill, Chris D. Shaw, and Rob
Woodbury. A paper entitled “Capturing and
Supporting the Analysis Process” was presented at VAST 2009; the
presentation materials can be found on the vgtc website. For more
information, see CZSaw's webpage.
IMAS:
IMAS (The Interactive Multi-genomic Analysis System) is a visual analytics
system for knowledge discovery in genomic information, which provides the user
with a horizontal zooming of the sequences. Initially it was developed by Chris Shaw and his
students in 2007. IMAS visualizes the output of some common bioinformatics
tools such as BLAST and ClustalW in a unified
framework. BLAST is used for pair-wise alignment, and ClustalW
is used as our multi-alignment program.
Tableau:
Version 5.1 of Tableau was used for solving Mini Challenge 2. Tableau data
visualization software was a project in Stanford University in 1997 by Chris Stolte and Professor Pat Hanrahan. Tableau Desktop was released in 2003. With
Tableau, analysts can connect to large amounts of data and auto-generate
visualizations including reports, tables, charts and graphs through a
drag-and-drop interface.
Video:
ANSWERS:
GC: Investigate any possible linkage between the illegal arms dealing
and the pandemic outbreak.
In particular, you need to address the following:
1. Briefly describe your hypothesized linkage between the arms dealing
activity and the pandemic outbreak.
2. Where did the disease originate (as far as you can tell with the
data)? Provide a time-based tracing
of its spread among countries. If
you have established linkages between arms dealers in certain countries and the
pandemic, please indicate this.
3. We had countries with arms dealers identified in MC 1 that did not
suffer pandemic outbreaks in MC 2.
Provide a hypothesis as to why some countries that may have been
involved with arms dealers did not suffer an outbreak?
In the first half of 2009, there was a major epidemic
outbreak (the Drafa virus) that spanned over several
countries around the world. Through careful investigation we have developed
strong hypotheses about its origin and how it spread to
many different countries.
The country of origin for the outbreak of the disease
was Nigeria since this is the native sequence which we determined is the
ancestor of all the outbreak sequences for the countries of western Africa. The
disease first spread in many countries in western Africa before jumping to
countries in eastern Africa, Asia, and South America in April and May 2009. It
is our hypothesis that this jump to more developed countries occurred as the
result of arms dealers contracting the disease from someone from Nigeria. They
then unintentionally spread it back to their home countries.
Much intercepted communication from the year leading
up to April 2009 shows that a group of arms dealers agreed to meet many of
their customers in Dubai (UAE) within the same week (from April 15th 2009 to
April 22nd 2009). There is no indication that many of these customers knew of
each other, so this was most likely a series of meetings rather than a larger
conference involving everyone. This is supported by the fact that many
customers planned to arrive and leave on different days throughout the week.
From multiple phone conversations, surveillance
reports and emails it is clear that the core group of arms dealers were Nicolai
Kuryakin (likely from Russia), Mikhail Dombrovski of Russia, Arkadi Borodinski of Ukraine, and Boonmee
Khemkhaeng of Thailand. These people planned to
attend almost all the meetings during the week. Hence, we can infer that there
were some physical connection paths between all the people who attended at
least one of the meetings in Dubai. One of the people that came for a meeting
was Dr. George Ngoki from Nigeria. In an email on Feb
11th 2009, Mikhail Dombrovski hopes that “minor
health issues” for George Ngoki from Nigeria,
does not prevent him from attending their meeting. This quite likely refers to
the outbreak of this new virus in western Africa. We claim that Dr. George
brought the disease, originating from Nigeria as we said, with him and then
infected Mikhail Dombrovski who he was buying weapons
from, and possibly other people that he had contacts with in Dubai. All
intercepted communication indicates that every other meeting planned for Dubai
occurred in the week following this meeting between Mikhail and Dr. George. We
thus claim that Mikhail then infected the other arms dealers and they infected
all the customers throughout the week. This then led to the infection of all
their home countries.
The order of spread of the disease is almost certainly
clear from an analysis of the hospital admittance and death records during
April, May and June 2009. The hospital admittance dates for patients in the
outbreak were between mid April and the end of June with a peak around May
13th-21st. Dates of deaths across countries ranged from April 24th-May 4th to
June 24th-30th with a global peak of May 22nd-28th. Although we had identified
a set of 92 syndromes related to the disease in the dataset, further
investigation narrowed this group into 39 distinct types of symptoms, with the
most common ones being vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, back pain, fever and
nose bleeding. Having these 92 syndromes on average caused death 8 days after
hospitalization. These syndromes clearly mark the general order in which
countries experienced an outbreak of the disease by a few factors, including:
the dates for first hospitalizations for the disease, first deaths caused by
the disease, the jump in the number of deaths (onset of the disease), and the
peak time of the disease. Ordering the countries by first recorded deaths
caused by this disease, we have the following list: Kenya, Syria, Lebanon,
Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Columbia and then Iran. Since all
these nine countries were similar according to different factors in the
outbreaks, namely high mortality rates (Mean = .097), 92 syndromes and the timing of
outbreaks, we believe that they were all affected by the pandemic. Thailand and
Turkey did not follow these same patterns and this is why we believe they were
unaffected by the disease.
The main reason for our hypothesis that the arms
dealers spread the disease is that there is also a correlation between this
order of countries in the spread of the disease and the order in which people
from these countries met in Dubai. After the initial meeting between the core
group of arms dealers and the Nigerian, there were meetings with people from
countries in the following order: Turkey/Syria, Kenya, Gaza/Lebanon, Pakistan,
Yemen/Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela and Columbia. For some of them there is evidence
that they had flights scheduled to leave a couple days after and for the others
we can assume they also would not linger in Dubai, but would instead return to
their home countries quickly with the weapons they purchased. So, it is
reasonable to think that the order, in which most of these people left Dubai,
is the same as the order of meetings. Thus the fact that this order closely
matches the order of the spread of the outbreak in the other countries strongly
supports our claims that the arms dealer’s customers spread the disease.
In some cases it is a fact that those who planned to
meet in Dubai died half a month afterwards, coinciding with the onset of the
disease in their countries. We know from a newspaper report that Thabiti Otieno and Nahid Owiti from Kenya, who were
supposed to be in Dubai on April 17th 2009, died in a hospital back in Kenya on
May 3rd. Also, Saleh Ahmed from Yemen, who had
planned to be in Dubai on April 19th, was close to death in a hospital back in
Yemen, again back in his own country. In addition, Nicolai Kuryakin
died in a hospital in Paris with the disease. We make the assumption this
happened after everyone met in Dubai since we have no evidence he would be
coming into contact with anyone else from western Africa.
We will now briefly outline the connections between
arms dealer’s customers from each country and why they did or did not
spread the disease.
A group of customers from Turkey and Syria referred to
their group as a “school”. It was located in Syria, had many new
“students”, and was in need of “textbooks” which they
planned to buy from a professor from Moscow. At the same time, they ordered
“farming equipment” over the phone and for this arranged for a
large sum of money in Dubai during the week in April. While Syria was one of
the first countries to experience an outbreak of the disease, Turkey was not
affected at all. Since we have no intelligence on this area following April we
can only make the hypothesis that this group only travelled to Syria in order
to deliver their new purchase to their “school”. At this point it
is possible that those from Turkey had died from the disease before they had a
chance to return there.
From phone conversations and their likely history of
arms dealing over the past year it is fairly certain that Thabiti
Otieno and Nahid Owiti from Kenya attended the meetings in Dubai. As
mentioned above they died at the start of May. From a variety of sources in
Kenya, we are fairly certain these two are deeply involved with shipping
weapons through Kenya to Sudan that originate from the core group. Thus they
would have had much contact with them including Nicolai who clearly contracted
the disease and died in Paris.
There are known terrorist groups in Karachi, Pakistan
(the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi), and
Gaza, near Lebanon (the Martyrs Front of Judea) that almost certainly had
representatives purchasing weapons in Dubai during the middle of this arms
week. They would have then returned to their home countries which were then
affected by the disease.
Saleh Ahmed is a known arms dealer in Yemen and Saudi Arabia who was
arranging to attend a meeting in Dubai in the middle of the week most likely
with Mikhail Dombrovski and possibly Nicolai. Thus he
would likely have contracted the disease and spread it to Yemen and Saudi
Arabia. Also, based on the geography of the region he may have even travelled
through Saudi Arabia to Yemen after the meeting.
While it is uncertain who exactly in Iran is connected
to the arms dealing, someone at the residence of Sattari
Khurshid was directed by someone in Ukraine to meet
with Nicolai near the end of the week. Also, a group of people from Venezuela
and Colombia planned to go to Dubai right at the end of this time period (April
22nd, 2009) to purchase weapons from Mikhail. They had arranged this through
online message board posts and emails. After so many earlier meetings it is
likely that both the Iranian people and those from South America came into
contact with other people who already had the disease. This would then explain
how the disease spread to these countries and why it peaked in them after all
the other countries previously described.
As mentioned, Thailand did not receive the outbreak
and we are aware of one key player, Boonmee, who is
from there. We have no evidence on which to rely for a definite reason why Boonmee did not spread the disease to his home country
however we can speculate based on his roles as an arms dealer and close
associate of Nicolai that he did not return home after the Dubai meetings. First
of all, we have no evidence that Boonmee was
purchasing weapons in Dubai so he may not have the motivation many others had
to deliver a product back to his home. Secondly, Boonmee
at least twice attended conferences with Nicolai in the past year and so he may
have travelled with him again after the Dubai meetings. We know that Nicolai
died in Paris so perhaps Boonmee did as well.
Well many of these details in the above hypothesis fit
together very well; there is a lack of intelligence on the whereabouts and
condition of many of the key players in this scenario. To verify this is truly
what happened, we recommend locating Boonmee Khemkhaeng, Mikhail Dombrovski
and any of the others that surveillance was provided for before, in order to
see that they are alive. It is likely that we will not find many of these
people alive and that they actually were among the first to die from the
disease within their country. Judging by how Nicolai was removed from a flight
to Moscow, it is possible that Moscow and the Ukraine avoided a large outbreak
of the disease, but we have no data on this.