This form is a web page which was created in MS WORD and therefore can be easily edited that way

Our project makes use of a variety of different tools that allow us to collate and visualize the information. ArcGIS 10 (by Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI)) is a fully developed Geographic Information System (GIS) that allows for the integration and visualization of spatial data. Scripts to further mine the data were developed in Java. These scripts were used to compare articles, extract entities and georeference locations mentioned in news articles. Although ArcGIS has the ability to create graphs to illustrate frequency, Microsoft Excel was used to summarize symptom counts using the graphing tools as well as create the timelines. One of the timelines illustrated was created using Excel Timeline Template developed by Vertex42. In addition the SensePlace2 tool developed at the GeoVISTA Center was used to perform additional pattern analysis of the microblog data. In addition open-source software such as ANNIE and OpenCalais were used to perform entity extraction on the documents. We wrote code in Java to geo-code the extracted location names and used Excel to store the metadata associated with each text document. Lucene was used to index the text and enable keyword search and NodeXL, a tool built by the Schneiderman group to display and analyze network entity-relationships.

Video:

gc-video.flv

Are any terrorist activities related to the current epidemic?

We considered two possibilities of terrorist attacks:

1. The chemical truck that hit the food truck to create a spill in the river. Instead of the driver falling asleep, this was a planned attack. There could be two options. First, the driver of the chemical truck took part in a “suicide attack”. The second is that there was a monitoring device in the chemical truck that resulted in an explosion even before the truck collided and that caused the truck to hit the other food truck. The truck may have been monitored and the explosion set off but this is unlikely that the first explosion would not be detected and could be timed so well. We lean towards calling this a suicide attack. The other evidence that we list below point towards it being a terrorist attack.

2. The convention center was emptied using a fake fire call. It is possible that some germs could have been sprayed in several parts of the center when people evacuated by some miscreants. However, doing so successfully and infecting a large population in a short time is highly unlikely and would have been caught by closed-circuit cameras, etc.

Describe the series of events, planned or otherwise, that led to the current epidemic.

The series of events that took place are as follows. There was some death of animals but we do not have information about what caused it. Then, the trucking company was intruded. We posit that this was done to obtain (a) information about the truck routes and manifests, alter the cargo being carried by trucks, alter the records to enable the terrorists to ship explosives and chemicals and bio-hazards, and/or (b) edit the employment records to add a new employee/driver (obtained from Mini Challenge 2). About a month later, the truck accident spilled bio-hazards onto the river. The water-supply and the fish got polluted. People drinking the water and/or consuming the fish got sick (obtained from Mini Challenge 3). The tweets confirm the sickness of people and the hospitals are treating a lot of people for that sickness (obtained from Mini Challenge 1).