UKON-GC

VAST Challenge 2014

Grand Challenge

Team Members

Fabian Fischer, fabian.fischer@uni-konstanz.de PRIMARY
Florian Stoffel, florian.stoffel@uni-konstanz.de
Sebastian Mittelstädt, sebastian.mittelstaedt@uni-konstanz.de
Tobias Schreck, tobias.schreck@uni-konstanz.de
Daniel Keim, daniel.keim@uni-konstanz.de

Student Team: no

Analytic Tools Used:

Approximately how many hours were spent working on this submission in total? 8

May we post your submission in the Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository after VAST Challenge 2014 is complete? Yes

Video UKON-GC.wmv (WMV)

Questions

GC.1 – Summarize and describe the events of January, 2014 relating to the disappearance of the GAStech employees. Focus on the disappearance of the employees, and the events immediately before and afterward. The summary should include the following:

  1. Who: Individuals and groups involved and their roles
  2. What: A description of what happened over the time period
  3. Where: Associate events with locations
  4. When: Specific times of activities, particularly as it relates to planning and execution
  5. Why: A description of the motives or motivations of the individuals or groups involved
  6. How: What, if any, notable entities provided support for or facilitated the events that took place? These could be people, places, or things that helped those responsible for the disappearance in some way.
Do not reproduce the overview or MC1 materials concerning background knowledge, although you may reference this information if needed. Visualizations illustrating how you determined the summary points above are encouraged. Please limit your response to no more than five images and 500 words.

Summary

In the following we have an overview with details about the events in January related to the Kronos Incident.

The APA (Army of People of Asterian) is behind the terror in Kronos. They decided to kidnap or even kill GAStech executives to eventually stop the company. They do not see any other possibility to bring justice to the country. They start doing night observations and preparations to kidnap the different employees. They also meet at various places, where they create hiding places for future hostages. The persons belonging to the different groups can be seen in the following pictures as well.

After careful planning they activate the fire alarm at GAStech to use the confusion to bring the executives to a nearby hiding place. Three days later they actually use the planned POK rally and a fire to move the hostages to other places to get them out of the country. However, one of their van got caught by the police and the two POK members surrender after shooting a police officer and having even a fight with each other. One of them might be Inga Ferro. Based on a message in MC3 we know that a person named Rachel might be missing. This is probably Rachel Panatal. She could be one of the hostages in the black van, who is free again. She is Executive Assistant and works as an effective gatekeeper; manages busy calendars and efficiently handles required tasks. She is reporting to chief corporate officers. So she is aware of all the meetings and might be supporting the terrorist or is forced to support them. She reports to the CIO, who is Ada Campo-Corrente, who might actually be an hostage.

To gather those insights we made use of various developed visual analytics tools, which are described in the individual entries for MC1, MC2, and MC3. To answer these grand challenge questions, we used the combination of the different insights. For example, during the analysis of the data stream, we realized the fire and used the data and insights from MC2 to identify, who is living in that region - which was identified as Dancing Dolphin Apartment Complex.

GC.2 – Describe at a high level the most significant networks that exist, and how they have influenced each other to produce the current situation. Please limit your response to no more than three images and 100 words.

We have identified four groups of networks. The first one are the POK which are persons organizing a peaceful rally. The second one are the APA (Army of People of Asterian) which are involved in the ongoing terrorist activity. POK seems to be too peaceful for them, so they obviously decided to really attack the GAStech company. In the group of hostages are the executives of GAStech. Then, we have some persons which might or might not belong to POK who uses the kidnapping of the APA to blackmail to get money, even if they are not involved in the kidnapping at all. They want just get ransom. However, the APA is not interested in money. They want to destroy GAStech to really bring it to an end to stop poisoning the environment.

GC.3 – Identify three of the most significant information gaps that remain at the end of the time period covered by the data. Describe why this missing information would be important to the investigation. Highlight in your visualizations where these knowledge gaps are present. Please limit your response to no more than three images and 250 words.

1) Black Van Terrorists

We know from MC3 that there were two terrorist and two hostages in the black van at Gelato Galore. The police could resolve the situation and those terrorist surrender. We need to know the names, so that we can identify the involved network. We should also ask the terrorist if they are really members of the Army of People of Asterian (APA). In addition to this, we have several sighings of other black vans in the city area. We do not have enough information about them. Comparing the licence plates would at least reveal how many different vans we have. Maybe these are also operated by the APA - driving additional hostages to other places.

2) Blackmail

Some persons (who say they are from POK) do demand ransom for the hostages. However, their request is very general and unspecific nature in their message on January 21st. We need to figure out, if they really have the hostages. Normally, the police does request proof if the hostages are still alive. So our assumption might be right, that those are really just copycats making financial use of the situation.

3) Explosion at Dancing Dolphin

During the end of the data stream (MC3), we identified an explosion. It is unclear yet, if this is an aftermath of the fire - or if this is related to a bomb or explosive material deposited in one of the apartments. We need more information from the fire department about that.

GC.4 – The police have sufficient manpower to investigate up to two different locations simultaneously. Provide your best recommendation to the police chief as to where the police should be deployed, and why. Provide visualizations that help describe the importance of this action. Please limit your response to no more than two images and 100 words.

From the data we know that the highly suspicious suspects (from APA) met at five previously unknown locations. These might be the hiding places for the hostages as well. Location (Unknown01 and Unknown02) in the above figure seems to be the best choice to start with. The first one was the last place the terrorist went to. And the other one is located closest to the airport, which might be a reason they picked that place as well. The estimate GPS coordinates are: 36.0807, 24.8468 and 36.0695, 24.8415 as seen in the figure.

Go for them NOW!