Entry Name: “GT-Stasko-MC1"
VAST Challenge 2014
Mini-Challenge 1
Team
Members:
James Nugent, Georgia Institute of Technology, jnugent6@gatech.edu
PRIMARY
Yi Han, Georgia Institute of Technology, yihan@gatech.edu
Jaegul Choo, Georgia Institute of Technology, jaegul.choo@cc.gatech.edu
Francesco Poggi, Georgia Institute of Technology, fpoggi3@gatech.edu
Hannah Kim, Georgia Institute of Technology, hannahkim@gatech.edu
Mengdie Hu, Georgia Institute of Technology, mengdie.hu@gatech.edu
Haesun Park, Georgia Institute of Technology, hpark@cc.gatech.edu
John Stasko, Georgia Institute of Technology, stasko@cc.gatech.edu
Student Team: NO
Analytic
Tools Used:
Jigsaw
PowerPoint
Matlab
A web-based tool we created to visualize email interaction between individuals and departments
Approximately how many hours were spent working on this submission in total?
100
May we post your submission in the Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository after VAST Challenge 2014 is complete? Yes
Video:
OR
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Questions
MC1.1 – Provide a visual representation of the structure of the Protectors of Kronos network, with supporting evidence.
a. Who are the leaders?
b. Who is part of the extended network?
c. How has the group structure and organization changed over time?
d. Where are the potential connections between the POK and GAStech?
Provide novel visualizations appropriate for communicating key information to the busy leaders of the investigation. Please limit your response to no more than eight images and 500 words.
To work on this part of the challenge, we used Jigsaw - a text visualization tool. We imported the news articles and email headers into Jigsaw, then created various entities that we could search or connect between the documents - such as keywords, people, dates, or department.
a. When the organization was founded, Henk Bodrogi was the leader. In early 2000, he gave leadership of the POK over to Elian Karel, a young activist who was better equipped to deal with the growing urges to be a more violent organization. Once Karel was arrested and died suddenly in jail of a heart attack, Silvia Marek became leader. See Figure 1(a)
b. When the organization was founded, there were only seven members. See Figure 1(b). Carmine Osvaldo was Henk's right hand man, and Jeroen Karel was the recruiter. Cesare Nespola was the Minister of Health during Henk's leadership. He was a big supporter of several ideas that the POK held. He tried to pass new laws, but they weren’t supported. Nespola mysteriously died of a heart attack shortly after. As the organization grew, the founding members all stepped back. Mandor Vann and Silvia Marek each were key figures once Elian took over. Silvia Marek was head of the organization Save Our Wildlands, a nonviolent group with similar interests as the POK. Under him, Save Our Wildlands merged into the POK, and brought Lucio Jakab to the top of the POK as well. Lorenzo Di Stefano and Isia Vann both also played important roles under Elian. Once Silvia took over, the group grew to have 200-300 members.
c. The group structure changed from a small grassroots activist organization into a national cause. The biggest instigation of this change was Julianna Vann's death from pollutants in the Tiskele River. With the rapid growth, people joined who had more violent approaches. Henk struggled dealing with these outsiders, and their presence was a large part of the reason the seven founding members, including Henk, left the POK. Although the POK stayed nonviolent under Elian Karel, they were often associated with vandalism and declared a terrorist group. Mandor Vann fully supported violence - even though he did not take over after Elian, his influence can still be seen in the riots that the POK stages.
d. The first connection between GAStech and the POK is the set of last names - several of the key members in the POK share last names with employees at GAStech. In Figure 2, Mies, Vann, Bodrogi, and Osvaldo are among those shared names. Henk Mies and Ruscella Mies Haber also share last names, yet are in different departments. Inga Ferro was linked by department and email to suspected members of the POK. See Figure 3. Figure 4 implies that Rachel Pantanal and Isia Vann could be in a relationship. Another connection was people who were suspected to be POK members would often send emails that shared headers with emails used by executives earlier in the week. See Figures 5 and 6.
Figure 1 - A Flow Chart of the structure and leaders [1(a)] of the POK. The information to create this was retrieved from the 5 and 10 year historical report. 1(b) indicates the original seven members.
Figure 2 - Email visualization tool used to show people by department, and email interaction. Red indicated the selected person has been sending emails to the red names. Green lines indicate the selected person has been receiving emails.
Figure 3 - This image shows a Jigsaw Graph View with the search word "Virus". The white rectangles represent individual emails, while the blue dots represent people. Email 734 was an email sent from Linnea Bergen to the six people in the center. They then emailed each other, but cut Linnea out of the communication.
Figure 4 - A close-up of the Matlab table view. Specifically the relationship-seeming style of contact between Isia Vann and Rachel Pantanal.
Figure 5 - The Jigsaw Graph View of the search word “Favor”. Numerous people emailed back and forth, but separately of the whole, using the exact same title.
Figure 6 - Axel Calzas and Varga Lagos emailed about “Out of staples”. One week later, suspected POK members Henk Mies and Edvard Vann emailed using the same header. The title does not make sense considering they both work in security.
MC1.2 – Describe the events of January 20-21, 2014. What is the timeline of events? Please limit your response to no more than ten images and 500 words.
January 20th started with a celebration to commemorate the IPO of the company. The celebration was to start at 10:00 am, and did. Afterwards, the CEO and executives were to go to the Capitol and meet Kapelou, the Minister of Health. At 10:18, the fire alarm went off at the GAStech headquarters. There didn’t appear to be any fire, but the fire department arrived. Questions were asked when the National Fire Department arrived and there was speculation about a possible bomb threat. Finally, at 11:46, the building was clear to enter, and it was declared a false alarm.
Meanwhile, the CEO had been seen entering the Capitol building, while the executives were still nowhere to be seen.
Despite being declared a false alarm, the police showed up at GAStech headquarters at 12:20, then proceeded to cordon off the building. At 1:45, the Tethys GAStech headquarters confirmed that people were missing from the building. Eventually, a seemingly government-looking sedan showed up at the headquarters and a government official entered the building (later, it was determined that this official was Sten Sanjorge Jr.). At 3:12, police started to leave the headquarters and the employees were finally allowed out. When they talked to the reporters, they said they weren’t allowed to talk about what happened, but they did say that the caterers had been strongly questioned, yet were now released.
Around 6:00 PM, not much new information had surfaced. That being said, there was speculation about the incident being tied to the POK, or that the executives had taken their money and run. Two jets had left the Abila airport, one to Rome and the other to an unknown location. At 7, Edvard Vann told reporters that he was interrogated for 6 hours, due to his last name, but he was released. Police later released a statement confirming the kidnapping and saying that currently there were 14 unaccounted for people. That night, a Tethys jet landed, and the people on board went straight to the police headquarters.
On the morning of the 21st, the police changed the number of missing from 14 to 10. At midday, the POK released a demand for $20 million after blindfolding Petrus Gerhard, so he could retrieve the message from an unknown location. Figure 1 and 2
Jigsaw was used to find all of this information. First, all the articles were imported to jigsaw. Entities such as Name, Location, Date, Keyword, and Unreadable were used to find connections between articles. Then, we searched for the days in question - January 20 and 21 - in order to find only articles from those days. Once we narrowed the search once, we used Unreadable to filter out documents with poor translations. We used a time entity to help sort articles that utilized times at the beginning of the article as updates for the incident. Finally, we would open the articles an hour at a time. See Figure 3 and 4
Figure 1 - A timeline of the events of January 20 and 21. Created in the Tablet view of Jigsaw.
Figure 2 - Timeline from PowerPoint.
Figure 4 - This image shows how Jigsaw's List View was used to sort the articles on the day of the incident, and then hours could be opened in a document view one at a time.
Figure 5 - An hour of the incident open in Jigsaw view so that we could find out what happened in small segments.
MC1.3 – Identify at least two possible explanations why the GAStech employees may be missing. What evidence do you have to support each of these explanations? Please limit your response to no more than three additional images and 200 words.
1: Given the fact the kidnapping happened just after the IPO, and all the executives had just made a lot of money, it is possible they wanted to take the money and run. This claim is because the executives aren’t found after the kidnapping, and Henk Mies, a truck driver, has exchanged several personal emails with the CEO, Sten Sanjorge Jr. In addition, Silvia Marek is the current leader of the POK, who doesn’t believe in violence. In Figure 1, the keyword "vacation" shows that the executives of GAStech were planning a vacation together. Figure 2 connects numerous suspicious individuals with the keyword “Files”.
2: The POK is against GAStech and much of GAStech’s activity in the area. GAStech is almost directly responsible for the death of Julianna Vann and the poor health of several citizens of Elodis. As such, the POK wanted to cripple GAStech. By kidnapping 10 employees, and demanding money through the ransom letter, the POK both stops the company from working and takes money out of the company after the IPO. In addition, the company’s stock prices would probably be damaged. Figure 3 shows a suspicious email thread between numerous suspected POK members.
Figure 1 - A Graph View in Jigsaw of the search word "vacation". The image shows that the GAStech executives have been emailing back and forth about a vacation, while three suspected members of the POK are also emailing about "vacation" (Hennie Osvaldo, Edvard Vann, and Isia Vann).
Figure 2 - A Graph View in Jigsaw of the search word "files". This image links individuals who work in different departments, individuals both associated with the POK and not, and people who have seemingly no other connection. Henk Mies and the CEO, Sten Sanjorge Jr.; Isia Vann and Claudia Hawelon; Vira Frente and Minke Mies; Hennie Osvaldo and Rachel Pantanal are all among the suspicious connections.
Figure 3 - A Graph View in Jigsaw of the search word "ARISE". This image shows that five members of the security department are connected by an email titled "FW: ARISE - Inspiration for Defenders of Kronos". An email with a very implicating name and forwarded by Ruscella Mies Haber - whose maiden name points back to the POK.
