Entry Name: "UCAS-Song-MC1"

VAST Challenge 2014
Mini-Challenge 1

Team Members:

Qiang Song, University of Chinese Academic and Science, 645566328@qq.com PRIMARY

Rui Li, University of Chinese Academic and Science, lirui13@mails.ucas.ac.cn

Peng Yin, University of Chinese Academic and Science, 784021255@qq.com

Student Team: Yes

Analytic Tools Used:

1. Python

2. Mathworks Matlab

3. Mcrosoft Excel

4. SQL Server

4. D3

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

Nearly 35 hours

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

Yes

Video:

http://pan.baidu.com/s/1pJv3azT

VAST Challenge 1

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

Figure 1 POK Organization History Network

Figure 2 A Conclusion of Network

Figure 3 Information Retrieval

Figure 4 Additional information obtained from News Report

Figure 5 GASTech Company Tree Model

Figure 6 Email Communication Analysis

Figure 7 Suspicious Characters

The Protectors of Kronos (POK) is a political activist movement that began as a small group of seven citizens. Today the POK has grown to a loosely organized group with an estimated membership of 200-300 people.

From the visualization above we may find that there are two "circles". The nodes on the outer circle represent the detailed events in clock-wise order, and the inner circle expresses key figures and organizations which have some kinds of relationships with POK. The different colors of the nodes represent different roles. According to the Notation, We can clearly learn that these roles include Event, Originator, GASTech Members, Governors, some Local Communities, etc. We can move mouse on each node to obtain the detailed information, or use the “Retrieval Button” to query key words and the matched node will be highlighted. Besides, here we would like to mention that some additional information, such as “The death of Elian Karel” and “POK labeled a Public Threat” is obtained from the News report.

Moreover, we also use the multi-way tree to visualize the structure of GASTech Company, from which the detailed profile can be shown clearly.

And we visualized email relationships between those email senders and receivers, which may help in finding suspicious figures. The bars on the left sides represent email senders, and on the right email receivers. When we click on a bar, the bar will be highlighted, showing the connection relationship between senders and receivers about that bar. We found that the stuff who sent everyone email may not be suspicious in that those emails are just administrative emails with no value for investigation. What paid our attention is those who sent emails to several people regularly. We checked those emails manually and found that those emails were indeed related to the company’s benefit.

With analysis and visualizations above, we found some suspicious characters in the company. We visualized these characters as a word cloud, with larger font size the more importance. Those characters were chosen according to the following clues:

1. Whether did their names have any relationships with POK members. For example, Both Edvard.Vann (GASTech Employee) and Mandor.Vann (POK Leader) have character “Vann”. Thus, we can suspect that maybe they have blood relationship.

2. Whether did their email communications have content about the company’s benefit? We check the email communication and dig out the suspicious figures.

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.

Figure 8 Real Time News Report

Figure 9 Vivid Pictures with Relevant Topics

Figure 10 Raw News Report Texts

This visualization tells the live report of the incident. On top-left corner is a scrolling news box which shows the up-to-date news of the incident. On top-right corner is a scrolling image box which visualizes the content as images, thus helping readers understand what is going on more easily. We found that a lot of 'things' happened one by one on the very day, and even who are not 'experts' can more or less conclude that some of what happened are diversions which lead people's attention to somewhere else. We can say that there must be some truth hidden behind the missing incident. Let's see more visualizations for details.

As shown in the top-left corner, we used regular expressions to extract date and event information for clues which helps us to figure out what had happened on that day, and in the top-right corner is a group of selected images which visualized the news texts. Each image has its own topic. And these topics are extracted used LDA model (Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model) and then retuned manually. Here, we express the topics sequence as a vector.

[“Waiting for interview”, ”The capital building”, “A fire alarm”, “People flee out”,

“Fire Department is coming”, “A bomb threat”, “Refuse to our interview”,

“Police Involved in the investigation”, “Call those responsible persons”,

“Planes fly away from Kronos”, “Employees disclose important news”,

“A formal declaration of the case”, “Announce kidnapping”, “Experts group is coming”,

“A brief summary of yesterday”, “An Interview for POK”, “POK response Kidnapping”]

Take one topic above as an example: “Waiting for interview” describes the kernel of the following News:

“2014/1/20 09:26 Our journalist is standing outside the gastech headquarters waiting for the gastech executives who are expected to appear within the hour. Gastech CEO Sten Sanjorge is celebrating the successful initial public offering of his company, which took place last month. When they leave here the gastech executives will travel to the capital building where they will meet with President Kapelou and several of his Ministers and Council members. A private celebration of their successful alliance is planned to take place later today. One can't help but wonder how much healthcare could be provided with only half the funds used to orchestrate this spectacle."

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.

Figure 11 Kidnapping

Figure 12 Possible Reasons

By mining and analyzing the given data, we concluded two possible reasons to explain why the GAStech employees may be missing as follows:

1. Those missing employees might be kidnapped by POK

1) We obtained clues of kidnapping from the news reports. By mining the news articles, we found that the POK released a statement, claiming responsibility for the kidnapping of GAStech employees and demanding a $20 million ransom.

2) In 2009, Kaerl died and Mandor Vann became new leader of POK. From then on, POK had taken more radical action to protect Kronos and protest GASTech. In 2011, POK was labeled as a public treat.

3) Some employees of GAStech are members of POK organization. We found the suspicious people have blood relationship with POK.

2. Those missing employees might be set up by the CEO

We were also strongly suspicious of the CEO of GASTech -- Sanjorge Jr. Sten.

1) GASTech has made a big success on gas mining in recent years. It was the CEO's decision to have a celebration, and the date was chosen by himself.

However, On the very day, the CEO was not appeared and 'fortunately' avoided being 'kidnapped' by POK.

We may infer from the above situations that the CEO had got rumors that POK might take radical actions on GAStech. Nevertheless, for his own benefit, he didn't prevent this kidnapping, for he might get more benefits from the case.