This
Answer Sheet should be used for your VAST Challenge 2014 Mini-Challenge 1
submission. Please maintain the .htm format and make sure that all hyperlinks are relative
to the answer form.
Rename
this form "index.htm" for your submission. Remove these instructions and any other
example text below that is highlighted in yellow. Please see the
"Submission Instructions" at http://vacommunity.org/VAST+Challenge+2014
for more detailed instructions.
Entry Name: "Stuttgart-Han-MC1"
VAST Challenge 2014
Mini-Challenge 1
Team
Members:
Qi Han, University
of Stuttgart, Qi.Han@vis.uni-stuttgart.de
PRIMARY
Markus John,
University of Stuttgart, Markus.John@vis.uni-stuttgart.de
Stefan Strohmaier, University of Stuttgart,
strohmsn@studi.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de
Student Team: YES
Analytic
Tools Used:
Provide
a list of analytic tools used. Examples:
GATE (Natural Language Processing
unit to annotate the documents (NER))
Approximately how many hours were spent
working on this submission in total?
3(members)*30(hours)*2(Weeks) = 180
hours
May we post your submission in the
Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository after VAST Challenge 2014 is complete? Yes
Video:
The video can be downloaded here.
The same video can also be found at http://youtu.be/pNzm-q1tqgw
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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.
A: With the timeline visualization we explore the
articles and extract historical background information about organizations and
key persons. After a keyword search the affected articles aggregations are
highlighted red. By clicking on them, we can analyze the annotated entities
(Persons, Organization, Dates and Locations automatically extracted using Gate)
in a separate window. Those entities can be individually selected which results
in a highlighting of all additional articles they are mentioned in. Further we
build a novel timeline by extracting time expressions and remapping each
article to different timepoints mentioned in the
article. This way we help the user to find more events and collect all piece of
information about each event in one place. We identified Henk
Bodrogi as the first head of POK (since its inception
in 1997). After he quit in October 2001, Elian Karel became his successor, and,
after he passed away in 2009, Silvia Marek finally took his place. Figure 1
illustrates the analysis steps leading to our conclusions.
Figure 1
B: With our person
graph view we can analyze the connections between different organizational
units of GAStech and members of the POK. It depicts
the organizational chart of GAStech and uses a Named
Entity Recogniser to identify employees that share
their last name with POK members, assuming that these persons are relatives.
Additionally, it is possible to add, remove, and change persons’ nodes to
reflect information found by analyzing the articles or e-mails. The analysts
can also add arbitrary additional information gathered during the investigation
by creating new nodes and edges. By selecting a person, analysts can review her
resume in a separate view to further scrutinize her background. An example
graph is shown in Figure 2, in which the POK members are connected to the
potential extended network. 
Figure 2
C: By searching for
the names of the POK leaders in our timeline visualization, we can easily find
articles that deal with POK and their leaders and further exam them along the
timeline.
POK started out as
a small group with seven founding members under the leadership of Henk Bodrogi. In October 2001, Bodrogi resigned and all founding members left the
organization along with him. After that, Elian Karel took over, and shifted
POK’s policy to include concern over government accountability and possible
corruption. This information can be discerned from the visualization in Figure
3. 
Figure 3
Under Karel, the POK became a group with 200-300 members. Silvia Marek joined POK when it was merged with ‘Save Our Wildlands’. Marek believes in peaceful protest but has a weak control over the POK members and as a result he couldn’t prevent a rising numbers of criminals and hooligans entering POK. This can be discerned from Figure 4.
D: In our person graph view several potential
connections between the POK and GASTech become
visible. Mandor Vann, e.g., is Isia
Vann’s uncle and works for GASTech in the security
department. Another example is Carmine Osvaldo, co-leader of POK, a potential
relative to Hennie Osvaldo, who is also working in the security department.
Additional links between POK and GAStech can be seen
in Figure 2.
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.
For the events of January 20-21 we provide a
separate timeline with a finer granularity to uncover the relevant events. The
articles are sorted according to a timestamp, we created with a time expression
recognizer (SUTime library), and a similarity index
to indicate the same event. The length of the bar chart
(number of articles at the same timestamp), identify the importance of events.
By reading through the different events we discovered that on Monday the yearly
meeting of the GAStech leadership took place. During
the meeting, the fire alarm went off, forcing everybody to leave the building.
Two hours later, the fire department spokesman announced that the building is
clear, that it was a false alarm, and that the employees can return to the
building. At 12:25 it is reported that the local GAStech
executives (Ingrid Barranco, Ada Campo-Corrente, Orhan Strum, Willem
Vasco-Pais and Sten Sanjorge Jr.) have vanished. At about the same time, Abila Police arrived
at GAStech headquarters, raising concerns about what
has happened. At about 15:00 the Police began to leave the building after their
investigations were finished. Shortly afterwards, the employees were allowed to
leave the headquarters. Some employees speculated about the missing executives
and reported that they have seen several persons dressed in black in the
building before the fire alarm. However,
GAStech officials informed reporters that the
"people in black" present that morning were
caterers. At 17:30 there are unofficial reports from the police indicating that
they believe the Protectors of Kronos (POK) are behind the kidnapping and that
they requested government assistance with the investigation. At 18:00 reporters disclosed that two private
jets took off at Abila airport. The first jet left the airport at 12:30, with
seven or eight businessmen on board. The second jet left for Rome, Italy at
14:30 with also seven or eight businessmen on board, who looked like they had
something to celebrate. It was further reported, that the police suspected Edvard Vann to be connected to the POK organization. He was
interrogated by the police for six hours, but denied to have any connection
with the kidnapping or the POK organization. In the evening, a police
conference took place, summarizing the events of the day.
Another police
conference is held on January 21 at 9:00 which clarified some of the
speculations. The number of kidnapped employees is reported to be 10 instead of
14. A reporter was contacted by the POK to tell the citizens of Kronos, that
the organization wants a ransom of $20 million to release the kidnapped
employees. 
Figure 5
Figure 6
Event summary as depicted in Figure 5 and 6: 1) GAStech leadership meeting 2) wrong fire alarm 3) police
investigation about missing executives 4) employees are allowed to leave the
building and speculate to reporter questions 5) information about two private
jets 6) Edward Vann interrogation 7) 8) Police conferences 9) POK wants ransom
of $20 million
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.
POK kidnapped the GAStech employees:
With the timeline visualization we found out that Mandor Vann, Isia Vann and
Juliana Vann are relatives. Juliana Vann probably died because of water
polluted GASTech. Isia Vann
is an employee of GAStech and works in the security
department. Other employees of the security department (Edvard
Vann, Hennie Osvaldo, Minke Mies,
Loreto Bodrogi) also have a
possible connection with POK as depicted by Figure 7 created with the e-mail
view. The POK organization became more and more radical over the years under
the leadership of Silvia
Marek as can be seen in Figure 4.
Executives of GAStech: