Entry Name: “SmithCollege-Chung-MC1”

VAST Challenge 2016
Mini-Challenge 1

Team Members:

Ji Won Chung, Smith College, jchung@smith.edu PRIMARY

Zheng Mu, Smith College, zmu@smith.edu

(Acknowledgements to: Subashini, Smith College, ssridhar@smith.edu )

Student Team: Yes

Tools Used:

Microsoft PowerPoint

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

36 hours

May we post your submission in the Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository after VAST Challenge 2015 is complete? Yes

High-resolution image:

https://i.imgsafe.org/8296e41281.png

Video (Optional but recommended):

https://vid.me/CXB4

Description

Provide a description of your design using no greater than 1000 words and 10 images. Describe the important features of your design, including both display features and interactions. Describe how it will enable investigators to quickly understand new situations, think deeply to develop and test their theories as part of their investigation, and rapidly reorient their investigation when data or assumptions change.

The design has three major displays. They are designed to be compatible with touch-screen devices such as tablets and smartphones to provide investigators mobility, if needed, and an easier way to interact with the programs. The first display gives a general overview of the conditions on the island. The second gives a more specific, but still general, overview of the subset of VIP members each investigator is assigned with. The third display is a search database that can look up, compare, and contrast people based on the search settings.

The first display is accessible to all investigators and shows an overview of the overall security of the island in real time. Regions of the island blinks in red to indicate that the investigator’s attention is needed in those areas because of high suspicious or criminal activities. The bar on the very right demonstrates the overall security level of the island accumulated from various camera, police, or financial transaction reports. The blue levels of the bar fluctuates depending on criminal or suspicious activity and overcrowded regions.

On the left side of the display are features the investigator can select to appear on the map. The investigator can view population, crime, and anomaly density and track specific groups of people. Anomaly density represents locations where there is deviation from the regular pattern of movements or activities.

Another feature allows the investigator to select regions of the map to zoom in. These features help determine the location, validity, and urgency of the alerts.

The last feature allows the investigator to select a building for a detailed report on its activity levels. The activity detection is based on information such as times of events, financial transactions, key card entrance record, news reports, and the weather.

The entire building is shown in distinct red, white, and purple color schematic in order to easily convey this information and quickly alert the investigators to take notice. The red indicates extremely high activity while the white indicates no activity. The purple indicates anomalous activities which could indicate that a person is inside a room where he should not be or that he has been in a room for an excessive period of time. This feature has the option of viewing changes in data over time.  The video progress bar has green tabs in which an investigator can enter a start and end time to view changes over time. The play bar will show the data change over time and the stop button will pause the data at a specific time or data frame. Hovering over the red button will indicate the specific date and time of the what is displayed on screen. The time progress bar is to help the investigator to detect any patterns in activity and readily access old data.

The second screen is a collection of a subset of locations that the investigators are assigned to. The major purpose of this program is to secure the safety of VIP members. In each grid, the exit labels are marked and the VIP members are indicated in green. Criminals or suspects have a red circle around them and the radius of the circle differs depending on how dangerous they are. When the VIPs enter or touch the red circles, the VIPs change color and blink. The program then immediately calculates and demonstrates the nearest route to the exit and an “Alert VIP” button appears. Pressing the button will send information regarding the nearest exit and that the VIP is in an unsafe area to security officials who will help guide the VIPs into a safe direction. This program also has a time progress feature which works in the same manner as described above.

The third display is a search tool for investigators to navigate through the huge database and report sources. The search bar on top of the display zone help investigators to keep track of each individual. If an investigator wants to know what happened to a specific person in a certain period of time, he can type in the person’s ID number (each person on the island has a unique ID number), mark the person’s type (He might be a VIP, a suspect, a criminal or just a normal person), and select the time period they want to look up.After selecting a person, there will be a line displaying next to his ID number, which represents his/her activity status during the selected time, in which white means no activity, green means normal activity and purple means weird activity. Investigators can search for several people at the same time, so that they can compare and analyze their movement (For example, if several people are planning a crime together, they may show weird activity at the same time).

By selecting one or more people and clicking the “track” button, the screen will display the paths of these selected people.

Investigators can get further information about where these people are based on time using the time progress bar.

Clicking the “Predict” button will demonstrate circular regions that demonstrate where each person will most likely be based on past behaviors. This “Predict” button is useful because it can help indicate if a person is demonstrating weird location patterns and create a preemptive measure in which security can guide VIPs away from the circular regions created of the suspects and criminals.