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Entry Name: "PURDUE-ZHOU-MC1"

VAST Challenge 2017
Mini-Challenge 1

Team Members:

Zheng Zhou, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA, zhou85@purdue.edu PRIMARY

Sijin Wang, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA, wang2283@purdue.edu

Wenjie Wu, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA, wu1116@purdue.edu

Aijun Huang, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA, huan1004@purdue.edu

Yafeng Niu, Southeast University, China, nyf@seu.edu.cn

Hui Tang, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA, tang227@purdue.edu

Yingjie Chen, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA, victorchen@purdue.edu

Zhenyu Qian, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA, qianz@purdue.edu

Student Team: Yes

Tools Used:

D3.js, jQuery, PHP, MySQL

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

300 hours.

May we post your submission in the Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository after VAST Challenge 2017 is complete?

Yes

Live demo: https://va.tech.purdue.edu/vast2017/mc1

Video: https://va.tech.purdue.edu/vast2017/mc1/clockpetals.mp4

Questions

1 – “Patterns of Life” analyses depend on recognizing repeating patterns of activities by individuals or groups. Describe up to six daily patterns of life by vehicles traveling through and within the park. Characterize the patterns by describing the kinds of vehicles participating, their spatial activities (where do they go?), their temporal activities (when does the pattern happen?), and provide a hypothesis of what the pattern represents (for example, if I drove to a coffee house every morning, but did not stay for long, you might hypothesize I’m getting coffee “to-go”). Please limit your answer to six images and 500 words.

1) Vehicles daily trespass the preserve (Fig. 1). Hundreds of vehicles were identified as they have trespassed the preserve area. Figure-1 (A) show that 416 vehicles in total entered entrance 2 and didn’t go to any park facilities but exited the park from entrance4. 415 vehicles trespassed from entrance 4 to 2. Figure-1 (B), (C) and (D) also shows that these vehicles didn’t trespass through the park at specific time but fell in all day. The similar trespassing routes include but not limit to:

· Between entrance 2 and entrance 4

· Between entrance 0 and entrance 3

· Entrance 4 à General-gate 5 à General-gate 2 à Ranger-stop 0 à Ranger-stop 2 à General-gate 1 à Entrance 0

· Entrance 2 à General-gate 2 à Ranger-stop 0 à Ranger-stop 2 à General-gate 1 à Entrance 0

· Entrance 1 à General-gate 7 à Entrance 3 and vice versa.

Fig.1-1 Selected routes where the vehicles trespassed the park area.

2) Overall, day campers, who spent less than 24 hours and didn’t stay overnight, didn’t enter the camping sites until 5:00:00 am and didn’t leave until 16:00:02 pm, as shown in the left half of Fig.2. It was interesting that the exit time stamp always 2 seconds past the hour (11:00:02, 13:00:02, 15:00:02, etc.). So we hypothesize that the fee to the camping was charged by the hour when the vehicle left the camping site.

Fig.1-2 Camping sites open for day campers from 5am to 4pm. The exit time was recorded two seconds past the hour.

3) Camping sites have daily routine as they are closed from 11pm to 5am. No traffic has been recorded accessing the camping sites.

Fig.1-3 Camping traffic histograms.

4) Park service vehicles patrolled every hour except 4:00 AM to 5:00AM. They always departed from and returned the ranger base.

Fig.1-4 Daily patrol pattern by park service vehicles

2 – Patterns of Life analyses may also depend on understanding what patterns appear over longer periods of time (in this case, over multiple days). Describe up to six patterns of life that occur over multiple days (including across the entire data set) by vehicles traveling through and within the park. Characterize the patterns by describing the kinds of vehicles participating, their spatial activities (where do they go?), their temporal activities (when does the pattern happen?), and provide a hypothesis of what the pattern represents (for example, many vehicles showing up at the same location each Saturday at the same time may suggest some activity occurring there each Saturday). Please limit your answer to six images and 500 words.

1) Traffic patterns over the weekends in July 2015: it was obvious that there were peak traffic at major traffic junctions such as ranger stop 2, general gate 7, general gate 5, general gate 4, and entrance 1 over each weekend in July 2015.

Fig.2-1 Traffic comparison among major junctions in July 2015

2) Type 4 2-axle truck accessed ranger stop 3 after midnight and stayed for 20-ish minutes. From the right half of Fig.2-2 it is found that a type 4 truck visited ranger stop 3 once or twice a month in general and more frequently in June and July 2015.

Fig.2-2 Type 4 (2-axle truck) accessing ranger stop 3

3) 2-axle and 3-axle buses didn’t stop in any trackable stop in the park but trespassed the park only.

Fig.2-3 Type 5 and 6 (buses) commuting through the preserve

4) The number of the buses commuting through the park differs in different month. The number increased from May to June, peaked in July, and decreased to very few in October.

Fig.2-4 Type 5 (2-axle bus) commuted through the park differs in months

5) Camping sites opened in May, peaked in July and August, and closed in October.

Fig.2-5 All camping sites open/close illustration

3 – Unusual patterns may be patterns of activity that changes from an established pattern, or are just difficult to explain from what you know of a situation. Describe up to six unusual patterns (either single day or multiple days) and highlight why you find them unusual. Please limit your answer to six images and 500 words.

1) Six vehicles (type 1) trespassed ranger stop 1 against the regulation and avoiding gate 2. The accessing time was approximately 10:30am on July 10, 2015. They stayed for about one hour and a half in ranger stop 3.

Fig.3-1 Type 4 (2-axle truck) accessing ranger stop 3

2) Evening Campers. Typically, the campers who spent the day time (not overnight) entered the camping sites and exit between 5am to 4pm. But in camping site 1, we observed these vehicles (red circled) who entered the camping site after 6 and left in the evening.

Fig.3-2 Evening campers appeared in camping site 1

3) One vehicle (car id: 20155705025759-63, type-1) entered the park in May 2015 from entrance 0 and stayed in the park for the rest of the time in the data. It basically stayed in a camping site for approximately a month then moved to another camping site.

Fig.3-3 A vehicle has stayed in the park for the whole year

4) One vehicle (car id: 20162904122951-717, type-1) visited camping site 0 on every weekend in March 2016 and the first two weekends in April 2016. Each time of the visit it stayed for about four days.

Fig.3-4 A vehicle has visited camping site 0 every weekend for six times from March 2016 to April 2016

4 –– What are the top 3 patterns you discovered that you suspect could be most impactful to bird life in the nature preserve? (Short text answer)

1) Trespassing vehicles which don’t have a destination in the park may increase the air and noise pollution in the preserve.

2) Especially those vehicles that drive through the park in the late night can break the quiet and peace of nature and may affect birds’ sleeping because of the headlight and engine noise.

3) The sensors at the gate have been detected malfunctioning at several timestamps (two records only have the gap of one second). Several private vehicles have also been detected as trespassing some area against the park regulation. Such “illegal” human activity could impact the birds’ habitant or even lead to poaching.