NEVAC, has had a very successful 3+ years of research ad development. That effort ended officially at the end of June, 2009 and is followed by our role in a new DHS Center of Excellence for Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and Interoperability Environments (VACCINE) was approved for funding. NEVAC activities are transitioning into the new COE. The Purdue-led effort includes participation from all of the original RVACs plus some new partners along with a range of new partners and a stronger integration with data analytics efforts led by Rutgers. The official start date for VACCINE was July 1, 2009. Watch the GeoVISTA Center main page for details to be posted soon.

Five NEVAC graduate students participated in the 3rd Annual Department of Homeland Security University Network Summit, held March 17-19 in Washington, D.C. Students presenting their work are:

• Kevin Ross, Craig McCabe and Robert Roth:: A near real-time visualization for understanding spatio-temporal patterns of violent crime in the District of Columbia (recieved third place in the poster competition)
• Don Pellegrino: was a panelist during Student Day of the Third Annual DHS University Net-work Summit. His presentation slides are available.
• Jin Chen: Geovisual analytics of spatial clusters at multiple scales

Five NEVAC graduate students will be presenting posters on March 19-20 at the 2nd Annual Department of Homeland Security University Network Summit in Washington, D.C. Students presenting their work are:

• Ritesh Agrawal: Capturing, Visualizing, and Sharing the Process of Data Analysis
• Bimal Balakrishnan and Varun Adibhatla: NeoCITIES transactive memory system for geo-collaboration in emergency crisis management
• Don Pellegrino: Automatic hypothesis generation and evaluation by network structure content analysis and visualization
• Michael Stryker: Health GeoJunction: tracking infectious disease threats and related science

GeoVISTA Center Research Associate Chris Weaver won the InfoVis 2007 contest with his entry, called Cinegraph. The InfoVis Contest is held annually to promote the development of advances in information visualization and to establish a forum to advance evaluation methods. Contestants must develop interesting and insightful ways of visualizing and analyzing a complex data set, which is provided by the contest organizers. This year, the contest data set was about Hollywood movie releases, including actors, genres, awards, release dates, and box office performance. The contest focused on the design aspects of the visualization in addition to its exploratory and analytical aspects, and entrants were encouraged to augment the data set with any publicly available data.

The winning entry, Cinegraph, is an interactive visualization for exploring and analyzing the InfoVis 2007 contest data set derived from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). By combining two complementary visual interaction techniques, cross-filtered views and attribute relationship graphs, Cinegraph supports a wide variety of general and highly focused analytic tasks. Users can express complex lines of questions in the form of rapid sequences of simple interactions. Designed and built in a little over two days by a single visualization designer using the Improvise visualization environment, Cinegraph provides high-dimensional interactive drill-down capability into the people, genres, awards, release dates, and box office characteristics of movies described in the database, using ancillary photographs of people, images of movie posters, and icons of movie genres to enhance the interaction process

Chis Weaver received a prize and presented his winning work during the contest session at the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization in Sacramento, CA, October 28-November 1, 2007. Additionally, an abstract and short video demonstration of the winning entry have been included on the official Symposium proceedings and DVD.

GeoVISTA Graduate Associate Anthony Robinson was one of ten Ph.D. students selected to participate in the Doctoral Colloquium at the 2007 IEEE Visualization and InfoVis conferences, co-located with the IEEE VAST (Visual Analytics Science and Technology) Symposium. Robinson presented a paper, Synthesizing Geovisual Analytic Results, during the Geovisual Analytics session of the Doctoral Colloquium on October 31st in Sacramento, CA.

North-East Visualization and Analytics Center director, Alan MacEachren, presented some of NEVAC's work over the last year at the first Annual Department of Homeland Security University Network Summit on Research and Education. The summit, held in Washington, D.C. on March 15-16, was open to homeland security officials, professionals, researchers, educators and students, as well as other interested parties in government, academia and industry.

Dr. MacEachren's presentation, Geo-temporal information discovery (25 MB pdf file), was included in the Cross-Media Information Identification and Extraction panel. The presentation focused on the challenges of exploiting complex, heterogeneous information that contain both implicit and explicit geospatial and temporal references. The approaches and applications presented are part of a larger effort to develop, implement, test, and deploy a suite of geovisual analytics methods and tools directed to supporting an iterative process of information foraging, analysis, sensemaking, and decision-making.

Three NEVAC-affiliated graduate students have been chosen to present posters at the Department of Homeland Security's First Annual University Network Summit on Research and Education being held March 15th and 16th in Washington, D.C. From Penn State's GeoVISTA Center, graduate students Brian Tomaszewski and Chi-Chun Pan will present posters, and from NEVAC partner institution, Drexel University, Weizhong Zhu will present a poster.

Tomaszewski's poster is entitled: Mapping Open-Source Information to Support Crisis Management

Pan's poster is entitled: Automatic Extraction and Geo-spatial Visualization of FEMA National Situation Updates

Zhu's poster is entitled: Visual Analysis of Terrorists’ Networks Extracted from the Public Knowledge Bases

The North-East Visualization and Analytics Center (NEVAC) is the subject of a feature article on the Research Penn State website. The article highlights NEVAC's interdisciplinary approach to developing a new generation of visualization and analysis tools to help the intelligence and emergency management communities better respond to natural or man-made crises.

North-East Visualization and Analytics Center (NEVAC) researchers presented their work at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), held in Baltimore in November. Weizhong Zhu and Chaomei Chen from NEVAC partner institution Drexel University demonstrated their new tool, Storylines. Storylines is a storytelling tool to generate event timelines, construct social networks, and identify key players in the networks. The demo "Storylines - A Tool to Explore Events and Key Players in Stories," was given during the Full Week Demo Session of the VAST symposium.

Additionally, Drexel's Chen partnered with GeoVISTA's Chris Weaver to author a paper that was presented during the Complex Information Spaces Symposium of VAST 2006. The paper is entitled "Visual Analysis of Conflicting Opinions."

NEVAC investigators Chaomei Chen and Chris Weaver wrote a paper that will be featured at the upcoming IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST 2006) in Baltimore, Maryland. The paper, "Visual Analysis of Conflicting Opinions," highlights some of NEVAC's work on visual analytics.

GeoVISTA Center director Alan MacEachren will co-chair a workshop entitled "Visualization, Analytics & Spatial Decision Support" at the upcoming GIScience conference in Münster, Germany. The workshop aims at bringing together researchers from relevant fields to address research issues of visual analytics and spatial decision support in the multidisciplinary context of GI Science. The participants will present and discuss the state-of-the-art and directions for future research. Extended papers (subject to formal review) will be included in a special issue of the International Journal of Geographical Information Science reflecting the results of the discussion.

Visit the workshop website to learn more.

Pennsylvania State University has been named a Regional Visualization and Analytics Center by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. PNNL leads the Department of Homeland Security's National Visualization and Analytics Center, or NVAC™, which is bringing academic expertise to the nation's efforts to discover information that may warn officials of a terrorist attack.

DHS established the NVAC™ in 2004 to provide scientific guidance and coordination for the research and development of new tools and methods that DHS has identified as required for managing, visually representing, and analyzing enormous amounts of diverse data and information. Development of these visualization tools will enable analysts to more effectively identify signs of terrorist attacks in their earliest stages and ultimately to prevent terrorist activities before they can be carried out.

"Penn State is known world-wide for its contributions to geographic information science, particularly its work on strategies and technologies for exploiting geospatial and temporal information, which is a slice of visual analytics that isn't currently represented on the NVAC™ team," said Jim Thomas, PNNL's chief scientist for information technologies and NVAC™ director. "Their expertise is an exciting addition."

Penn State's RVAC, led by the GeoVISTA Center, will address three core challenges related to visual representation and analysis of diverse information. Researchers will develop methods for deriving and exploiting information, such as place and time, from a variety of data forms; they will link this information with stored knowledge and analytical reasoning practices to yield usable intelligence; and will provide cognitive readiness and collaboration support enabling individuals and teams to assess situations, interpret evidence, make decisions and direct or execute actions.

Read the full announcement . .