Uncharted | A Thousand Words Is Worth a Picture

Self-Supervised Learning for Timeseries from Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagery

Wed, 09 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Distil is a system for constructing point-and-click machine learning models, here extended for multi-spectral satellite imagery for timeseries data leveraging an autoML pipeline, adding embedding model trained using self-supervised learning; rapid data labeling facilitated with image query; hierarchical geospatial timeseries modeling; and sub-image feature extraction using weakly supervised segmentation.

Improved Portfolio Monitoring, Analysis and Communication

Thu, 27 Sep 2018 13:50:48 +0000

Managing a portfolio presents endless opportunities for improved success, from deep analysis of underlying markets, creating predictive models, combining a wide variety of data sources, monitoring securities in real time, to communicating with multiple stakeholders. In our over 25 years of experience in the field, interactive visual analysis of structured financial products has proven to better reveal real-time market opportunities, flag historic anomalies, facilitate interactive what-if risk analysis and engage clients with insights.

"What If" Global Risk Forecast for BHP Billiton

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:23:48 +0000

This tool for senior and executive management won Energy Risk magazine’s prestigious “Innovation of the Year.” Asset class by term structure is shown on the floor, while one wall provides a geographic roll-up and the other shows financial metrics. BHP Billiton, one of the world’s largest resources companies, uses a diversified portfolio strategy to manage assets. Uncharted’s enterprise risk visualizations create and assess what-if scenarios such as potential acquisitions and their impact on short-term risk.

Airspace Management - Extreme Real-Time Performance

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:23:48 +0000

Uncharted provides interactive 2D and 3D visualization of complex airspace control measures, planned and actual mission routing, objectives and alert analytics that meets real-world performance and throughput requirements. Independent evaluations prove that Uncharted outperforms other legacy and incumbent solutions in terms of display, usability and cognitive performance.

Mission Critical Awareness, Planning and Execution

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:23:48 +0000

Real-time visualization provides commanders with the necessary tools for rapid assessment and comprehension of highly complex situations. Staying inside the opposition’s awareness / planning / decision cycle is essential when the ultimate goal is concurrent planning and execution. Interactive visual collaboration enables participants to work together remotely with shared understanding to plan next steps more rapidly and successfully. Uncharted develops and supports C2 collaboration solutions that are deployed and used around the world every day.

Navigating Conflict with MobileTerrain

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:23:48 +0000

MobileTerrain™ is a next generation C2ISR solution for mission-critical data collaboration in real time. Cross-platform (Windows/Android/Linux) and designed for desktop, vehicle, tablet and dismounted handheld operation, MobileTerrain provides one solution for all tactical information where low bandwidth and disconnected operability are needed across the battlespace.

“Geo-chat,” C2 messaging, planning tools, vehicle integration, camera feeds and more are built-in and easy to use with little training required. MobileTerrain’s extensible, componentized SDK enables rapid development and integration of new capabilities.

Pioneering Visual Analytics with nSpace

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:23:48 +0000

A post 9/11, pre-HTML5 precursor to TellFinder, Uncharted’s nSpace is a landmark web-based visual analytics platform that enables analysts to interactively discover and synthesize insights from vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. nSpace includes semantic extraction and categorization, hypothesis exploration and evidence gathering, reasoning, collaboration and reporting. It is a collaborative environment to build and share knowledge. Powerful software agents combined with gesture-based data-driven sketching techniques are used to synthesize and share actionable knowledge with others.

TellFinder®

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:23:43 +0000

TellFinder® searches vast areas of the deep web and other media troves to surface connections between entities and reveal activity patterns in text, PDFs, images, and video. TellFinder technology accelerates network analysis for criminal investigations in a variety of contexts, including supply chain, intellectual property, illicit trade, human trafficking, and cybersecurity.

PanTera

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

PanTera is a next generation augmented intelligence platform for large, complex, heterogeneous data. Leverage human-directed AI and LLMs to extract actionable information from video, audio, imagery, and text.

Influent - Follow the Money

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:23:43 +0000

Influent is a fresh approach to link analysis for graphs of transactional data. Influent empowers analysts to visually and interactively investigate transactional flow between billions of entities, accounts and transactions, revealing actors and behaviors of concern.

Live Trade Landscape for a Leading Exchange

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:23:48 +0000

In this system designed for a leading ECN, Uncharted renders an intuitive, integrated view of supply and demand (buy and sell orders), transaction history (trades), and analytics (e.g. volume distributions and VWAP), in real time in a browser. Giving visual form to the financial market enables a trader to see developments more quickly, gaining competitive advantage. This innovative visualization design earns praise in David Leinweber’s book Nerds on Wall Street.

Visual Journey Analytics

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Journey analytics create sequences that can be understood with graph-oriented visual analytics. We have designed and implemented more than a dozen visual analytics on sequence data in production software over the last 20 years. We outline and demonstrate a variety of data challenges, user tasks, visualization layouts, node and edge representations, and interactions, including strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches. We also discuss how AI and LLMs can significantly improve these analyses.

Resilient Supply and Demand Networks

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The DARPA Resilient Supply-and-Demand Network (RSDN) program intends to expose and mitigate sources of surprise in supply-demand networks. In addition to DARPA, eight teams are working on solutions. Among them, Uncharted is assembling big data into a graph model with interactive visual analytics combining hierarchical large-scale graph visualization with on-the-fly what-if scenario analysis to uncover and assess systemic risk. In this panel discussion, each team provides a lightning overview of their research.

Visual Journey Analytics: lessons learned from real-world implementations

Wed, 15 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Process mining and more broadly journey analytics create sequences that can be understood with graph-oriented visual analytics. We have designed and implemented more than a dozen visual analytics on sequence data in production software over the last 20 years. We outline a variety of data challenges, user tasks, visualization layouts, node and edge representations, and interactions, including strengths and weaknesses and potential future research.

Towards Accessible, Flexible and Collaborative Scientific Modeling with Terarium

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the evolving field of scientific modeling research, computational notebooks have made steps to promote collaboration by providing interactive environments for code execution, visualization, and narrative composition; however they are still limited. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Terarium, a platform that attempts to socialize scientific modeling for a broad audience, including students, researchers, and data scientists.

Work Domain Analysis of Electric Transmission Networks and Operation

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Electric networks are globally significant systems being transformed to support increased wind and solar generation. To structure development of real-time operator support, we developed a conceptual model of electric transmission network operation that represents physical, functional, and purposeful distinctions and summaries used by experts at a North American transmission operator and reliability coordinator.

Visualizing LLM Text Style Transfer

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Text Style Transfer (TST) retains semantic content while modifying stylistic features. Exploratory visualization of LLM-generated TST via semantically aligned text visualization reveals advanced stylistic techniques such as use of metaphors. LLM style inquiry can be used to articulate advanced stylistic devices such as interjections, idioms and rhetorical devices and visually depicted as multivariate style heatmaps.

Visualizing Textual Distributions of Repeated LLM Responses to Characterize LLM Knowledge

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The breadth and depth of knowledge learned by Large Language Models (LLMs) can be assessed through repetitive prompting and visual analysis of commonality across the responses. We show levels of LLM verbatim completions of prompt text through aligned responses, mind-maps of knowledge across several areas in general topics, and an association graph of topics generated directly from recursive prompting of the LLM.

Many Types of Design Needed for Effective Visualizations

Wed, 24 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

For effective visualizations, there are many types of design to consider. Visualization design focuses on core theory of tasks, data and visual encodings. Workflow design, user interface design and graphic design all contribute to successful visualizations. All design aspects range from initial design exploration to iterative design refinement. Guidelines can help, but have limitations.

Telling the Story of TellFinder: How We Harness Knowledge Graphs, AI and Deep Web Search to Combat Human Trafficking

Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

TellFinder is a software platform that enables counter human trafficking investigators to search and visualize many millions of enriched adult service ads from the deep web. In this talk we discuss how TellFinder works and how it has impacted investigations and prosecutions during its active deployment with various agencies.

New Frontiers in Data Visualization

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Expert technical analysts are always looking for new techniques to better understand supply, demand, and market prices. In this presentation, we examine the potential of alternative datasets, advanced AI and novel visualizations to reveal market movements.

Why AI Can't Save the World (Yet), and How Humans Can Help

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Analysts tasked with solving social problems like human trafficking rely on long-established processes and field experience. Broad artificial intelligence solutions to these problems have good intentions, but they often omit nuance and context that analysts bring. In this talk, we present Uncharted’s approach to designing “augmented intelligence” tools for global resilience that let both humans and machines do what they do best.

Causeworks: A Mixed-Initiative Framework for Causal Modeling

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The construction of computational causal models for complex systems has typically been completed manually by domain experts and is a time-consuming, cumbersome process. We introduce Causeworks, an application in which operators “sketch” complex systems, leverage AI tools and expert knowledge to transform the sketches into computational causal models, and then apply analytics to understand how to influence the system.

Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Visualization for Visual Knowledge Discovery

Sun, 05 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Uncharted contributed the following chapters to Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Visualization for Visual Knowledge Discovery:

Visual Analytics of Hierarchical and Network Timeseries Models: Visual analytics that represent many aspects of timeseries models in one holistic application are perceptually scalable to exploration of millions of nodes.

Dual Y Axes Charts Defended: Case Studies, Domain Analysis and a Method: We show dual axes charts are necessary for fine-grained correlation analysis that is not made obvious within single axis charts or other means.

3Dify: Extruding Common 2D Charts with Timeseries Data

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

3D charts are not common in financial services. We review chart use in practice. We create 3D financial visualizations starting with 2D charts used extensively in financial services, then extend into the third dimension with timeseries data. We embed the 2D view into the 3D scene; constrain interaction and add depth cues to facilitate comprehension. Usage and extensions indicate success.

Useable Machine Learning for Sentinel-2 Multispectral Satellite Imagery

Sun, 12 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One of the challenges when building Machine Learning (ML) models using satellite imagery is building sufficiently labeled data sets for training. In the past, this problem has been addressed by adapting computer vision approaches to GIS data with significant recent contributions to the field. But when trying to adapt these models to Sentinel-2 multi-spectral satellite imagery these approaches fall short. To address this deficit, we present Distil, and demonstrate a specific method using our system for training models with all available Sentinel-2 channels.

A Multi-scale Approach for Biological Graph Visualization: Local Analysis in Global Context

Sun, 25 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Biologists grapple with large multi-scale graphs to find relevant subgraphs for answering a range of biological questions. Our approach for scalable graph analysis enables biologists to interactively explore, query, and analyze biological graphs at different scales. Computational biologists see promise in our approach for various use cases such as drug interactions and disease propagation.

Automated Insights on Visualizations with Natural Language Generation

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Quantitative data, such as a 10k financial report, requires cognitive load to scan the columns and rows and identify patterns and important takeaways, whether novice or subject matter expert. Visualizations can be used to summarize and reveal patterns. However, it may still be difficult to understand what is most meaningful. What should the viewer pay attention to? In this research, we reduce the cognitive load in understanding tabular data by combining charts with ranked natural language generated (NLG) bullet point statements that summarize the top takeaways.

Unmasking Human Trafficking Risk in Commercial Sex Supply Chains with Machine Learning

Sun, 13 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The covert nature of sex trafficking provides a significant barrier to generating large-scale, data-driven insights to inform law enforcement, policy and social work. We leverage massive deep web data (collected globally from leading commercial sex websites) in tandem with a novel machine learning framework to unmask suspicious recruitment-to-sales pathways, thereby providing the first global network view of trafficking risk in commercial sex supply chains.

Causeworks Collaboration: Simultaneous Causal Model Construction and Analysis

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Military planners use “Operational Design” (OD) to understand systems and relationships in complex operational environments. Causeworks is a visual analytics application for OD teams to collaboratively build causal models of environments to understand and find solutions to affect them. Collaborative causal modeling can help teams craft better plans, but there are unique challenges in developing synchronous collaboration tools for building and using causal models. Causeworks overlays analytics inputs and outputs over a shared causal model to flexibly support multiple modeling tasks simultaneously in a collaborative environment with minimal state management burden on users.

Causeworks: A Framework for Transforming User Hypotheses into a Computational Causal Model

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Causal Model building for complex problems has typically been completed manually by domain experts and is currently a time-consuming, cumbersome process. The resulting models are simple diagrams produced on whiteboards, and do not support computational analytics, thus limiting usefulness. Causeworks helps operators “sketch” complex systems, and transforms sketches into computational causal models using automatic and semi-automatic causal model construction from knowledge extracted from unstructured and structured documents. Causeworks integrates computational analytics to assist users in understanding and influencing the system.

Visualizing with Text

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Visualizing with Text uncovers the rich palette of text elements usable in visualizations from simple labels through to documents. Using a multidisciplinary research effort spanning across fields including visualization, typography, and cartography, it builds a solid foundation for the design space of text in visualization.

Literal Encoding: Text Is a First-Class Data Encoding

Sun, 25 Oct 2020 00:00:01 +0000

Digital humanities are rooted in text analysis. However, most visualization paradigms use only categoric, ordered or quantitative data. Literal text must be considered a base data type to encode into visualizations. Literal text offers functional, perceptual, cognitive, semantic and operational benefits. These are briefly illustrated with a subset of sample visualizations focused on semantic word sequences, indicating benefits over standard graphs, maps, treemaps, bar charts and narrative layouts.

Towards a Paradigm for Visual Modeling

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Visualization has recently gained a foothold in the field of artificial intelligence research. Typically, this work has focused on visualizing modules or specific dynamics of machine learning models, doing so for the purposes of model explainability or for visual debugging. Drawing from ongoing projects involving pandemic analysis and famine shocks, this seminar describes research efforts on graphical modeling where visualization functions as the medium for modeling itself.

Strategy Mapper: Coloring the Gray

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 00:00:01 +0000

Strategy Mapper is a visual analytic tool for human-machine decision making in complex situations with uncertainty in estimating and understanding a competitor’s intent and tactics. Users can compare and reason through multiple hypotheses about one or more competitor’s behaviors, and consider recommendations to probe for more information. Using the “Gray Zone” as an application example, a user evaluation exercise shows the methods are usable and effective.

Why Two Y-Axes (Y2Y): A Case Study for Visual Correlation with Dual Axes

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Many researchers and authors recommend against dual-axis charts. We provide a case study of timeseries correlation analysis in financial services where dual-axis charts superimpose series to facilitate observation of local patterns. Fine-grain patterns cannot be otherwise perceived using a single-axis charts, normalization charts, scatterplots nor statistical correlation analysis.

The Vast Potential for New Text Visualizations

Fri, 31 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

More data is text than quantitative. Beyond the current standard visualization techniques, so much more is feasible looking across domains and history. Designers, computer scientists and analysts of texts need an expanded visualization vocabulary. This talk illustrates the breadth of design possibilities for using text with visualizations. First, the design space is defined by a review of historic exemplars. Then, using this new design space, text and typography are used to create new kinds of visualization techniques.

"SkyMap": World-Scale Immersive Spatial Display

Sun, 20 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

To relate typical survey map features to the real world during navigation, users must make time-consuming, error-prone cognitive transformations in scale and rotation and make frequent realignments over time. In this paper, we introduce SkyMap, a novel immersive display device method that presents a world-scaled and world-aligned map above the user that evokes a huge mirror in the sky. This approach, which we have implemented in a VR-based testbed, potentially reduces cognitive effort associated with survey map use.

Industry-Driven Visual Analytics for Understanding Financial Timeseries Models

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Timeseries models are used extensively in financial services, for example, to quantify risk and predict economics. However, analysts also need to comprehend the structure and behavior of these models to better understand and explain results. We present a methodology, derived from extensive industry experience, to aid explanation through integrated interactive visualizations that reveal model structure and behavior of constituent timeseries factors, thereby increasing understanding of the model, the domain and the sensitivities. Expert feedback indicates alignment with mental models.

Visual Analytic System for Subject Matter Expert Document Tagging using Information Retrieval and Semi-Supervised Machine Learning

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We present a system that combines ambient visualization, information retrieval and machine learning to facilitate the ease and quality of document classification by subject matter experts for the purpose of organizing documents by “tags” inferred by the resultant classifiers. This system includes data collection, a language model, query exploration, feature selection, semi-supervised machine learning and a visual analytic workflow enabling non-data scientists to rapidly define, verify, and refine high-quality document classifiers.

The Design Space of SparkWords

Thu, 06 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

SparkWords are consistently sized words embedded in prose, lists or tables; enhanced with additional data including (a) categoric, ordered or quantitative data; (b) encoded by a variety of attributes (singular or multiple); and (c) applied to words or letters. Historic examples and sample implementations show a range of novel techniques and different uses.

Bertin's Forgotten Typographic Variables and New Typographic Visualization

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Typographic variables were only briefly discussed by Bertin with no example applications. We extend Bertin’s framework with literal encoding, ten typographic attributes, variations on scope including characters, words, phrases and paragraphs, and more layout types. We apply the framework to Bertin’s population dataset to create eleven new typographic visualizations. New research opportunities include readability, semantic association, interaction, and comprehension.

Automated Annotations

Sun, 21 Oct 2018 10:50:00 +0000

Annotations on typical charts, graphs and maps draw a viewer’s attention to a particular subset of an otherwise information-dense display thereby aiding understanding. Instead of manual creation of annotations, we outline approaches to automatically generate annotations.

Distil: A Mixed-Initiative Model Discovery System for Subject Matter Experts

Sat, 14 Jul 2018 00:00:01 +0000

We present in-progress work on Distil, a mixed-initiative system to enable non-experts with subject matter expertise to generate data-driven models using an interactive analytic question first workflow. Our approach incorporates data discovery, enrichment, analytic model recommendation, and automated visualization to understand data and models.

Abstractive Tabular Dataset Summarization via Knowledge Base Semantic Embeddings

Sat, 14 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This paper describes an abstractive summarization method for tabular data which employs a knowledge base semantic embedding to generate the summary. Assuming the dataset contains descriptive text in headers, columns and/or some augmenting metadata, the system employs the embedding to recommend a subject/type for each text segment. Recommendations are aggregated into a small collection of super types considered to be descriptive of the dataset by exploiting the hierarchy of types in a prespecified ontology.

TopicOnTiles: Tile-Based Spatio-Temporal Event Analytics via Exclusive Topic Modeling on Social Media

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Detecting anomalous events of a particular area in a timely manner is an important task. Geo-tagged social media data are useful resources, but the abundance of everyday language in them makes this task still challenging. To address such challenges, we present TopicOnTiles, a visual analytics system that can reveal the information relevant to anomalous events in a multi-level tile-based map interface by using social media data. To this end, we adopt and improve a recently proposed topic modeling method that can extract spatio-temporally exclusive topics corresponding to a particular region and a time point.

Challenges in Visualizing Complex Causality Characteristics

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Causality is important for providing explanations when using computational models to understand complex systems structure and behavior, and what happens when change occurs in the system. There are many properties of causality that need to be considered and made visible, but current causality visualization methods are limited in expressions, scale, dimensionality and do not provide sufficient support for user tasks such as “what-if” and “how-to” questions, or in supporting groups considering multiple scenarios.

Microtext Line Charts

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Timeseries line charts are a popular visualization technique but traditionally do not show many lines. We borrow concepts of tiny microtext and path dependent cartographic text to embed labels and additional text directly into lines on line charts, thereby making it easier to identify individual lines in a congested line chart, enabling more lines to be displayed and enabling additional data to be added to the lines as well.

Stem & Leaf Plots Extended for Text Visualizations

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Stem and leaf plots are data dense visualizations that organize large amounts of micro-level numeric data to form larger macro-level visual distributions. These plots can be extended with font attributes and different token lengths for new applications such as n-grams analysis, character attributes, set analysis and text repetition.

STExNMF: Spatio-Temporally Exclusive Topic Discovery for Anomalous Event Detection

Tue, 21 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We propose herein a novel topic modeling approach on text documents with spatio-temporal information (e.g., when and where a document was published) such as location-based social media data to discover prevalent topics or newly emerging events with respect to an area and a time point. We consider a map view composed of regular grids or tiles with each showing topic keywords from documents of the corresponding region. To this end, we present a tile-based spatio-temporally exclusive topic modeling approach called STExNMF, based on a novel nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) technique.

An Open Source Adaptive User Interface for Network Monitoring

Sun, 08 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Decision support systems for network security represent a critical element in the safe operation of computer networks. Unfortunately, due to their complexity, it can be difficult to implement and empirically assess novel techniques for displaying networks. This paper details an open source adaptive user interface that hopes to fill this gap. This system supports agile development and offers a wide latitude for human factors and machine learning design modifications. The intent of this system is to serve as an experimental testbed for determining the efficacy of different human factors and machine learning initiatives on operator performance in network monitoring.

Text Analytics and New Visualization Techniques

Wed, 27 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Text analytics have significantly advanced with techniques such as entity extraction and characterization, topic and opinion analysis, and sentiment and emotion extraction. But the visualization of text has advanced much more slowly. Recent visualization techniques for text, however, are providing new capabilities. In this talk we offer an overview of these new ways to organize massive volumes of text, characterize subjects, score synopses, and skim through a lot of documents. Together, these techniques can improve workflows for users focused on documents.

Argument Mapper: Countering Cognitive Biases in Analysis with Critical (Visual) Thinking

Sun, 25 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Argument Mapper provides an easy-to-use, theoretically sound, web-based interactive software tool that enables the application of evidence-based reasoning to analytic questions. Designed in collaboration with analytic methodologists, this tool combines structured argument mapping methodology with visualization techniques to help analysts make sense of complex problems and overcome cognitive biases.

Multivariate Label-based Thematic Maps

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 08:02:04 -0400

The rich history of cartography and typography indicates that typographic attributes, such as bold, italic and size, can be used to represent data in labels on thematic maps. These typographic attributes are itemized and characterized for encoding literal, categorical and quantitative data. Label-based thematic maps are shown, including examples that scale to multiple data attributes and a large number of entities.

Evaluation of Visualization by Critiques

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 08:02:04 -0400

In this position paper, we extend design critiques as a form of evaluation to visualization, specifically focusing on unique qualities of critiques that are different than other types of evaluation by inspection, such as heuristic evaluation, models, reviews or written criticism. Critiques can be used to address a broader scope and context of issues than other inspection techniques; and utilize bi-direction dialogue with multiple critics, including non-visualization critics.

Tile-Based Spatio-Temporal Visual Analytics via Topic Modeling on Social Media

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 13:57:54 -0400

We present a visual analytics system that supports the geospatiotemporal analysis of social media data based on a large-scale distributed topic modeling technique. Through the analysis of social media data in a given time and region, we can identify critical events in real time. However, it takes significant time to perform such analyses against a large amount of social media data. As a way to handle this issue, we developed an efficient tile-based topic modeling approach, which divides textual data into multiple subsets with respect to different regions and time frames at different zoom levels and applies topic modeling to each subset.

Adaptive Visualization of Complex Networks with FocalPoint: A Context Aware Level of Details Recommender System

Fri, 23 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We are investigating FocalPoint, an adaptive level of detail (LOD) recommender system tailored for hierarchical network information structures. FocalPoint reasons about contextual information associated with the network, user task, and user cognitive load to tune the presentation of network visualization displays to improve user performance in perception, comprehension and projection of current situational awareness. Our system is applied to two complex information constructs important to dynamic cyber network operations: network maps and attack graphs.

Adapting Level of Detail in User Interfaces for Cybersecurity Operations

Thu, 18 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Our research focus is on developing FocalPoint, a system that provides Adaptive Level of Detail (LOD) in user interfaces for cybersecurity operations. FocalPoint is a recommender system tailored for complex network information structures that reasons about contextual information associated with the network, user tasks, and cognitive load. This facilitates tuning cyber visualization displays, thereby improving user performance in perception, comprehension and projection of current Cybersecurity Situational Awareness (Cyber SA).

Graph Mapping: Multi-Scale Community Visualization of Massive Graph Data

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Graph visualizations increase the perception of entity relationships in a network. However, as graph size and density increases, readability rapidly diminishes. In this cover article for the July 2017 edition of the Information Visualization journal, we present an end-to-end, tile-based visual analytic approach called graph mapping that utilizes cluster computing to turn large-scale graph (node-link) data into interactive visualizations in modern web browsers.

Typographic Sets: Labeled Set Elements with Font Attributes

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We show that many different set visualization techniques can be extended with the addition of labeled elements using font attributes. Elements labeled with font attributes can: uniquely identify elements; encode membership in ten sets; use size to indicate proportions among set relations; can scale to thousands on clearly labeled elements; and use intuitive mappings to facilitate decoding.

Using Typography to Expand the Design Space of Data Visualization

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This article is a systematic exploration and expansion of the data visualization design space focusing on the role of text. A critical analysis of text usage in data visualizations reveals gaps in existing frameworks and practice. A cross-disciplinary review including the fields of typography, cartography, and coding interfaces yields various typographic techniques to encode data into text, and provides scope for an expanded design space.

Multi-Scale Community Visualization of Massive Graph Data

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 16:52:41 +0000

Graph visualizations increase the perception of entity relationships in a network. However, as graph size and density increases, readability rapidly diminishes. In this paper, we present a tile-based visual analytic approach that leverages cluster computing to create large-scale, interactive graph visualizations in modern web browsers. Our approach is optimized for analyzing community structure and relationships.

Instant Market Insights for a Major Financial Data Vendor

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:23:48 +0000

As part of a comprehensive platform advancement for a leading client, Uncharted created an iconic map of the financial markets that provides high-level, intermediate and detailed summaries of activity. A highly effective technique to organize and aggregate information helps traders and portfolio managers understand overall activity and swiftly act on individual stocks, commodities and portfolios in just a few taps. This intuitive workflow, suited for both desktop and mobile, earned significant praise in the client’s first mobile app. Reviewers in particular liked the ability to seamlessly move back and forth between market overviews and individual stocks or news stories.

Global to Local Pattern of Life Analysis with Tile-Based Visual Analytics

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, we present in-progress work on applications of tile-based visual analytics (TBVA) to population pattern of life analysis and geo-temporal event detection. TBVA uses multiresolution data tiling, analytics and layered high-fidelity visualization to enable interactive multi-scale analysis of billions of records in modern web browsers through techniques made familiar by online map services.

High Category Glyphs in Industry

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Encoding a high number of categories in a glyph may be necessary and can be encoded as label, icon, shape or texture. Number of categories, transparency, layout, compound glyph and legibility are considerations for the encoding.

TellFinder: Discovering Related Content in Big Data

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, we present lessons learned in the development of TellFinder, a tool designed to explore domain-specific web crawls using graph analysis and multi-modal visualization. The initial application of the tool was to help combat human trafficking through entity resolution and characterization based on data from sex ads crawled from a variety of publicly available sites.

Value in the Details: Understanding Data Through Visual Exploration

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Analysts and data scientists work with large amounts of data, but the common approach, which dates back 20 years, is to roll up all the data into summary tables or charts, resulting in loss of detail. In contrast, direct visual exploratory analysis of massive amounts of raw data can yield insights that are otherwise overlooked. Here we highlight high-density visualizations that directly plot hundreds of millions of data points for applications such as market opportunity, periodicity analysis, and anomaly identification.

Untangling Influence and Desire: Visual Analysis of Massive Graph Data

Fri, 01 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This session demonstrates using open source tools and techniques for visually exploring massive node-link graphs in a web browser by visualizing all the data. Seeing all the data reveals informative patterns and provides important context to understanding insights. Examples will highlight large-scale graph analysis of social networks, customer purchase history, and healthcare industry data.

Graph Analysis and Visualization: Discovering Business Opportunity in Linked Data

Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Graph Analysis and Visualization brings graph theory out of the lab and into the real world. Using sophisticated methods and tools that span analysis functions, this guide shows you how to exploit graph and network analytic techniques to enable the discovery of new business insights and opportunities.

3D InfoVis is Here to Stay

Sun, 09 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

3D information visualization has existed for more than 100 years. 3D offers intrinsic attributes such as an extra dimension for encoding position and length, meshes and surfaces; lighting and separation. Further 3D can aid mental models for configuration of data within a 3D spatial framework. Perceived issues with 3D are solvable and successful, specialized information visualizations can be built.

Argument Mapper: Countering Cognitive Biases in Analysis with Critical (Visual) Thinking

Sun, 09 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

[Short Paper] Humans are vulnerable to cognitive biases such as neglect of probability, framing effect, confirmation bias, conservatism (belief revision) and anchoring. The Argument Mapper addresses these biases in intelligence analysis by providing an easy-to-use, theoretically sound, web-based interactive software tool that enables the application of evidence-based reasoning to analytic questions.

Challenges in Financial Visualization

Sun, 09 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Financial visualization has existed for more than 100 years. Ongoing growth of financial markets increases the frequency, complexity and scale of data while users need to discern meaningful insights for many different types of tasks and objectives. This panel brings together four established practitioners from the financial industry who use visualization tools every day.

Highly Scalable Tile-Based Visualization for Exploratory Data Analysis

Wed, 01 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The open source Aperture Tiles provides interactive data exploration with continuous zooming on large scale datasets. By leveraging big data software stacks Hadoop, Apache Spark and HBase for distributed computation and storage, the technique can scale to data sets with billions of data points or more. In this talk we review the Tile-based visual analytic methodology, challenges and highlight some example applications.

Using Font Attributes in Knowledge Maps and Information Retrieval

Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Font specific attributes, such as bold, italic and case can be used in knowledge mapping and information retrieval to encode additional data in texts, lists and labels to increase data density of visualizations; encode data quantitative data into search lists; and facilitate text skimming and refinement by visually promoting of words of interest.

The Multiple Visual Attributes of Shape

Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

There are many different types of shape attributes that can be used to encode data for information visualizations. Prior art from many fields and experiments suggest that there are more than a half dozen different attributes of shape that can potentially be utilized to effectively represent categoric and quantitative data values.

Influent: Scalable Transaction Flow Analysis with Entity-Relationship Graphs

Mon, 09 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, we present in-progress work on “Influent,” a graph analysis tool that enables an intelligence analyst to visually and interactively “follow the money” or other transaction flow. Summary visualizations of transactional patterns and entity characteristics, a left-to-right semantic flow layout, interactive link expansion and hierarchical entity clustering enable Influent to operate effectively at scale with millions of entities and hundreds of millions of transactions, with larger data sets in progress.

Bloomberg Sports Visualization for Pitch Analysis

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Visualization of big data in baseball at the per pitch level including measured data and video can be made effective for coaches and managers through a variety of information visualization techniques focused on creating easy to use and easy to understand visualizations.

Interactive Data Exploration with "Big Data Tukey Plots"

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Our goal is to develop new automated tools to produce effective raw data characterization on extremely large datasets. This paper reports on the development of a web based interactive scatter plot prototype that uses tile-based rendering similar to geographic maps and interaction paradigms.

Louvain Clustering for Big Data Graph Visual Analytics

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Visual aggregation techniques, tools and easily tailorable components are needed that will support answering analytical questions with data description, characterization and interaction without loss of information. We present two case studies of prototype implementations of JavaScript browser-based visualization tools leveraging the Louvain clustering algorithm.

Tile Based Visual Analytics for Twitter Big Data Exploratory Analysis

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The widespread use and adoption of web-based geo maps have provided a familiar set of interactions for exploring extremely large geo data spaces and can be applied to similarly large abstract data spaces. Building on these techniques, a tile based visual analytics system (TBVA) was developed that demonstrates interactive visualization for a one billion point Twitter dataset.

Visualizing Big Graphs and Social Networks

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Big graphs are difficult to visualize because the scale of the data quickly results in complex network diagrams that can be difficult to decipher and have complicated interfaces with hundreds of options. Instead, we start by understanding what valuable nuggets we are trying to learn from this data, such as “Who’s connected to both me and my competition?” and “Did these people meet?” Starting from the question, we can then simplify the requirements and design effective visualizations that fit the problem. We will look at some mini-case studies and demos (e.g. Twitter correlation network, charity network).

Visual Thinking Design Patterns

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper we introduce Visual Thinking Design Patterns (VTDPs) as part of a methodology for producing cognitively efficient designs. We describe their main components, including epistemic actions (actions to seek knowledge) and visual queries (pattern searches that provide a whole or partial solution to a problem). We summarize the set of 20 VTDPs we have identified so far and show how they can be used in a design methodology.

Financial Visualization Case Study: Correlating Financial Timeseries and Discrete Events to Support Investment Decisions

Mon, 15 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Bloomberg has designed and implemented a scalable visual representation for the depiction of many discrete timestamped events in use by hundreds of thousands of financial markets experts. This visualization enables a single screen to visually organize a large volume of event data; to facilitate inference through visual alignment of related data; and to provide a workflow from the single point of access to a wide variety of detailed information.

Aperture: An Open Web 2.0 Visualization Framework

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Aperture is an open, adaptable and extensible Web 2.0 visualization framework, designed to produce visualizations for analysts and decision makers in any common web browser. Aperture utilizes a novel layer based approach to visualization assembly, and a data mapping API that simplifies the process of adaptable transformation of data and analytic results into visual forms and properties.

System and Method for Interactive Visual Representation of Information Content and Relationships Using Layout and Gestures

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Making Major League Data Work - Example Big Data Visualization

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This presentation covers some of the challenges and successes with baseball analytics and visualization and generalize some of the lessons learned that could be much more broadly applicable, for example, to retailers or city planners. This was co-presented by Noah Schwartz of Bloomberg Sports and Richard Brath of Oculus.

Multi-Attribute Glyphs on Venn and Euler Diagrams to Represent Data and Aid Visual Decoding

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Representing quantities on Venn and Euler diagrams can be achieved through the use of multi-attribute glyphs. These glyphs can also act as an aid to assist in the visual decoding of the membership of segments within the diagrams and convey other data attributes as well.

Human Movement Patterns: Space-Time Geography of Everyday Mobilities

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

From Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) conference

Linked Visible Behaviors: A System for Exploring Causal Influence

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

From AHFE Cross-Cultural-Decision-Making (CCDM) conference

Sphere-based Information Visualization: Challenges and Benefits

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Use of a sphere as a basis for organizing an information visualization should balance issues such as occlusion against potential useful benefits such as natural navigational affordances and perceptual connotations of an application.

Animated Attention Redirection Codes for Interactively Linking Display Elements

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper we report on our preliminary designs for Animated Attention Redirection Codes (AARCs), these are interactive short animated streaks traveling from a moused over symbol that convey information linkages in a transitory manner.

Interactive Data Analysis with nSpace2

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

nSpace2 is an innovative visual analytics tool that was the primary platform used to search, evaluate, and organize the data in the VAST 2011 Mini Challenge #3 dataset. nSpace2 is a web-based tool that is designed to facilitate the back-and-forth-flow of the multiple steps of an analysis workflow, including search, data triage, organization, sense-making, and reporting.

System and Method for Interactive 3D Air Regions

Tue, 10 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

System and Method for Large Scale Information Analysis Using Data Visualization Techniques

Tue, 10 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Empirical Guidelines for Visualizing Social Cultural Model Results

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

From AHFE Cross-Cultural-Decision-Making (CCDM) conference

System and Method for Processing Map Data

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

System and Method for Interactive Multi-dimensional Visual Representation of Information Content and Properties

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Visualization and Comprehension

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A chapter from Estimating Impact: A Handbook of Computational Methods and Models for Anticipating Economic, Social, Political and Security Effects in International Interventions by Alexander Kott and Gary Citrenbaum

Multiple Shape Attributes in Information Visualization: Guidance from Prior Art and Experiments

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Multiple shape attributes can be used within information visualizations. Prior art from many fields and experiments inform what the attributes of shape are and the potential ways that we may effectively utilize shapes to represent multiple data values within an information visualization.

System and Method for Data Visualization Using a Synchronous Display of Sequential Time Data and On-Map Planning

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Combining Space-Time and Network Analysis

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

From AHFE Cross-Cultural-Decision-Making (CCDM) conference

Visual Classification: Expert Knowledge Guides Machine Learning

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Working Through Synthetic Worlds

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Uncharted contributed the following chapters to Working Through Synthetic Worlds:

The Cognitive Playground: Fostering Critical and Creative Thinking with Synthetic Worlds: This chapter explores the potential of synthetic worlds to help individuals learn and practice higher order thinking skills including critical and creative thinking. Such skills are difficult to teach in traditional educational settings and are rarely addressed in common simulation-based training programs.

Synthetic Worlds and Financial Services: Collaborative interactions and transactions among traders, portfolio managers and risk managers can be transformed with synthetic worlds. It is easy to anticipate that by 2025, the reports, analyses and projections from financial industry participants will exist in a shared workspace for dissemination and collaboration that is flexible, adaptable and with high visualization capabilities

Anatomy of an Adaptive Scaffold for Analysts

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Adaptive user interfaces offer the potential to improve the learnability of software tools and analytic methodologies by tailoring the operation and experience to a user’s needs. Scaffolding is an instructional strategy that can be applied by adaptive interfaces to achieve this. Scaffolding theory suggests that the level of guidance should be adjusted to optimize learning and performance levels. This paper explores the use of adaptive techniques to scaffold user interaction and presents a taxonomy of techniques for adaptive scaffolds within complex software systems. The techniques identified in the proposed taxonomy can help software scaffolds select appropriate adaptations in response to the user’s learning and operating needs. A scaffold called nAble was implemented to explore the application of adaptive techniques from the taxonomy to support an analysis methodology called the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH).

TAIS CJMTK Integration

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

CJMTK User Conference

nCompass Service Oriented Architecture for Tacit Collaboration Services

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

nCompass is a flexible, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) designed to support the research and deployment of advanced tacit collaboration technology services for analysts. nCompass allows a significantly larger number of individual analytic capabilities, applications and services to be integrated together quickly and effectively.

The Many Dimensions of Shape

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Keynote lecture from the International Conference on Information Visualization

System and Method for Processing Map Data

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

nAble Adaptive Scaffolding Agent - Intelligent Support for Novices

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This paper describes nAble, an adaptive scaffolding agent designed to guide new users through the use of an analytic software tool in the ’nSpace Sandbox’ for visual sense-making. nAble adapts the interface and instructional content based on user expertise, learning style and subtask.

Configurable Spaces: Temporal Analysis in Diagrammatic Contexts

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This paper traces progress from concept to prototype, and discusses how diagrams can be created, transformed and leveraged for analysis, including generating diagrams from knowledge bases, visualizing temporal concept maps, and the use of linked diagrams for exploring complex, multi-dimensional, sequences of events.

Grand Challenge Award 2008: Support for Diverse Analytic Techniques

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

GeoTime and nSpace2 are interactive visual analytics tools that were used to examine and interpret all four of the 2008 VAST Challenge datasets. GeoTime excels in visualizing event patterns in time and space, or in time and any abstract landscape, while nSpace2 is a web-based analytical tool designed to support every step of the analytical process.

Use of Analogy in Synthesizing Novel Visualizations

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Alternative visualization designs provide different solutions that may be more effective for various tasks. Methods such as mechanical, symbolic and natural analogies aid ideation of alternative information visualizations. Issues include metaphor entrapment and implementation effectiveness.

Integrating GIS for C2 and Intelligence Analysis

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

GeoTime is a unique capability for analyzing events, objects and activities within a combined temporal and geospatial display. Intelligence analysts can see the who and what in the where and when. CPOF CommandSight Visualizer is the 4D collaborative CPOF workspace component and the integrated visualizer for TAIS the Tactical Airspace Integration System. GeoTime and CPOF CommandSight are currently fielded systems with varying levels of integration with ESRI GIS systems.

Stories in GeoTime

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A story is a powerful abstraction used by intelligence analysts to conceptualize threats and understand patterns as part of the analytical process. This paper demonstrates a system that detects geo-temporal patterns and integrates story narration to increase analytic sense-making cohesion in GeoTime.

nSpace and GeoTime - VAST 2006 Case Study

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This paper is a detailed case study describing how the nSpace/GeoTime tools created an analytical environment that enabled two novice analysts to examine the scenario, discover patterns, trace connections, assess evidence, visually represent meaningful hypotheses with associated evidence, track progress, collaborate with others and then produce a final report.

Visual Analytics for Model-Based Policy Analysis: Exploring Rapid Changes in Commodities Markets.

Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

We will demonstrate an interactive visualization prototype with capabilities for ad hoc exploration that we have not found in other tools for policy analysis outside of the intelligence community. This visual workspace is built on a dynamic butterfly economic model. It enables analysts to examine for policy purposes global trends in consumption, production, imports and exports at national and regional scales and to relate them to population, GDP and income elasticity.

Avian Flu Case Study with nSpace and GeoTime

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

GeoTime and nSpace are new analysis tools that provide innovative visual analytic capabilities. This paper uses an epidemiology analysis scenario to illustrate and discuss these new investigative methods and techniques. In addition, this case study is an exploration and demonstration of the analytical synergy achieved by combining GeoTime’s geo-temporal analysis capabilities, with the rapid information triage, scanning and sensemaking provided by nSpace.

Spreadsheet Validation and Analysis through Content Visualization

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Visualizing spreadsheet content provides analytic insight and visual validation of large amounts of spreadsheet data. Oculus Excel Visualizer is a point and click data visualization experiment which directly visualizes Excel data and re-users the layout and formatting already present in the spreadsheet.

The Sandbox for Analysis - Concepts and Methods

Sat, 22 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This paper presents innovative Sandbox human information interaction capabilities and the rationale underlying them including direct observations of analysis work as well as structured interviews. Key capabilities for the Sandbox include “put-this-there” cognition, automatic process model templates, gestures for the fluid expression of thought, assertions with evidence and scalability mechanisms to support larger analysis tasks.

Visualizing Spreadsheets Adds Exponential Value to Excel for Monitoring, Analysis and Modeling

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Microsoft Excel has evolved beyond a simple data calculation tool to the point where it is now used as a sophisticated and flexible repository for collecting, analyzing and summarizing data from multiple sources. The power of Excel can be leveraged with visualization in many different ways: enhancing effectiveness, focusing communications, helping make anomalies pop out, facilitating comprehension and empowering collaboration.

Illuminating the Path: The R+D Agenda for Visual Analytics

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Development of the visual analytics agenda began after a survey of leading universities’ researchers found that traditional views of the needed sciences, such as visualization, did not address the required capabilities. We needed to achieve a broad understanding of the requirements in order to enable the best talents to address the technical challenges. Achieving this understanding required training from those dealing with border protection, emergency response, and analysis. It also required the assembly of a dedicated team of highly motivated people to develop this agenda.

Visualization for Communication: The Importance of Aesthetic Sizzle

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

When creating a visualization for communication, the inclusion of aesthetically appealing elements can greatly increase a design’s appeal, intuitiveness and memorability. Used without care, this “sizzle” can reduce the effectiveness of the visualization by obscuring the intended message. Maintaining a focus on key design principles and an understanding of the target audience can result in an effective visualization for communication. This paper describes these principles and shows their use in creating effective designs.

Correlating Events with Tracked Movements in Time and Space: A GeoTime Case Study

Mon, 02 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

GeoTime is a new paradigm for visualizing events, connections and movement in a combined temporal and spatial visualization. This paper will show how this information visualization capability allows intelligence analysts to quickly reveal relationships between tracked movements and events of interest.

Information Triage with TRIST

Mon, 02 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

TRIST (“The Rapid Information Scanning Tool”) is the information retrieval and triage component for the analytical environment called nSpace. TRIST uses Human Information Interaction (HII) techniques to interact with massive data in order to quickly uncover the relevant, novel and unexpected.

GeoTime Visualization of RFID: Providing Global Visibility of the DoD Supply Chain

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

GeoTime visualization exploits the collection and storage of RFID data, and provides global in-transit visibility of the DoD supply chain down to the last tactical mile.

Information Visualization for Business - Past & Future

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The opportunities for competitively harnessing information visualization to drive strategic business advantage are much bigger today than 10 years ago. Choose your visualization solutions carefully; fit is extremely important, and with visualization, a poor fit will show!

Dashboard Design: Why Design is Important

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Effective design is crucial for dashboards. A good information design will clearly communicate key information to users and makes supporting information easily accessible.

GeoTime Information Visualization

Sun, 10 Oct 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Analyzing observations over time and geography is a common task but typically requires multiple, separate tools. The objective of our research has been to develop a method to visualize, and work with, the spatial inter-connectedness of information over time and geography within a single, highly interactive 3-D view. A novel visualization technique for displaying and tracking events, objects and activities within a combined temporal and geospatial display has been developed. This technique has been implemented as a demonstrable prototype called GeoTime in order to determine potential utility.

Paper Landscapes: A Visualization Design Methodology

Wed, 31 Dec 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Paper landscape refers to both an iterative design process and a document as an aid to the design and development process for creating new information visualizations. A paper landscape engages all stakeholders early in the process of creating new visualizations and is used to solicit input; clarify ideas, features, requirements, tasks; and obtain support for the proposal, whether group consensus, market validation or project funding.

Visualization of Blue Forces Using Blobology

Tue, 11 Jun 2002 00:00:00 +0000

This paper discusses one technique that became known as ‘blobology’ and which is used to represent self-reporting friendly forces. Blobs evolved over time, in a collaboration with subject matter experts, and this evolution is shown.

Visualization of Self-Reporting Entities for Command and Control

Tue, 11 Jun 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Several innovative visualization techniques have been developed during the DARPA Command Post of the Future (CPOF) program. One assumption of the program is that information will be gathered electronically from the individual platforms of friendly forces. New visualization techniques, combined with this hi-resolution platform-based or entity-level data, can be used to generate dramatically improved displays of the battlefield. This paper discusses the visualization methods that have been developed for effective presentation of this information to commanders.

Visualization Techniques for Intrusion Detection (Cyber Analysis)

Sat, 01 Jun 2002 00:00:00 +0000

This paper reports on the experiences of using interactive animated 2D and 3D graphics in an Intrusion Detection (ID) Analysts Workbench prototype. Visualization techniques allow people to see and comprehend large amounts of complex data. Graphics are used to assist with the ID investigation and reporting process by helping the analyst identify significant incidents and reduce false conditions (positives, negatives and alarms).

Visualization Value for Northern Trust Investors

Wed, 23 Feb 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Data Mining for Financial Services Conference, IBC, Chicago.

Information Animation - Applications in the Capital Markets

Mon, 08 Feb 1999 00:00:00 +0000

This groundbreaking book defines the emerging field of information visualization and offers the first-ever collection of the classic papers of the discipline, with introductions and analytical discussions of each topic and paper. The authors’ intention is to present papers that focus on the use of visualization to discover relationships, using interactive graphics to amplify thought.

Risk Visualization

Wed, 04 Mar 1998 00:00:00 +0000

Invited speaker from Risk Management Technologies Conference

Information Visualization Techniques for Exploiting a Shared Knowledge Base

Tue, 03 Mar 1998 00:00:00 +0000

From Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Symposium

Seeing Investment Strategy

Mon, 02 Mar 1998 00:00:00 +0000

From Global Investment Management

Business Visualization Adds Value

Sun, 01 Mar 1998 00:00:00 +0000

The value of information visualization depends on the success of its applications. One important application area is business visualization. To discuss issues and to share experiences and lessons learned in business visualization (bizviz), my colleagues and I in the visualization community conducted a birds-of-a-feather session on business visualization at the IEEE Information Visualization 97 Symposium with 44 spirited attendees. This short note highlights the discussions.

Multi-Dimensional Representations - How Many Dimensions? Cluster Stack Visualization for Market Segmentation Analysis

Sat, 01 Nov 1997 00:00:00 +0000

“Information visualization methods present multi-dimensional data graphically by mapping data and properties to different visual shapes, colors, and positions… The purpose of visualization is to improve comprehension and reveal significance. It is easier to comprehend a visual representation than a numerical one, especially when the visual representation replaces many pages or screens of data. "

Metrics for Effective Information Visualization

Wed, 01 Oct 1997 00:00:00 +0000

Resolving Radar Ambiguities: A 3-D Look at EW Analysis

Mon, 01 Sep 1997 00:00:00 +0000

Business Visualization Applications

Tue, 01 Jul 1997 00:00:00 +0000

From IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, July issue

3D Interactive Information Visualization: Guidelines from experience and analysis of applications

Sun, 01 Jun 1997 00:00:00 +0000

Information visualization permits users to interactively explore large amounts of data. Poorly designed information visualizations will not reveal insight. Effective visualizations will. Guidelines will aid developers to make effective visualizations. These guidelines serve as a starting point for designing visualizations and as a starting point for further research.

Information Visualization: The Fourth Dimension

Tue, 01 Apr 1997 00:00:00 +0000

In Database Programming and Design, April issue

Video, Ergo, Cogito - Seeing Investment Strategy

Thu, 02 Jan 1997 00:00:00 +0000

Institutional investor from Investment Roundtable

Information Visualization for Large Databases

Wed, 01 Jan 1997 00:00:00 +0000

From VLDB (Very Large Databases) conference

Information Visualization - New 3-D Representations

Fri, 01 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

From ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management

System and Method for Creating and Displaying Map Projections Related to Real-Time Images

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 10:52:09 -0400

System and Method for Creating & Displaying Map Projections Related to Real-Time Images

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 10:52:09 -0400

A Multi-scale Visual Analytics Approach for Exploring Biomedical Knowledge

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This paper describes an ongoing multi-scale visual analytics approach for exploring and analyzing biomedical knowledge at scale. We utilize global and local views, hierarchical and flow-based graph layouts, multi-faceted search, neighborhood recommendations, and document visualizations to help researchers interactively explore, query, and analyze biological graphs against the backdrop of biomedical knowledge.

Tactical Intelligence for Pro Baseball

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:23:48 +0000

In this engagement Uncharted worked with a startup to visualize 5 TB of pitch-level data and video in professional baseball. We designed and developed a suite of purpose-specific visualization systems that allow players, coaches and managers to analyze both detailed pitch-by-pitch outcomes and video footage. Seamless workflow between these representations enables users to discover minute mechanical adjustments that vastly improve player performance. At product launch, the press reported that “experts were seen gawking” and singled out the visualizations as “drool-worthy.” The product achieved 271% market penetration over forecast in the first year, with pro team adoption correlating strongly with deep playoff runs.

Creative Storytelling Techniques - The Stars of Twitter

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:23:48 +0000

Infographics excel at telling simple stories. For larger datasets, narrative makes knowledge more accessible by explaining complex concepts, highlighting key insights and encouraging interactive exploration. In this experimental WebGL demo, a Twitter correlation sphere provides a novel view of social media popularity and cohesion. An interactive narrative guides the viewer through clusters of notable accounts (celebrities, media personalities, politicians, organizations) to find correlations and dissimilarities between them. A similar approach has been applied to reveal correlations in financial data such as consumer price indices (CPI) and stock activity.

NASDAQ Point of Presence in Times Square

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:23:48 +0000

Uncharted developed this iconic visualization system for reporters to compose a live mosaic of 4,000 stocks, on demand, onto a 20x6 screen video broadcast wall and eight-storey tower. Journalists make more than a hundred broadcasts from Nasdaq MarketSite every day to tell the market’s story. Launched in the eyes of the world on the eve of the millennium, the NASDAQ site on Times Square is a visual beacon for critical information, with big brand presence, engaging clients in daily market events through the use of advanced video and CGI on massive wall, tower, and interior screens.

A Mixed-Initiative Visual Analytics Approach for Qualitative Causal Modeling

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Modeling complex systems is a time-consuming, difficult and fragmented task, often requiring the analyst to work with disparate data, a variety of models, and expert knowledge across a diverse set of domains. Applying a user-centered design process, we developed a mixed-initiative visual analytics approach, a subset of the Causemos platform, that allows analysts to rapidly assemble qualitative causal models of complex socio-natural systems.

Automated Data Driven Storytelling

Mon, 02 Apr 2018 15:23:48 +0000

This autonomous multi-touch wall consumes news, internal research, market data and databases, and automatically generates story sequences with annotated, animated data visualizations, 24x7. In a data-driven economy, live streams are integral to every company’s brand identity, and competition for audience engagement grows daily. Here, captivating narratives portrayed on a rich, life-size canvas create a connection with passing viewers. Touching the screen with one hand or two—alone or with others—initiates a personal interaction with content of interest to explore further details.

Explaining Complex Systems and Predictions

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:23:48 +0000

Autogenerated, interactive, story-driven visualization speaks to a wider audience and promotes deeper understanding of patterns and anomalies in data. Narrative sequences communicate observations, enabling a community to understand, to see for themselves, and to contribute. In this application story threads emerge as the user interactively drills-down to explore deeper underlying factors and scenarios. Unlike paper reports, live graphic presentations are up-to-date with the latest data and commentary.

Surveying Wonderland for Many More Literature Visualization Techniques

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There are still many potential literature visualizations to be discovered. By focusing on a single text, the author surveys many existing visualizations across domains, in the wild, and creates new visualizations. Many dozen techniques are indicated, suggesting a wider variety of potential visualizations beyond research disciplines.

Maritime Security, Anomaly Detection and Predictive Movement

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 13:37:00 +0000

The maritime domain is awash with data vital to national security. Geotemporal ship movement visualization unlocks patterns of life that aid characterization of unusual events. Combined with predictive analytics, our tile-based visual analytics approach enhances human cognition to find anomalies. Overlooked behavior such as an unlikely meeting of fishing boats outside commercial zones could signal covert trafficking operations. For bulk carriers and tankers, a deviation in course from heavily traveled routes can signal a change in destination, which may be a leading indicator of inventory constraints or price movement in global commodities.

Understanding Patterns of Life in Time and Space with GeoTime

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:23:48 +0000

Originally developed for an advanced research project, GeoTime is a powerful tool for visualizing and analyzing events across geography and time. Uncharted cultivated GeoTime in a nascent market into a suite of enterprise-class commercial products now used at major agencies in the U.S. and around the globe. GeoTime was acquired by PenLink in 2022 and is continuing its innovative journey to reach and serve an even greater audience.

Enhanced Critical Thinking with Argument Mapper

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 15:23:43 +0000

Argument Mapper helps intelligence analysts, criminal investigators and legal practitioners make sense of complex cases and draw sound conclusions. Structured argument mapping methodology and intuitive visualization techniques combine to support fluid application of evidence-based reasoning, overcoming bias. Argument Mapper promotes shared understanding and peer critique for efficient, confident decision-making.

Urban Pattern-of-Life Analysis

Fri, 31 Aug 2018 13:37:00 +0000

Modern cities are abundant sources of untapped pattern-of-life data that can help urban planners and investors understand land use and build complementary services. In this application, we used SALT to create an interactive multi-resolution map of taxi trip endpoints and openly available social media that reveals how people interact with urban spaces. Taxi traffic patterns and social media paint a picture of land use, cultural hotspots, events and tourist activity. Spatial query-by-example tools empower planners to find areas similar to an indicated place of interest and better understand relationships between urban design and cultural behaviors.

Navigating the Patent Universe with Graph Mapping

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 13:37:00 +0000

Making sense of the universe of relationships in massive data has been a longstanding challenge. The scalability limits of traditional node-link visualizations result in uninterpretable “hairballs.” New standard methodologies are needed to leverage the intuitive usability of geospatial maps for navigation and interpretation of multi-scale clusters and communities in data.

In this application of our novel graph mapping methodology, we built an interactive multi-scale map of all 2.5 million U.S. patents granted since 2001, linked by citation reference. Large, closely situated communities indicate technological domains with significant innovation. Analytic overlays convey themes, emergent or declining technological trends, and areas of intensive intellectual property contention.

International Crisis Management with Scalable Analytic Layered Tiles

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:37:00 +0000

Interactive tile-based visual analytics that fuse diverse media sources and commercially available satellite imagery can aid investigation of events in many domains such as natural disasters, infrastructure changes or yields of global commodities.

In this proof-of-concept application, Uncharted combined numerous data sources and predictive analytics to improve discovery and corroboration of cease-fire violations in the Yemeni Civil War. Social media analytics flag possible indicators of military conflict. Adaptive macro-to-micro visualization, per-region topic summarization and interactive navigation point to both developing crises corroborated by underlying reports of violence. Frequently refreshed satellite imagery reveals evidence such as building destruction to support eyewitness accounts.

Visualizing Dynamic Network Flows with TorFlow

Thu, 22 Dec 2016 15:23:48 +0000

Uncharted built TorFlow to portray the bidirectional movement of data through Tor relay nodes. Here, thousands of animated particles mimic live packet flow in the anonymous communication network. Historical data reveals both typical usage and changes over time due to significant events like the Arab Spring. To date, TorFlow has more than a million page views and has garnered praise from Wired and Business Insider.

We have since employed these techniques for numerous commercial monitoring applications, including supply chains and network operations. Such live visualizations make it easy to discover and plan for bandwidth constraints, unexpected movements and interruptions by outages or natural disasters.

Visualization design before | after AI

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI is transforming the design space of data visualization. This presentation discusses how the importance of text, narrative, and human context have long been overlooked. Building on prior work integrating text and visualization, it examines how large language models (LLMs) enable new approaches, from embedding text in visual structures to supporting interactive analysis of unstructured content. With AI influencing every stage of the visualization process, the boundaries of what constitutes a visualization are rapidly expanding.

Terarium Highlighted in Science

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

National emergencies and global volatility require timely detection and intervention policies backed by the latest science. But vital knowledge about complex scientific models that inform such policies may be buried in code, literature, or supplementary materials that are time consuming to parse and build upon. The prestigious journal Science highlights Uncharted’s AI-powered Terarium platform as a way to rapidly “interact with and edit [these] models, without touching the code itself.”

Integrating Human Expertise and AI Capabilities: Evaluating Terarium for Infectious Disease Modeling

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Scientific modeling for infectious diseases faces enduring challenges, including limited model transparency, poor traceability of assumptions and uncertainty, and difficulty adapting legacy models amid rapidly evolving scientific knowledge. Terarium is a novel, open-source modeling platform that integrates human-in-the-loop AI to address these gaps. This study presents Terarium and results from a systematic evaluation in epidemiological modeling, assessing its potential to accelerate modeling workflows while improving rigor and interpretability.

AI and LLM-Assisted Scientific Modeling in Terarium

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In a crisis like a pandemic, time stands still. Policymakers rush to chart a way out, trying to establish some consensus truth about the situation and the best path forward. The “open science” movement rallies to offer predictive models, but the models are seemingly limitless in number, of uncertain provenance and questionable suitability, and they don’t agree. Understanding and extending complex model code requires deep expertise and takes weeks at best, especially when there’s little transparency into the original intent and assumptions. To democratize modeling for the shared benefit of society, Uncharted is developing Terarium, an AI-powered platform for everyone from grad students to decision makers. Terarium breaks down barriers to accelerated scientific advancement by helping users reproduce, combine, and extend existing knowledge from disparate sources and share modeling workflows and outcomes in a collaborative ecosystem.

Visualizing with Text: Bringing Content to the Fore to Better Assess (Mis)information

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In an age of Large Language Models, online misinformation, plagiarism, hate speech, and more—the analysis of text is increasingly important. But traditional statistical visualization tools have lagged behind. Visualizing with Text characterizes the design-space for directly integrating and visualization to reveal information disparity with examples such as text-centric scatterplots, line charts, treemaps, mindmaps and tables.

Strategic Management Analysis: From Data to Strategy Diagram by LLM

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Strategy management analyses are created by business consultants with common analysis frameworks (i.e. comparative analyses) and associated diagrams. We show these can be largely constructed using LLMs, starting with the extraction of insights from data, organization of those insights according to a strategy management framework, and then depiction in the typical strategy management diagram for that framework (static textual visualizations).

Radically Improving LLM Responses with Context-Tailored Knowledge Graphs

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The release of GraphRAG from Microsoft Research this week marks a major milestone in the effectiveness of generative AI to continually reason with and answer questions about ever-changing collections of large, unstructured text. Uncharted has been working on applications of this technology for months now and couldn’t be more excited about its potential. This approach promises to significantly outperform existing Large Language models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques for interpreting and understanding non-public troves of text.

"Peak GUI," LLMs and the Conversational Interface

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When it comes to productivity tools, we’ve reached the maximum complexity of graphical user interfaces (GUIs): cascading menus, endless dialogue boxes, a plethora of buttons. When you need a search engine or a user-generated tutorial to figure out how to change a setting in your email, slide deck, or image editor, the interface is no longer discoverable. So if using a GUI is now like trying to determine how to write a query in SQL, what’s the way back to discoverability?

From Geological Treasure Hunting to Future Proofing Supply Chains

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Is your holiday wish list full of eco-friendly gadgets? Even if you’ve been decidedly nice, supply chain fragility may impact what ends up under your tree. A pandemic worsened shortages in the world’s supply of resources like critical minerals needed for renewable energy and technological innovation, and delays and rising inflation naturally followed. But now that we’re increasingly aware of our resource problems, we can start to examine how technology like AI can make our supply chains—and our holidays—more resilient.

Collect and Connect the Dots with LLMs

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Understanding a summation of assembled knowledge in support of solving a complex problem is hard. We’ve all struggled to organize and communicate our reasoning using mind maps, flowcharts, evidence boards, or the ever-ubiquitous whiteboard. Large language models (LLMs) will alleviate some of these difficulties by analyzing collections of text in ways previously impossible. However, our experience suggests that humans benefit significantly from conceptualization models that can’t be understood or internalized with words alone. Fortunately, we can leverage LLMs to help with that too.

Uncharted Earns Another Spot on the Leaderboard in AI Competition by DARPA and USGS

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When last we checked on the joint DARPA and USGS AI for Critical Mineral Assessment Competition, we were thrilled to discover we had won the Map Georeferencing challenge. Since then, we submitted our entry for the competition’s recently completed second challenge, Map Feature Extraction. Now that the scores are in, we’re honored to find ourselves on the leaderboard once again, earning top marks in the map symbols category and second best in region features on the way to a third place finish overall. For more information on each challenge, see DARPA’s announcement of the winners and episode 63 of the Voices from DARPA podcast.

Uncharted Wins First Place in AI Competition for Critical Mineral Assessment

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Uncharted has been awarded first place in a prestigious artificial intelligence (AI) competition co-sponsored by DARPA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Both agencies hope the results will help USGS extract intelligence from tens of thousands of historical maps that hold vital location data on critical mineral resources. Finding and mapping these resources in such a vast and varied landmass is a monumental task with significant implications for national defense and the impending clean energy transition. The competition aims to augment time-consuming human research in these areas with more efficient AI approaches that utilize machine learning and computer vision.

Join Uncharted at IEEE VIS 2022

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

VIS 2022 is back in person this year, and so is Uncharted! As proud sponsor of the visualization community’s leading conference, we’ll be in Oklahoma City to present our latest research and catch up with our talented peers and colleagues. We’d love to talk to you about the state of the art and how you can join our team. You’ll find several of us on the convention floor and at any of the following sessions.

Multimodal Analogs to Infer Humanities Visualization Requirements

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Gaps and requirements for multi-modal interfaces for humanities can be explored by observing the configuration of real-world environments and the tasks of visitors within them compared to digital environments. Some of these capabilities exist, but not routinely available in implementations.

Summarizing Text to Embed Qualitative Data into Visualizations

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Qualitative data can be conveyed with strings of text. Fitting longer text into visualizations requires a) space to place the text inside the visualization; and b) appropriate text to fit the space available. To fit text within these layouts is a function for emerging NLP capabilities such as summarization.

GeoTime Acquired by PenLink

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Nearly 20 years ago, Uncharted began research and development on what would become GeoTime. In the novel use of 3D visualization, two of our co-founders saw a breakthrough technology for portraying events and movement across space and time. As it transitioned from research to market, GeoTime quickly became the go-to tool for users who needed to identify and understand complex real-life stories and patterns of life across a variety of data formats. Over the years it spawned several industry-leading product offerings, each of which is a vital tool for streamlining investigative work. Now GeoTime begins a new journey with the announcement of an acquisition by PenLink, and we’re extremely excited to see what new heights it will reach.

How Effective Are Uni- and Multivariate Typographic Encodings? Studying the Usage of Font Weight, Oblique Angle, and Spacing

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Text is one of the most commonly used ways to transmit information. It is widely used in various visualizations and determines our understanding of the presented content. The information density of text can be enhanced by visualizing data in typographic attributes, such as font weight, letter spacing, or oblique angle. To increase information density the furthest, without the visualization losing performance or effectiveness, the perceivable granularity of the typographic attributes needs to be known.

Uncharted Returns to a Redesigned Office and a New Work Model

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

After nearly two years of mostly full-time remote work for all our staff, it is with great pleasure that we’ve reopened our office spaces for regular use. Starting this Spring, many Uncharted colleagues, both familiar and unaccustomed, have begun returning for newly instituted in-person “team days.” Team days address both the enduring effects of the pandemic and our staff’s evolving preferences for flexible work arrangements.

A new work model

With team days, each project or product group in the company gets a few days a week in the office for dedicated collaboration. While finally sharing the same space again, team members can gather for important meetings, hold working sessions, and enjoy much-missed camaraderie and effective coordination. Scheduled team days also help us manage the health and safety of our staff, minimizing the impact should another COVID wave occur. Finally, they give those who have appreciated the flexibility of working from home the option to keep doing so on a part-time basis.

Uncharted Celebrates 20 Years

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As we reach the finish line on 2021, Uncharted is again reflecting on all the inspiring work and amazing teams we’ve had the privilege of being a part of. This year is especially meaningful to us, as it marks the 20th anniversary of our founding!

To celebrate the occasion, we designed our annual holiday card to enumerate and chart memorable new heights over the years, leading up to this special moment in our history. Follow our journey below, starting back in 2001, through uncharted territory in diverse research areas such as visual analytics, machine learning, big data, augmented reality and more. As you take in the climb, note the many markers of Uncharted growth over the years: the expansion of our office space and our talented staff, the accumulated body of peer-reviewed publications, and the global reach of our GeoTime products. For more information on the milestones achieved along the way, check out the links below the chart.

Uncharted at IEEE VIS 2021

Wed, 20 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It’s time again for IEEE VisWeek, and Uncharted is excited to be on hand both as a sponsor of the VIS Diversity/Inclusivity Scholarships and a presenter of three new peer-reviewed research papers. We hope you’ll join us to talk about these latest innovations (see below for more information), keep up with the state-of-the-art in visual analytics, and chat about opportunities to join our team.

A Mixed-Initiative Visual Analytics Approach for Qualitative Causal Modeling
by Fahd Husain, Pascale Proulx, Meng-Wei Chang, Rosa Romero-Gómez, and Holland Marie Vasquez

Introducing GeoTime Live

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to introduce GeoTime Live, a new crime-fighting tool that lets investigators use any device to instantly map live ping emails. GeoTime Live has already been successfully used in exigent scenarios for cases related to narcotics, homicide, fugitive, kidnappings, Amber Alerts, Silver Alerts, despondents and dispatch. It joins a suite of GeoTime products with a long history of helping analysts and law enforcement do their jobs efficiently and accurately from normalizing data to analysis:

TellFinder Image Search Shows the Missing Link in UK Trafficking Trial

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Using TellFinder software, UK investigators connected small details in images from across the web to identify, investigate, and prosecute a Romanian trafficking operation in England, resulting in the convictions of eight perpetrators. Investigating officers had narrowed in on a suspect, but needed hard evidence of a networked operation in multiple locales. Using TellFinder’s advanced image analytics, prosecutors collected the evidence they needed: hard data demonstrating the connections between, and the movement of, victims from across the UK.

Visualizing Mobility in Times of Pandemic

Tue, 30 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Even as governments attempt to manage COVID-19 and distribute highly sought-after vaccines, hurdles have surfaced and frustration has understandably mounted. As new variants emerge, many are left wondering what more can be done to contain further outbreaks while a socially distanced world undertakes the time-consuming process of building immunity. Questions have highlighted that broad-strokes policy making may not always appear to align with local, everyday observations. This seeming disconnect has led to a public outcry for more clarity into the data behind decisions with such high costs. With some of these problems in mind, we conducted a small experiment to see how we might enable visualization tools for outbreak analysis. Specifically, we wanted to see if it was possible to visualize—anonymously and at a hyperlocal level—how citizens responded to stay-at-home orders from local and federal governments. If so, could displaying hyperlocal mobility trends both inform pandemic analysis and response efforts and help the general public understand how and why COVID restrictions were enacted to ensure health and safety?

2020 Year in Review

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 01:00:00 -0600

Despite the many unforeseen challenges of 2020, it has been another year of exciting new firsts at Uncharted. Because the COVID-19 pandemic meant we as a team could no longer share the same space, we seamlessly transitioned to a remote-priority workforce in March. Yet even as we were setting up and adjusting to our home offices, Uncharted still added 24 team members. This growth under less than ideal conditions is a testament to the value of our work to our clients—something for which we are extremely grateful.

Towards a Paradigm for Visual Modeling

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 01:00:00 -0600

Significant research at Uncharted in recent years has focused on the union of visualization and augmented intelligence techniques. We strive to create interactive systems in which human and machine intelligences can complement each other in real time to solve problems that are compositional in nature. Following a previous engagement for a workshop for Artificial Intelligence Applications to Agriculture hosted by the Texas A&M Institute of Data Science (TAMIDS), I had the privilege of delivering a talk at the TAMIDS Fall 2020 Seminar Series, representing the work across two Uncharted teams. “Towards a Paradigm for Visual Modeling” describes how an overarching philosophy of augmented intelligence guides our efforts. Specifically, it details our work developing systems for exploring, assembling and engaging large, complex graphical models that span multiple domains or involve diverse representations. The impetus for this ‘visual modeling’ work comes from two pioneering DARPA fundamental research programs: World Modelers and Automating Scientific Knowledge Extraction (ASKE).

Visualizing with Text

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 01:00:00 -0600

We’re excited to announce the publication of a new book by Richard Brath, Managing Partner, Commercial Innovations at Uncharted. Visualizing with Text is the fifth entry in the AK Peters Visualization Series edited by Tamara Munzner. This is Richard’s second book, following Graph Analysis and Visualization: Discovering Business Opportunity in Linked Data (2015), which he co-authored with David Jonker, Uncharted Senior Partner, Co-Founder and CEO.

In Visualizing with Text, Richard examines examples of text visualization both from a thousand years of historical documents and from contemporary sources. Using these as inspiration, he postulates an expanded design space that designers can apply “to enable richer, more expressive visualizations of data or text.” More than 240 example images from a variety of disciplines illustrate how labels, text formats and layouts can contribute to the design and development of new visualizations. Keen readers will recognize among them some visualizations produced by Uncharted.

TellFinder's New Research Partnership

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A new partnership between TellFinder Alliance and two researchers at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania kicked off in February this year — coincidentally at the same time that the coronavirus pandemic became a global crisis.

One potential hidden outcome of the pandemic makes the work of these researchers, who are analyzing recruiting patterns in sex trafficking, even more important. “New opportunities for organized crime to profit from the crisis are emerging,” says Ilias Chatzis, the Chief of UNODC’s Human Trafficking Section. “This means traffickers may become more active and prey on people who are even more vulnerable than before because they have lost their source of income due to measures to control the virus.”

TellFinder Alliance Automates Identification of Child Sexual Abuse Material

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 10:00:00 -0500

TellFinder Alliance, in response to the increased presence of online child sexual abuse material (CSAM) appearing in online commercial sex advertisements, has created new tools for TellFinder users to identify and report these images to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline in seconds.

Uncharted Software and The District Attorney of New York co-founded TellFinder Alliance in 2018. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. has established the District Attorney’s Office as a national leader in criminal justice by expanding its expertise on an array of 21st century crimes and funding innovative tools and partnerships to address those crimes. TellFinder is a web platform that connects its users to the transitory data of the deep web where human trafficking and other crimes flourish.

2019 Year in Review

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 01:00:00 -0600

Looking back on 2019, we take great pride in all that our amazing team was able to achieve. We grew our space and hired nearly 30 new staff members, including almost two dozen talented engineers, developers, data scientists and designers. This rapid expansion was the result of continued success in our goals of pioneering visual analytics research for tough, data-driven challenges and offering solutions and products that realize these advancements to help leaders in government and industry understand problems and get answers more quickly.

Introducing SkyMap

Fri, 06 Dec 2019 01:00:00 -0600

You’re so hopelessly lost that your smartphone is no help. You can’t reconcile its map of the landmarks around you with their real-world counterparts. You spend so much time looking down that you’re more disoriented than when you started. All you can do is look up in frustration! But what if looking to the sky was all the help you needed?

This year at ACM Spatial User Interaction (SUI) 2019 in New Orleans, we won the Best Poster Award for “SkyMap”: World-Scale Immersive Spatial Display, in which we unveiled a fundamentally new wayfinding and spatial situational awareness technique for augmented reality (AR). For thousands of years, people have navigated the world by translating their positions between exocentric 2D representations (i.e. a small paper or phone-based map) and their real-world environment. This focus-switching between frames of reference can require significant cognitive effort, especially in information-rich or high-risk situations; think about how tricky it can be to figure out where you are on your phone map while you are driving a car. SkyMap reduces the need for these cognitive transformations by rendering your position on a map that’s always in view above you, scaled to the same size as the real world, and aligned with it in every direction.

Highlights from IEEE VIS 2019

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 01:00:00 -0600

This October, Uncharted was once again a proud sponsor of IEEE VIS, the premier academic conference for the art and science of information visualization. As always, VIS 2019 gave us the opportunity to connect with leading researchers and practitioners from universities, government, and industry. At this year’s conference, held in beautiful Vancouver, the community coalesced around two pressing topics from recent years: interpretability of artificial intelligence (AI) systems and mitigation of both AI and cognitive biases when conducting analytical tasks.

Historic Visualization: Isotype

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 01:00:00 -0600

Here at Uncharted, we create new kinds of visualizations, finding inspiration across diverse sources both contemporary and historic. We’ve been building our collection of interesting historic visualizations over the years and recently had the pleasure of poring over a copy of the atlas Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft by Isotype from the 1930s:

When designers talk about Isotype, they often focus on the impressive array of easily understood icons. But we found a lot more to marvel over seeing these charts in real life. Digital reproductions fail to capture the attentiveness paid to the finer qualities of ink on paper. Every color—vibrant, crisp and harmonious—jumps off the page. This ensures the perceptual clarity of the charts and, when combined with common semantic associations, optimizes the cognitive clarity as well. Unlike most contemporary applications of color theory, each color encoding activates physical or cultural visual memory to ease interpretation.

See you at IEEE VIS 2019

Thu, 17 Oct 2019 01:00:00 -0600

Six of us are traveling to IEEE VIS 2019 in Vancouver to check out the latest in academia and chat with the community about Uncharted’s active visualization / visual analytics research.

Fourth Annual Uncharted Hackathon

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 01:00:00 -0600

What does it mean for a society to go cashless? That’s what we’ll be exploring today at Uncharted. Thirty employees across seven cross-functional teams will spend the next eight hours or so brainstorming, designing and developing projects that illustrate the benefits and drawbacks of such a shift.

There are many aspects of a cashless society to analyze: automated banking, peer-to-peer money transfers, mobile payments, cryptocurrency and blockchain, crowdfunding, and microloans, to name a few. Our teams will gather data from these spaces and apply the latest tech—be it deep learning systems or augmented reality—to visualize and explain the impacts.

We're Expanding!

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 01:00:00 -0600

As our business and staff continues to grow, so too will our office. In a few weeks, Uncharted will be expanding our footprint here at the Berkeley Castle in Old Town Toronto. The new accommodations will complement our existing open-concept industrial loft, making room for some exciting new lab spaces that will fuel our innovative research in augmented intelligence. Renovations are taking shape quickly.

If you’d like to help us fill out the new space and want to apply cutting-edge technology to unsolved problems, check out our current opportunities. We’re looking for more full stack and senior machine learning and visualization researchers to join our world-class team.

Classifying News and Social Media for Visualization

Mon, 12 Aug 2019 01:00:00 -0600

As we recently discussed at the 23rd International Conference on Information Visualisation, one challenge with visualizing unstructured sources like news and social media is getting the right data. Tags and classifications for streaming text data from these sources may be prone to low-quality false positives. For example, tags intended to highlight content about “oil” may correctly identify stories about crude oil while also capturing unrelated stories about soybean oil, motor oil and the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers and missing ones about West Texas Intermediate, a common grade of crude oil.

AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Web Search: How TellFinder Helps Investigators Uncover Trafficking Operations

Wed, 05 Jun 2019 01:00:00 -0600

In examining how technology advancements play a crucial role in uncovering trafficking operations, Medium’s OneZero notes how TellFinder “slaloms through terabytes of the deep web to search where Google can’t.”

International Trafficking Network Discovery Leads to FBI Sting Operation

Wed, 05 Jun 2019 01:00:00 -0600

The identification of an international sex trafficking network using TellFinder technology in 2017 led to more than a dozen, coordinated FBI-led sting operations on January 15, 2019. A federal grand jury has since returned two indictments, charging six people with running sex trafficking organizations in the U.S., Canada and Australia.

The use of TellFinder to identify an international sex trafficking network led to FBI sting operations and eventual indictments charging six people in Oregon.

Introducing Uncharted's Argument Mapper

Thu, 25 Apr 2019 06:00:00 -0600

Intelligence analysts, criminal investigators and legal practitioners frequently face complex cases with large volumes of ambiguous, uncertain, contradictory or inconclusive evidence. They must rapidly analyze the evidence, assess the situation and recommend options with clear justification to decision makers. Moreover, inherent human cognitive biases, such as neglect of probability, confirmation bias and recency bias further complicate objective analysis.

Lacking rigorous, approachable critical thinking tools, analysts must manually assemble evidence and draw conclusions in an ad hoc manner susceptible to cognitive biases.

TellFinder Provides Key Historical Data in Human Trafficking Trial

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Data from TellFinder was admitted as evidence for the first time in a US court in a 2019 human trafficking trial in the Ninth Judicial Circuit of Florida. The defendant, Darrius White, was charged with two counts of human trafficking of a minor for commercial sexual activity, one count of unlawful sexual activity with a 17-year-old, and one count of tampering with a witness. White was convicted on all counts.

DARPA's 60th Anniversary

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 01:00:00 -0600

Uncharted congratulates DARPA on its recent 60th anniversary. For nearly 20 years, we have worked with leading minds on “DARPA-hard” technology challenges. This immense privilege has afforded us the opportunity to apply thought, design, and implementation leadership in the data-driven art and science of visual analytics to new breakthroughs in human empowerment.

DARPA’s recent retrospective magazine, 60 Years: 1958–2018, highlights one such effort under the Memex program to enable analysis of large, unstructured “Deep Web” content. A section on “Technology That Matters” describes how our web-based tools, including TellFinder, help investigators discover human trafficking activity around the globe. Thanks to DARPA’s seed investment more than 230 law enforcement agencies across several countries are now using these tools to investigate and prosecute human traffickers.

Text Analytics and New Visualization Techniques

Thu, 09 Aug 2018 08:00:00 +0000

Since the advent of Gutenberg’s press, typesetting has relegated text to the margins of visualization: legends, axes, captions and footnotes. But modern web-based platforms can infuse rich textual information into interactive graphs and charts. Big data text analytics, such as natural language processing (NLP), power visualization techniques that reveal greater insights.

We first detailed these advances in our recent Strata talk. Below we summarize a few examples of real-world applications to identify business opportunities.

Third Annual Uncharted Hackathon

Thu, 02 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We recently held our Third Annual Uncharted Hackathon. This year’s theme was “Visualizing the Environment.” Thirty staff members across nine multidisciplinary teams vied for Uncharted’s coveted Hackathon Championship belt. Participants used the opportunity to learn new skills, experiment with emerging tools and extend Uncharted technologies outside the typical project life cycle.

The Uncharted Hackathon Championship belt

After much deliberation, the judges chose The Clean Techies (Pascale Proulx, Daniel Chang, James Neilson and Mark Deitner) as winners. The Techies built an interactive map to correlate water quality with pollution from industrial facilities. In cleaning up the competition, they’ll get their names forever etched on the Hackathon Championship belt and become the bane of potential polluters everywhere.

Axe Overthrow

Wed, 25 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

How does Uncharted unwind? We walk over to our local axe-throwing range (yes, that’s a thing) and let a few hatchets fly. For our 2018 summer outing, we returned to BATL in Toronto’s Port Lands for some spirited, friendly and exhilarating competition. A company-wide round robin gave way to a knockout tournament to determine who throws the meanest axe. And because hurling sharp projectiles is hungry work, afterward we retired to the Cherry Street Bar-B-Que patio for some brisket and brews.

Graph Mapping Featured in Leading InfoVis Research Journal

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 09:00:00 -0500

An Uncharted research product for the visual analysis of massive graph data is featured in the pages and on the cover of the latest issue of Information Visualization, a leading peer-reviewed journal on the study and application of information visualization. Our contribution to this special issue—which is dedicated to big graph analytics and edited by leading research authorities in the field, David Haglin, David Trimm and Pak Chung Wong—details a novel method for visualizing the community relationships between millions of nodes and links in a network. This patent pending graph mapping approach uses a cluster computing framework and our Salt library to build hierarchical tile-based visual analytic (TBVA) layers of all the data across multiple aggregation levels. Graph mapping TBVA applications can be deployed as web-based applications that provide interactive graph analysis in any modern web browser.

Uncharted Selected as a Joint Venture Partner for NTIS Data Innovation Program

Fri, 05 May 2017 06:00:00 -0600

In October 2016, the U.S. Department of Commerce National Technical Information Service (NTIS) announced Uncharted’s selection as one of 35 partners in a new joint venture program to spur public sector data innovation. The terms of the partnership mean that agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau, NOAA, the FDA, HUD, and HHS will have unprecedented ease of access to data-driven software innovation provided by Uncharted and other leading-edge industry partners. Recent comments by NTIS Director Avi Bender and U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross have touted the program’s ability to quickly bring about improved technology and services to government agencies that are increasingly collecting massive amounts of data and leveraging it to drive economic growth.

TellFinder and the Fight Against Human Trafficking

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 09:00:00 -0500

Reporting on DARPA’s efforts to combat human trafficking, a recent Defense.gov post highlights TellFinder, Uncharted’s tool for exposing hidden connections in hard-to-search domain spaces. TellFinder XHT extends to the online escort advertisement domain by allowing investigators to search for identifying attributes that can reveal behaviors and identities of traffickers. Along with other tools developed for the DARPA Memex program, TellFinder is now being used by law enforcement agencies to detect and prosecute perpetrators who facilitate sex trafficking.

Virtual Reality Taxi Trips in NYC

Tue, 18 Oct 2016 09:00:00 -0500

What if you could move freely through Manhattan and watch every licensed taxi pick up and drop off every one of its passengers at the same time? What movement patterns would you see? That’s what we aimed to find out by extending our Salt library to plot high-density New York City traffic data in three dimensions.

We’ve used Salt before to visualize NYC taxi data. Below, a multi-scale geographic heatmap illustrates all taxi pick-up (orange) and drop-off (blue) locations in the city during 2013. As you can see, this interactive, web-based map depicts where people start and end their trips both at global and street-level views. But plotting the data on just two dimensions can confine our ability to understand daily patterns of life in aggregate.

Following the Twitter Emotions of #Debate2016

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 11:18:38 -0500

While sentiment analysis on Twitter data has become commonplace, Uncharted’s Richard Brath got us thinking about going deeper and looking at the emotional content. Plutchik defines a taxonomy of 8 core emotions, often illustrated by his “wheel of emotions” (below). Saif Mohammed crowd-sourced a lexicon of about 10,000 words that can be used to measure the emotional content of text using a similar approach to sentiment analysis. We thought that the first 2016 Presidential Debate was a perfect opportunity to take emotion analysis for a test drive.

Popular Science Profile Shows TellFinder XHT in Action

Wed, 31 Aug 2016 13:00:00 -0600

The Sept-Oct 2016 issue of Popular Science features a profile of Microsoft Principal Researcher and former DARPA program manager, Chris White. The article demonstrates how TellFinder and Aperture Tiles (the original research project from which Salt was developed) can significantly enhance searches in hidden and transient online human trafficking, terrorism, illegal markets, and fraud activity. Both visualization tools allow analysts to discover connections and movement patterns through interactive analysis of data extracted from millions of structured and unstructured data points. The profile also contains a case study in which TellFinder XHT aided in the investigation of an individual who was ultimately convicted of sex trafficking.

The Game within a Game

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 17:52:14 +0000

Click the above image for the interactive version

We’ve been looking at characteristics of break-out tweets and memes. All memes are NOT the same. One interesting approach is to use our Salt library to plot time (horizontally) and number of retweets (vertically). This creates effectively a line chart made up of millions of lines. Each line grows from left to right as it is retweeted. Some tweets take off as a vertical line, some tweets take a while to grow and the vast majority of the data is stuck at the bottom never breaking out.

Twitter Talks Trump

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Click the above image for the interactive version

Last summer we began tracking tweets that mention Donald Trump in preparation for our talk at Strata NY. We’ve continued monitoring the topic and, as of March 3rd 2016, we’ve processed over 91 million tweets. For more information on the collection process, have a look at Two Days of Trump in Iowa.

With Super Tuesday on the way, we decided to take a look at some of the most popular tweets related to Donald Trump and how engagement with them (measured in terms of retweets) can be visualized over time. What you see above is the result: a two-dimensional Salt visualization with time on the horizontal axis and number of retweets on the vertical axis, which supports zooming in the temporal dimension (stretching horizontally).

Trump Climbs Primary Mountain

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Click above for the interactive version

In our ongoing analysis of tweets about Donald Trump we pulled together 27 million tweets in the month of February from 3.7 million unique users. It seems like everyone is joining the conversation in different ways. Last time we showed that some of those unique users aren’t real people, and they leave telltale traces in the data.

Two Days of Trump in Iowa

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 22:23:02 +0000

Last summer we began tracking tweets that mention Donald Trump in preparation for our talk at Strata NY. At the time it looked like things were only going to get more interesting so we kept watching and, as of Feb 1, we’d processed over 59 million tweets. With the Iowa caucus last week it seemed like a good time to revisit some of our earlier analysis. We’ll focus specifically on the 48 hours spanning the caucuses, from 7 PM EST on Sunday Jan 31 to 7 PM EST on Tuesday Feb 2.

TorFlow

Sun, 17 Jan 2016 12:00:00 -0500

The Tor project is an open network for anonymous communication over the internet. Tor routes users’ internet traffic through a series of volunteer-run relay nodes to conceal its origin and destination from potential surveillance or censorship.

While Tor is built for anonymity, the structure of the network and locations of many of the relay nodes is open. We built TorFlow to show the movement of data through the relay nodes of the Tor network using thousands of particles to simulate packet flow. The simulation has years of historical data so we can see how the network is used and changes over time and during significant events such as the “Arab Spring.”

Introducing Uncharted Salt

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 14:00:00 -0500

T-Drive data sample from Microsoft Research, generated by Salt and visualized with Leaflet - View Fullscreen

One of the questions we've spent a lot of time pondering over the years is a deceptively simple one:

How do we visualize billions of data points?

To understand why this is a difficult question to answer, let’s look at two popular approaches. Fundamental to both is the (correct) assumption that one cannot simply ship billions of data points over a network connection and draw them on a web front-end.

Continuous Integration with Apache Spark

Fri, 06 Nov 2015 11:03:38 -0500

We’ve been writing libraries for Spark at Uncharted for several years, and continuous integration involving the Spark runtime has always been a difficult thing to accomplish. Common approaches, such as creating a Spark context within a standard Scala runtime, can fail to accurately emulate nuances of the distributed Spark environment. I’d like to share a solution we’ve developed for creating a native Spark test environment within TravisCI.

Uncharted Visualization Tools Illuminate Dark Web Search Tech

Fri, 17 Apr 2015 13:00:00 -0600

Reporting on the release of a suite of open source tools designed to significantly improve “dark web” searches, Forbes highlights two key Uncharted technologies, TellFinder and Aperture Tiles, the original research project from which Salt was developed. Commenting on the user interfaces developed by Uncharted and other contributors to the suite of tools, DARPA Program Manager Christopher White is quoted as saying:

They’re very good at making things look slick and shiny. Processing and displaying information is really hard and quite subjective.

TellFinder: In Search of Better Ways to Find Criminal Activity in Massive Web Data

Thu, 12 Feb 2015 06:00:00 -0600

A new Wall Street Journal article describes how TellFinder can drastically simplify searches for illicit behavior online. TellFinder automatically aggregates similar web posts to eliminate the need for investigators to perform highly manual link-by-link examinations of every result. Analysts can iteratively expand these aggregations to discover networks of connected identifying characteristics that may suggest coordinated activities of individuals or organizations. TellFinder XHT is currently being used by law enforcement agencies to investigate online adult services advertisements for signs of human trafficking. Ongoing development is focused on extending the tool to other domains that are difficult to search, including propaganda, IP infringement, and fraud.

Searching the Hidden Internet with TellFinder

Mon, 09 Feb 2015 09:00:00 -0600

A recent Scientific American article details efforts to revolutionize Internet search technology by allowing people to review “deep web” data and search and review results in a fraction of the time. TellFinder, our search tool for finding and visualizing connections in structured and unstructured media stores, was designed to address these goals. The article shows TellFinder XHT’s ability to interactively map millions of sex advertisements in time and space and to graph relationships between automatically aggregated ad groups based on email addresses and phone numbers they share online.

60 Minutes Segment Features Uncharted Technology "Exposing the Dark Web"

Mon, 09 Feb 2015 09:00:00 -0500

Two innovative Uncharted technologies, TellFinder and Salt, were featured in a segment on 60 Minutes last night. Leslie Stahl looks into how the tools are being used by criminal investigators to uncover suspected cases of human trafficking in the “deep” and “dark” corners of the web ignored by traditional search engines. Advanced machine intelligence is used to collect, extract, classify, cluster and link over a hundred million online adult services advertisements for users to search and delve into in TellFinder XHT. Visualizations reveal common identifying characteristics and relationships behind the organizations that post ads. The Salt library is used to produce scalable, interactive maps of massive datasets (e.g., movement patterns of suspected sex traffickers) that can be explored at any level of detail and layered with contextual metadata. Uncharted continues to develop and enhance these tools to provide insight into human trafficking and other big data domains.

IALEIA President's Award 2014

Mon, 08 Dec 2014 11:03:38 -0500

Uncharted was a proud recipient of an International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts (IALEIA) President’s Award.

Bloomberg awarded Best Technical Analysis Platform 2013

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 11:03:38 -0500

“Bloomberg is proud to accept two awards from The Technical Analyst in 2013 – one for Best Data Provider and one for Best Technical Analysis Platform. (The Technical Analyst is a publication for trading and investment professionals.)” — Bloomberg Blog, 2013

Uncharted wins Most Innovative NASA World Wind Application

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 11:03:38 -0500

VAST Mini-Challenge 3 Award 2011

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:03:38 -0500

Uncharted was a proud recipient of the VAST 2011 Mini-Challenge 3 Award for Good Analysis and Support Debrief. Presented at the IEEE Information Visualization Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Award recognizes Uncharted’s analysis of terrorist activity using nSpace2.

Bloomberg Sports awarded 1 of top 10 Innovative Companies in Sports 2011

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 11:03:38 -0500

Bloomberg was named one of the Most Innovative Companies in Sports in 2011 by Fast Company Magazine.

VAST Mini-Challenge 1 Award 2010

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 11:03:38 -0500

Uncharted was a proud recipient of the VAST 2010 Mini-Challenge 1 Award for Outstanding Analysis and Accuracy. Presented at the IEEE Information Visualization Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Award recognizes Uncharted’s analysis of arms dealing using nSpace2 and GeoTime technology.

VAST Grand Challenge Award 2008

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 11:03:38 -0500

Uncharted was a proud recipient of the VAST 2008 Grand Challenge Award for Support for Diverse Analytic Techniques. Presented at the IEEE Information Visualization Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Award recognizes Uncharted’s analysis of Wiki Editors, Migrant Boats, Cell Phone Calls, and Evacuation Traces using nSpace2 and GeoTime.

Read Uncharted’s paper from this challenge, Grand Challenge Award 2008: Support for Diverse Analytic Techniques.

BlueSky Innovation Award Finalist 2008

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 11:03:38 -0500

Uncharted was named a finalist of the Microsoft ISV Innovation Excellence Award.

VAST Challenge Award 2007

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:03:38 -0500

Uncharted was a proud recipient of the VAST 2007 Challenge Award. Presented at the IEEE Information Visualization Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Award recognizes Uncharted’s analysis of wildlife law enforcement, endangered species issues, and ecoterrorism using nSpace2 and GeoTime.

VAST Challenge Award 2006

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 11:03:38 -0500

Uncharted was a proud recipient of the VAST 2006 Challenge Award. Presented at the IEEE Information Visualization Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Award recognizes Uncharted’s analysis of suspicious political activity using GeoTime and nSpace2.

Read Uncharted’s winning paper from this challenge, nSpace and GeoTime - VAST 2006 Case Study.

Energy Risk Innovation of the Year Award 2006

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 11:03:38 -0500

Uncharted (formerly Oculus Info) was honored that our client BHP Billiton won Innovation of the Year award from Energy Risk magazine. BHP is a $30 B per year global resource company. In accepting the award, BHP praised Uncharted as “very innovative and [combining] high level computing skills with creativity.”

DARPA Sustained Excellence Award 2005

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 11:03:38 -0500

DARPA Significant Technical Achievement Award 2004

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 11:03:38 -0500

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