VAST 2007 Contest
Using Jigsaw as a support analysis tool, we entered and won the university component of the VAST 2007 Contest. The Contest organizers created a collection of over 1500 news reports, each being plain text of a few paragraphs in length, as well as a number of other images, spreadsheets, background documents, and blog entries. From these, contestants had to identify and describe an embedded crime/terror plot that was hinted at by a number of items across the data collection. We used Jigsaw to explore and analyze the information and we were able to develop a very accurate description of embedded plot. For more details, see our actual contest entry.

By winning the contest, we were also invited to appear in a special live challenge at the VAST 2007 Symposium as well. There, we teamed with a professional analyst to work on a new smaller, but similar, data set and problem using Jigsaw. We were able to gain a lot of valuable feedback about Jigsaw, including ideas for system improvements, during this session. Below we show a number of photos from the Symposium and the live contest.

This research is supported by a grant from the Dept. of Homeland Security's NVAC Program and is one of a number of projects from the Southeastern Regional Visualization and Analytics Center.

Last modified: October 24, 2008