The Visual Analytics Community and their member organizations (including the Department of Homeland Security, Pacific Northwest National Laboratories and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency), in coordination with the IEEE, sponsors a visual analytics challenge each year at the IEEE conference for students and researchers.
In
order to judge the output from the participants, the challenge
organizers asks for analysts to participate as reviewers of the
submissions. Kris Cook, who is on the contest committee, has asked me
to put the word out that the contest needs reviewers for this year’s
challenge.
This
is an unpaid, all volunteer effort to assist a non-profit sponsored
contest. Kris’ note to me is reproduced below with additional links.
If you are interested in participating or have any additional questions,
please contact her directly.
For
what it is worth, taking a look at the VAST entries is a very
interesting and rewarding way to learn what is happening in the world of
visual analytics.
Begin text of note:
We invite you to be a reviewer for this year’s IEEE Visual
Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge. The VAST Challenge
poses interesting problems that contestants solve using visualization-based
software tools that support analysis of complex data sets.
We are soliciting reviewers for three mini-challenges and a
grand challenge this year.
- Mini-Challenge 1 challenges participants to identify
the current organization of a fictitious terrorist organization and how
that organization has changed over time, as well as to characterize the
events surrounding the disappearance of multiple people.
Participants will use visual analytics to analyze the specified data.
- Mini-Challenge 2 challenges participants to describe
the daily routines of employees of a fictitious company and to identify
suspicious behaviors. This task focuses on the analysis of movement and
tracking data and is thus primarily a spatiotemporal challenge.
- Mini-Challenge 3 challenges participants to identify a
timeline of significant events in a fictitious city and identify important
participants, locations, and durations by monitoring real-time data feeds.
This task poses a streaming analysis challenge.
- The Grand Challenge asks participants to synthesize the
discoveries made across the three mini-challenges to form a high level
description of the entire scenario. This task focuses on the
identification of who disappeared, who was responsible, and the underlying
motivations. Significant information gaps will also be addressed by the
participants.
More specific information about
the tasks may be found at http://vacommunity.org/VASTChallenge2014.
As a reviewer you will be responsible for reading 3-4
submissions and providing written feedback for the committee and the
submitters. Each submission consists of an entry form describing the
submitter’s software, their technical approach, and their answers to the
mini-challenge questions, as well as a short video showing an example of the
analytic processes used by the submitters.
This year, the reviewing period is as follows: Entries will be available for review by July 12. Your reviews will be due by July 28.
All review materials will be accessible over the internet.
Reviews will be conducted using the Precision Conference web-based reviewing
system. Reviewers will be registered in the Precision Conference system and
will submit their reviews using Precision Conference web pages.
If you are interested in reviewing please respond to vast_challenge@ieeevis.org
no later than July 1. Please indicate which mini-challenges you would be
most interested in reviewing and how many entries you are willing to
review.
Thank you for your time and consideration!
VAST Challenge Committee
Kris Cook, Georges Grinstein, and Mark Whiting, co-chairs
