Salt

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.

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.

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.

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.