Web: Next

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

nSpace in a web browser lets me integrate all of my analysis into a flexible thinking workspace. - Government Analyst