Video - Introduction to system (20 meg wmv)

Full papers:
    Evaluating Visual Analytics at the 2007 VAST Symposium Contest - IEEE CG&A 2008
    Jigsaw: Supporting Investigative Analysis through Interactive Visualization - VAST 2007
    
Abstracts:
    Jigsaw meets Blue Iguanodon - The VAST 2007 Contest (Invited Contest Paper) - VAST 2007
    Visual Analytics with Jigsaw (Invited Poster Paper) - VAST 2007
  
  Using Jigsaw, we won the university division of the VAST 2007 Contest

Summary
Investigative analysts acquire clues and connect small bits of evidence to uncover larger plans, stories, or narratives. Often, the individual bits of evidence are short text documents, and analysts must examine large collections of such documents in order to "put the pieces together" and formulate a well-supported hypothesis about actions that may occur in the future. As the number of documents to examine rises, it becomes more and more challenging for analysts to uncover the embedded plans.

We are creating Jigsaw, a visual analytics system to help analysts better assess, analyze, and make sense of such document collections. Our specific objective is to help analysts reach more timely and accurate understandings of the plot(s) embedded throughout textual reports. Jigsaw provides a collection of visualizations that each portray different aspects of the documents. We particularly focus on presenting the identifiable important entities (people, places, organizations, etc.) and their direct or indirect connections. Textual processing extracts the important entities from the documents and then the visualizations help an analyst to explore the relationships and connections among the entities. The system includes graph, calendar, scatterplot and and tabular connections-based views, as well as views of individual document's text and the report collections as a whole. Jigsaw essentially acts as a visual index onto the document collection, helping analysts identify particular documents to read and examine next.

To learn more about the system's details and its different visualizations, please examine the Jigsaw views page.

Using Jigsaw as an analytic aid, we entered and won the university division of the VAST 2007 Contest. To learn more about our contest entry, visit the Contest Summary page.

We presented a full paper about Jigsaw at the VAST 2007 Symposium. Two short papers also appearing in the VAST 2007 proceedings describe our experiences working on the contest. Furthermore, a video illustrating system capabilities is available as well (links to the video and papers appear above). Please contact us if you would like more information about the system.

The picture below shows Jigsaw being used on a computer with four monitors presenting the different system views. The multitude of views in the system makes a mutliple monitor computer like this desirable for analysis.

Below is a picture of our team member Leo discussing the Jigsaw project at the DHS Summit in Washington D.C. in March 2007.

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: May 15, 2007