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Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

The Fifth Annual IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology, held October 25-26, 2010, brought together several hundred visual analytics researchers and users to discuss the latest advances in visual analytics. The conference included a full papers and posters program and a dynamic VAST Challenge awards event, and highlighted the technical progress and increasing breadth and depth of the visual analytics enterprise. VAST 2010 concluded with a Capstone Panel that included Stu Card, Pat Hanrahan, Daniel Keim, Richard May, and Ben Shneiderman, reflecting on progress in visual analytics over the past five years and engaging the audience in articulating key challenges for continuing mission-relevant science. The two-day event was marked by lively discussion, with VA Community members playing key conference organization roles.

VAST Conference included papers and speakers addressing the fundamental research contributions within visual analytics, as well as applications of visual analytics, including applications in science, security and investigative analysis, engineering, medicine, health, media, business, and social interaction.

2010 VAST Challenge
The VAST 2010 Challenge celebrated its 5th year with 58 entries in 3 mini challenges and a grand challenge. In total 155 individuals, 18 universities, 13 organizations, 14 student teams and 13 countries participated in the VAST 2010 Challenge. In the past 5 years, the types of data sets participants have ingested into their visual analytic environments include: text, phone logs, blogs, wiki edit data, badge and network traffic, geo-spatial data, video clips, health records and genetic sequence data. It is not feasible to track all the uses of VAST Challenge data but as of October 15, there had been 547 unique downloads of the VAST 2010 data.

The challenge datasets are available long after any specific VAST Challenge at the Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository (http://bit.ly/cmjYBl). Each year’s challenge dataset includes scenario descriptions, tasks, data, contributed solutions by participants, and papers describing solution approaches. Variants of the datasets are used by U.S. Government agencies to compare different visual analytic software being considered for purchase. Universities, such as Virginia Tech, Simon Fraser University, and University of Konstanz use the VAST challenges to support their visual analytics curriculum and as term projects for students. Commercial visual analytics tool vendors feature examples from the VAST challenge data sets in their marketing literature and on the web. Research papers presented at VAST, the ACM Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining conference, the IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition, and journal papers appearing in publications such as Springer-Link Lecture Notes in Computer Science and the Annals of Applied Statistics use the VAST challenge data to demonstrate and assess their work.