Proposal 12 - Visual Analytics

“ The use of visual analytics tools for unstructured content analysis” David Whitehead TBA, Vancouver Visual Analytics

Visual Analytics

My Proposal
Project
Investigate adopting visual analytics tools for unstructured content analysis and provide these tools as a service for TBA's and IS's in support of client and sector needs.
Stage 1: needs analysis
What unstructured content analysis does CISTI perform?
What types of client questions could/should we use VA tools to help answer?
How would different CISTI teams make use of VA tools?
What experience does CISTI have with VA and unstructured content analysis tools?
Stage 2: survey available tools
What tools are available?
What are the tradeoffs for each tool?
How well do they meet CISTI's needs?
Stage 3: pilot study
Select and deploy 1 or 2 VA tools for use in a pilot study
Select and train up to 3 IS/TBA teams in the use of Visual Analysis techniques and tools
Each team to use VA tools to work with at least 2 client projects
Teams to report on the effectiveness, usability, strengths and weaknesses of the selected VA tools.
Clients to feedback on the usefulness of the VA tool analysis/findings
Deliverables
Unstructured content analysis tools needs assessment
Survey of available visual analytics tools
Train 1 or 2 IS/TBA teams on Visual Analytics techniques
Pilot Study report

My Proposal
Project
Investigate adopting visual analytics tools for unstructured content analysis and provide these tools as a service for TBA's and IS's in support of client and sector needs.
Stage 1: needs analysis
What unstructured content analysis does CISTI perform?
What types of client questions could/should we use VA tools to help answer?
How would different CISTI teams make use of VA tools?
What experience does CISTI have with VA and unstructured content analysis tools?
Stage 2: survey available tools
What tools are available?
What are the tradeoffs for each tool?
How well do they meet CISTI's needs?
Stage 3: pilot study
Select and deploy 1 or 2 VA tools for use in a pilot study
Select and train up to 3 IS/TBA teams in the use of Visual Analysis techniques and tools
Each team to use VA tools to work with at least 2 client projects
Teams to report on the effectiveness, usability, strengths and weaknesses of the selected VA tools.
Clients to feedback on the usefulness of the VA tool analysis/findings
Deliverables
Unstructured content analysis tools needs assessment
Survey of available visual analytics tools
Train 1 or 2 IS/TBA teams on Visual Analytics techniques
Pilot Study report
OVERLY AMBITIOUS

Reality
One Visual Analytics tool:
“ Starlight” from Futurepoint Systems
Two projects:
Catalog of the BC Wireless Industry
Finding an appropriate partner for an enterprise USB Flash drive solution

I tried one Visual Analytics tool out on two projects:
Catalog of the BC Wireless Industry
Finding an appropriate partner for an enterprise USB Flash drive solution
Reality Practical

Why Visual Analytics
I don’t look for terrorists, but I do reduce risk

Visual Analytics
“ People use visual analytics tools and techniques to synthesize information and derive insight from massive, dynamic, ambiguous, and often conflicting data; detect the expected and discover the unexpected; provide timely, defensible, and understandable assessments; and communicate assessment effectively for action.”
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_analytics

Visual Analytics
Visual Analytics Sounds a lot like CISTI!
synthesize information
derive insight from massive, dynamic, ambiguous, conflicting data
detect the expected and discover the unexpected
provide timely, defensible, and understandable assessments
communicate assessment effectively for action

Why explore Visual Analytics
Clients come to IS’s and TBA’s expecting "the magic answers" and "a crystal ball“
Our success depends on our ability to meet that un-written brand promise, as unrealistic as it may be.
IS’s and TBA’s need to be the experts in information retrieval and analysis, including sophisticated analysis of unstructured content.
IS’s and TBA’s have the expertise to interpret and convey the results to business clients.

Visual Analytics Turns This Into This 1 - 10 of about 3,660,000 for enterprise usb content distribution

Demo
Incredibly Amazing Demo

Multiple Views

Subject Views

Good
Clustering of Data
Helps identify key topics for analysis
Quickly eliminates results of no value
Provides some confidence in the uniqueness of a solution
Allows broader coverage than manual approaches

Bad
Deeper Analysis requires a lot of preparation and data manipulation
Getting the data from here to something consumable is hard
Requires a lot of learning to get meaningful results
Best used by experts in a domain

Awesome!
Data input tools
Automatically crawl sites
Convert unstructured documents into data
Look for multiple parameters simultaneously
Automatically extract entities like people, places and companies

Test 1
Enterprise USB Flash Application Test
Traditional Approach Visual Analytics Approach
7 hours
Read 53 web pages
Identified 20 potential partners
Narrowed to 4 likely partners
Identified 2 key competing approaches
2 hours
Analyzed about 600 web pages
Identified 1 likely partner
Identified 7 competing approaches

Test 2
Wireless Industry Profile
Traditional Approach Visual Analytics Approach
1 month
Read about 1000 web pages
Classified 93 pre-defined technologies across 277 mobile industry firms in 2 cities (Vancouver & Ottawa)
8 hours
1 st web crawler pass
Analyzed about 11000 web pages starting with links to 137 companies
Identified 123 separate technologies

General Observations
Analytics result in much faster generation of garbage out
Many trials needed to get the automation right
Once right – automation dramatically helps in large environmental scans.
The two techniques complement each other well, help to double check findings
Helps find more outliers
Helps identify useful items to look for
Investigative techniques are essential to drawing real conclusions
Very hard to communicate the process and the comparative value of results using the tools alone.

Visual Analytics
“ Visual Analytics is the integration of interactive visualization with analysis techniques to answer a growing range of questions in science, business, and analysis. It can attack certain problems whose size, complexity, and need for closely coupled human and machine analysis may make them otherwise intractable.”
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_analytics

Why learn more…
Anyone can use Google…
VA tools are the tools used by leaders in large scale information analysis such as government security forces
Visual Analytics help make sense of information overload
Making sense of information overload is the essential skill for information analysts.
Information overload is every industries problem
VA tools are moving out of the security world into the realm of business and scientific analysis
expertise in applying tools like VA to analysis tasks in the fields of business and science is what will set CISTI IS’s and TBA’s apart.

Proposal 12 - Visual Analytics

by CISTI ICIST on Mar 31, 2009

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