http://www.hpcwire.com/features/The_New_Science_of_Visual_Analytics.html

Anything with “Analytics” in the title is going to make us sit up and pay attention. We at GCG are keeping watch on the growth of decision-making based on statistical analysis of huge data sets of information, and its sweeping effect on pretty much everything, from the course of treatment your doctor prescribes to the way a movie studio chooses to end the film you’re watching.

So what’s visual analytics? According to Jim Thomas, Director of the National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC), “Visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces.” Uhhh… ok. Anyone else need an example? HPCwire’s John E. West illustrates:

Consider the news stream at CNN.com and imagine that you are an analyst employed by Amalgamated Office Buildings to monitor what your competition, ACME Builders, is up to. You might be interested in news about big real estate deals, large purchases of steel, new metropolitan construction projects, and so on. But ACME is smart, and they know not to let news of their future projects into the press before they have the contract. There are clues, and any of these news stories individually might give a hint about what your competition is doing. The whole story, however, won’t be clear until you put all the pieces together.

So your job, as Amalgamated’s analyst, is to find the stories that reveal clues to ACME’s strategy in CNN’s massive news stream, and then put those clues together in a way that reveals what they are up to. Since you don’t know anything in advance, however, this is a lot like piecing together a puzzle where not only do you not know what the final picture looks like, you don’t even know where the pieces are.

Oh, and by the way, the news streams at NBC.com, ABCnews.com, and thousands of other news sites, blogs, podcasts, and videos on the Web have other clues that you’ll need to get an accurate picture. Good luck!

This kind of example is repeated countless times in border security, customs control, national security, disaster planning, crisis management, and so on. And this is the kind of problem that visual analytics in meant to solve. By using advanced computer-based analysis, graphics, and human-computer interaction techniques, visual analytics helps people sift through mountains of information to find individual pieces of a picture, and then helps them put that picture together.

NVAC, housed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, was created in 2004 to develop new techniques for sorting and structuring the masses of information that relate to national security, critical infrastructure, and disaster response.