This year, the team of senior lecturer Jonathan C Roberts and post-docs Serban Pop, Rick Walker and Llyr ap Cenydd from the RIVIC contingent at Bangor entered the VAST 2010 Challenge. This contest provides synthetic data sets with an embedded ground truth surrounded by obfuscating data, and challenges teams to correctly answer a series of questions on the scenario.

There were a number of mini-challenges, and the one we tackled was concerned with the spread of a pandemic across several countries. We built a tool to analyse the data provided, using a combination of multiple views and statistics, and were able to use it successfully answer all the mini-challenge questions. The picture left is a snapshot of our analysis - click on the image to download a short movie (divx format) showing our tool in action.

With the results announced on 11th August, we were delighted to receive an award for "Good analytic process and explanation", and have been invited to present and discuss our work at the VAST Challenge 2010 Participant Workshop in Utah in October.  The other award winners for this mini challenge are a joint team from Purdue University and University of Houston, a team from University of Konstanz, and a team from commercial company Periscope. Dr Roberts commented "This provides further evidence of Bangor's international reputation as a leader in visual analytics".