Contour maps are an essential tool for exploring spatial features of the terrain, such as distance, directions, and surface gradient among the contour areas. User interactions in contour-based visualizations create approaches to visual analysis that are noticeably different from the perspective of human cognition. As such, various interactive approaches have been introduced to improve system usability and enhance human cognition for complex and large-scale spatial data exploration. However, what user interaction means for contour maps, its purpose, when to leverage, and design primitives have yet to be investigated in the context of analysis tasks. Therefore, further research is needed to better understand and quantify the potentials and benefits offered by user interactions in contour-based geospatial visualizations designed to support analytical tasks. In this article, we present a contour-based interactive geospatial visualization designed for analytical tasks. We conducted a crowd-sourced user study (N=62) to examine the impact of interactive features on analysis using contour-based geospatial visualizations. Our results show that the interactive features aid in their data analysis and understanding in terms of spatial data extent, map layout, task complexity, and user expertise. Finally, we discuss our findings in-depth, which will serve as guidelines for future design and implementation of interactive features in support of case-specific analytical tasks on contour-based geospatial views.

This paper introduces a novel visual analytics approach, DCPViz, to enable climate scientists to explore massive climate data interactively without requiring the upfront movement of massive data. Thus, climate scientists are afforded more effective approaches to support the identification of potential trends and patterns in climate projections and their subsequent impacts. We designed the DCPViz pipeline to fetch and extract NEX-DCP30 data with minimal data transfer from their public sources. We implemented DCPViz to demonstrate its scalability and scientific value and to evaluate its utility under three use cases based on different models and through domain expert feedback.

This paper proposes a visual analytics framework that addresses the complex user interactions required through a command-line interface to run analyses in distributed data analysis systems. The visual analytics framework facilitates the user to manage access to the distributed servers, incorporate data from the source, run data-driven analysis, monitor the progress, and explore the result using interactive visualizations. We provide a user interface embedded with generalized functionalities and access protocols and integrate it with a distributed analysis system. To demonstrate our proof of concept, we present two use cases from the earth science and Sustainable Human Building Ecosystem research domain.

Automatic detection of malicious or provocative social media content is increasingly important to efforts leading to counteract illicit activities in the digital platform. This paper proposes a context-aware, regional feature representation learning framework that exploits multimodal cues to improve automatic detection by enhancing classification via accurate localization. Unlike most existing multimodal approaches, which evaluate category membership of multimedia web contents only at the image level, our approach leverages object proposals to identify potential interest regions within images in order to provide more precise localization performance that in turn, in a context-aware setting, also improves classification result. The proposed attention learning module estimates the domain specific cross-modal, fine-grained regional feature correspondence, conditioned on the classification categories, by evaluating mode relevance scores in a data-driven manner. The initial classification decision is further validated using a query adaptive decision fine-tuning for a more accurate final prediction. Experiments on publicly available datasets and on in-house datasets demonstrate superior classification performance as compared to monomodal and existing multimodal baselines.

In this paper, we propose an effective, multi-view, generative, transfer learning framework for multivariate time-series data. While generative models are demonstrated effective for several machine learning tasks, their application to time-series classification problems is underexplored. The need for additional exploration is motivated when data are large, annotations are unbalanced or scarce, or data are distributed and fragmented. Recent advances in computer vision attempt to use synthesized samples with system generated annotations to overcome the lack or imbalance of annotated data. However, in multi-view problem settings, view mismatches between the synthetic data and real data pose additional challenges against harnessing new annotated data collections. The proposed method offers important contributions to facilitate knowledge sharing, while simultaneously ensuring an effective solution for domain-specific, finelevel categorizations. We propose a principled way to perform view adaptation in a cross-view learning environment, wherein pairwise view similarity is identified by a smaller subset of source samples that closely resemble the target data patterns. This approach integrates generative models within a deep classification framework to minimize the gap between source and target data. More precisely, we design category specific conditional, generative models to update the source generator in order for transforming source features so that they appear as target features and simultaneously tune the associated discriminative model to distinguish these features. During each learning iteration, the source generator is conditioned by a source training set represented as some target-like features. This transformation in appearance was performed via a target generator specifically learned for target-specific customization per category. Afterward, a smaller source training set, indicating close target pattern resemblance in terms of the corresponding generative and discriminative loss, is used to fine-tune the source classification model parameters. Experiments show that compared to existing approaches, our proposed multiview, generative, transfer learning framework improves timeseries classification performance by around 4% in the UCI multiview activity recognition dataset, while also showing a robust, generalized representation capacity in classifying several large-scale multi-view light curve collections.

In this paper, we propose an effective, multi-view, deep, transfer learning framework for multivariate time-series data. Though widely used for tasks such as computer vision, the application of transfer learning to time-series classification problems (e.g., classification of light curves) is underexplored. The proposed framework makes several important contributions to facilitate knowledge sharing, while simultaneously ensuring an effective solution for domain specific fine-level categorizations. First, in contrast to the traditional approaches, the proposed framework describes pairwise view similarity by identifying a smaller subset of source-view samples that closely resemble the target data patterns. Second, by means of two-phase learning, a generic baseline model is learned on a larger source data collection and later fine-tuned on a smaller target data collection, precisely approximating the target data patterns. Third, an effective view-adaptive timestamp weighting scheme evaluates the relative importance of each timestamp in a more data-driven manner, which enables a more flexible yet discriminative feature representation scheme in the presence of evolving data characteristics. As shown by experiments, compared to the existing approaches, our proposed deep transfer learning framework improves classification performance by around 2-3% in the UCI multi-view activity recognition dataset, while also showing a robust, generalized representation capacity in classifying several large-scale multi-view light curve collections.

In this paper, we propose an effective, multi-view, multivariate deep classification model for time-series data. Multi-view methods show promise in their ability to learn correlation and exclusivity properties across different independent information resources. However, most current multi-view integration schemes employ only a linear model and, therefore, do not extensively utilize the relationships observed across different view-specific representations. Moreover, the majority of these methods rely exclusively on sophisticated, handcrafted features to capture local data patterns and, thus, depend heavily on large collections of labeled data. The multi-view, multivariate deep classification model for time-series data proposed in this paper makes important contributions to address these limitations. The proposed model derives a LSTM-based, deep feature descriptor to model both the view-specific data characteristics and cross-view interaction in an integrated deep architecture while driving the learning phase in a data-driven manner. The proposed model employs a compact context descriptor to exploit view-specific affinity information to design a more insightful context representation. Finally, the model uses a multi-view factor-pooling scheme for a context-driven attention learning strategy to weigh the most relevant feature dimensions while eliminating noise from the resulting fused descriptor. As shown by experiments, compared to the existing multi-view methods, the proposed multi-view deep sequential learning approach improves classification performance by roughly 4% in the UCI multi-view activity recognition dataset, while also showing significantly robust generalized representation capacity against its single-view counterparts, in classifying several large-scale multi-view light curve collections.

Cyber threat intelligence and security informatics play critical roles in the identification of the principal influencers and threats associated with criminal activity and extremism in web-based communities. This paper presents an effective, dynamic learning framework utilizing domain specific context information to design a novel classification model that can robustly identify malicious social media posts (e.g. enrollment propaganda for extremist groups) with expressions of extremism or criminal intent. Research towards automated identification of extreme online posts and their associated key suspects and threats faces numerous challenges, 1) Online data, particularly social media data, originated from numerous independent and heterogeneous sources are largely unstructured. 2) The tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of criminal activity and extremism are constantly evolving. 3) There are limited ground truth data to support the development of effective classification technologies. In this paper, we present a human-machine collaborative, semi-supervised learning system that can efficiently and effectively identify malicious social media posts in presence of these challenges. Our system and framework develops an initial classifier from limited annotated data and in an interactive manner evolves dynamically into a sophisticated model using shortlisted relevant samples, identified via a graph-based optimization method, solvable by maximum flow algorithm. This same method also may be used to refine the classifier as TTPs evolve. Under this framework, the classifier performance converges faster using roughly 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer annotated samples, as compared to fully supervised solutions, resulting in a reasonably acceptable accuracy of nearly 80%. We validate our framework using a large collection of English and non-English flagged words extracted from three web-based forums and manually verified by multiple independent annotators.

Big data analytics traditionally involves download of massive amounts of datasets to common server/cluster for processing. Analytic process gets slower with increasing size of required data and network conditions. Data scientists also need explicit access to data locations to download required data. Explicit access to required data may not always be granted due to security reasons. To simplify and accelerate the analytics process on distributed big data with security considerations, we proposed the Virtual Information Fabric Infrastructure (VIFI) for data driven discoveries. Instead of moving large amounts of data to a common place of processing, VIFI allows automatic transfer of required analytics programs to the distributed data locations for in-place processing of relevant data. VIFI allows data scientists to conduct and coordinate complex analytics processes on distributed data repositories using containerization technology and open-source workflow design tools. VIFI alleviates users from having detailed knowledge of distributed data locations, as well as required dependencies, installation and configuration of analytical libraries. In this paper, we demonstrate our current and future work to improve the VIFI architecture using previous and additional uses cases, data management layer that simplifies search of relevant data sets through addition of metadata, integration with security policies at different institutions with the proposed VIFI security layer, and the use of a user-friendly web interface to carry different VIFI activities.

We present VASA, a visual analytics platform consisting of a desktop application, a component model, and a suite of distributed simulation components for modeling the impact of societal threats such as weather, food contamination, and traffic on critical infrastructure such as supply chains, road networks, and power grids. Each component encapsulates a high-fidelity simulation model that together form an asynchronous simulation pipeline: a system of systems of individual simulations with a common data and parameter exchange format. At the heart of VASA is the Workbench, a visual analytics application providing three distinct features: (1) low-fidelity approximations of the distributed simulation components using local simulation proxies to enable analysts to interactively configure a simulation run; (2) computational steering mechanisms to manage the execution of individual simulation components; and (3) spatiotemporal and interactive methods to explore the combined results of a simulation run. We showcase the utility of the platform using examples involving supply chains during a hurricane as well as food contamination in a fast food restaurant chain.

Collaboration systems require an appropriate authorization model to specify and maintain policies that not only facilitate group activities but also enforce restrictions and accountability. Existing models fail to incorporate adequately into authorization decisions the rich notion of context that is inherent to any collaborative setting. In this paper we present the locale-based access control (locale-BAC) model for collaborative systems, a model whose design is based upon the application of Fitzpatrick's locale framework for collaboration to the problem of access control. This model encapsulates the notion of context using locales, allowing for a natural representation of collaborative authorization decisions.

Work activitieshave a highly situated nature.As a result, it is not possible to classify activities exactly, since they tend to evolve as they progress.This raises a significant problem for work support tools: how to address the trade off between active support, which requires knowledge of the activity at hand, and flexibility, which is a measure of how well a system can respond to changes in activities.We have been developing the ConversationBuilder, a support tool that is intended to provide flexible, active support for (collaborative) work activities.This paper overviews the Conversation-Builder, discusses both the kinds of support it provides and its architecture, and illustrates its use through an example.