Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and Interoperability Environments

Professional Training

Visual Analytics for Public Safety Professionals

The Justice Institute of British Columbia and the VACCINE Center of Excellence invite you to attend a DHS-sponsored workshop for first responders and scientists.

The amount of information gathered by public safety organizations on a day-today basis, as well as during a crisis, can be crushing if not managed correctly. The goal of visual analytics is to overcome this information overload and to create new possibilities for using available data and information.

It is imperative that public safety personnel acquire the requisite knowledge in visual analytics that will enable them to understand events, generate plans, execute strategies, and make tactical and operational decisions. The overarching purpose of the workshop will be to define the requirements that will lead to developing academic programs and relevant technology utilizing visual analytics in the public safety environment.

To view content from the workshop click here

Purdue and University of Houston Downtown participate in the Department of Homeland Security Minority Serving Institution Summer Research Program

Beginning in June 2010, Professor Erin Hodgess and student, Laura Sanchez, both from the University of Houston-Downtown (UHD), began working with a VACCINE, Visual Analytics for Command, Control and Interoperability, team at Purdue University comprised of Dr. David Ebert, Dr. Ross Maciejewski, Abish Malik, Shehzad Afzal, Tim Collins, and Jenny Kelly on a project for the IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge. This team participated as part of a Department of Homeland Security funded Minority Serving Institution Summer Research Program.

Professor Hodgess used her background in economics and statistics to develop connections with visual analytics and VACCINE projects. The team analyzed sets of numerous data including patient identification numbers, complaints, gender, date of admittance, etc. With this information, the team worked on a visual tool that is interactive for health officials. The project was submitted to the VAST Mini Challenge 2 and the team won an award in the Support for Future Detection Category.

While at Purdue, the UHD team also worked with Dr. Jim Westman and Dr. Sarah Sayger from the Purdue University Student Health Center (PUSH) to utilize the interactive tools they created. The PUSH doctors requested information dealing with several targeted illnesses they were interested in following. The data set they worked with was from January 2002 through July 15, 2010. Using the R statistical computer package along with the C++programming language, they developed a two menu bar tool, where one bar represents illnesses and the other bar is for the graphical and analysis. This helps PUSH visually understand if there are alerts over the boundary line where they should consider bringing in more staff, while if more alerts fall under the boundary line current staffing might be fine and some staff time off might even be considered. The doctors commended Professor Hodgess and Laura Sanchez on a great job with the PUSH interactive tools. Professor Hodgess is continuing work throughout the school year on her projects from the summer.