SAS UX team wins challenge at VIS 2017 Conference with SAS Visual Analytics 8.2
Using SAS Visual Analytics 8.2, the SAS Research and Development (R&D) team brought home the award for “Outstanding Clarity of the Presentation” at the VIS 2017 Conference, the premier conference in visual analytics and data visualization.
The VIS Conference includes the annual Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) challenge, which provides a Grand challenge broken down into three mini challenges, based on real-life scenarios. Previously, the challenge involved cyber-security. This year, the team focused on Mini Challenge 1, which required analyzing vehicle movement and other data within a nature preserve, to determine why the fictional Rose-Crested Blue Pipit bird population was declining.
The SAS team was composed of:
- Rajiv Ramarajan, Senior Manager, User Experience Design
- Jon Nemargut, User Experience Designer
- Riley Benson, Principal User Experience Designer
- Nascif Abousalh-Neto, Principal Software Developer
- Shaun Kurian, Sr Associate User Experience Designer
- Karl Prewo, Principal Visual Designer
They spent countless hours to complete the entry, analyzing time stamps of vehicle sensors at gates along with other available data and identifying short- and long-term trends and anomalies to respond to challenge questions. They took advantage of a new feature in VA 8.2 to integrate open source technology and wrap in custom content with other charting tools. They were even able to identify an issue of possible illegal dumping that was not part of the original challenge. “The ability to extend the visualization capabilities of VA allows it to adapt to more niche and cutting-edge problems,” said Benson.
After the analysis, the team submitted the entry, including a video and poster (see below) which Nemargut presented at the conference. Reviewers felt the entry was a “solid contribution based on the SAS VA tool (no self-made tools used),” and that “the team did a great job identifying suspicious patterns and hypothesizing about what might be going on.” The video also won praise as “an excellent video describing in detail data processing and analysis.”
VAST Mini Challenge 1 poster entry from SAS
How does this help you?
Lessons learned from the challenge were immediately brought back to help with SAS product development.
Nemargut, new to VA, used the project to help him learn the tool while developing the challenge product. “Once the challenge is complete,” he said, “it’s added to benchmarking. These known data sets can be used to validate software and help solve real-life challenges. The challenge can also define weaknesses in the software, which is valuable in making the product better.”
Benson, who created the graphic visualizations, feels that these projects are an opportunity to test new features that will be used in the real world. “All feedback from the competition goes back to the product and back to SAS. It helps to identify feature gaps and uncover workflow inefficiencies that more scripted testing may miss.”
Ramarajan believes that, “Seeing the various approaches used to solve the big data problem helps us understand how data scientists might want to use our software. This pushes our design forward. The synthetic data, and all the entries from the VAST challenge are organized into a benchmark repository which can be accessed by anyone.”
Ramarajan sums it up saying, “The entire conference is relevant to work we do every day at SAS,” Ramarajan said, “The VAST Challenge is an opportunity for us to test our software against data-challenges modeled on real-life scenarios. What we learn goes right back into the design.”
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