III: Small: Supporting Investigative Analysts and Researchers in Sense-making across Large Document Collections through Visual Analytics

人们经常遇到并试图理解大量的数据集合，这些数据集合既包括非结构化的报告或故事，也包括结构松散的日志或电子表格。在许多情况下，相关信息分散在大量文档中，分析人员的任务是阅读文档并“将各个部分组合在一起”。例如，警方调查人员在筛选大量观察、案件报告和证人证词时，必须对真实发生的事件形成连贯的看法。研究一个新领域的学术研究人员会查阅大量的论文摘要、引文和文章，以便更好地了解该领域的工作状况。将如上所述的单个信息片段连接成一个更连贯的叙述的过程是调查性分析的一个组成部分，也是这个项目的主要焦点。分析意义构建活动的一个共同因素是，它们在认知上非常具有挑战性，经常涉及大量数据，这对一个人的记忆、演绎、推理和一般分析能力都是一种考验。在当今世界，人们可以访问庞大的数据库，进行互联网搜索，在几秒钟内返回大量文件，而人类在合理的时间内无法阅读和消化，这使得调查分析变得更加具有挑战性。但是，增强人类记忆和分析推理的技术手段作为调查辅助手段具有巨大的潜力。这个项目探讨了计算系统的发展，使调查分析更有效和更高效。PI的方法侧重于为调查过程中收集到的单个数据块提供多种可视化表示，以帮助突出这些数据块之间的联系或潜在联系，并帮助分析人员从大量证据中确定下一步要检查的数据块。PI将利用他在信息可视化和可视化分析方面的经验来设计和创建一个系统来帮助分析人员，并利用他在人机交互方面的经验来评估该系统是否有效。这项工作将包括对挑战的基础研究，如可视化显示中的可靠性和不确定性的表示、协作系统能力的开发，以便分析人员能够协同工作，以及将复杂的自动文本分析能力与可视化界面提供的以人为导向的探索方法集成在一起。对所有新的分析能力的仔细评估也将伴随它们的设计。更广泛的影响：调查分析是执法和情报活动中的一项基本活动，对我们的国家安全至关重要。该项目将发明下一代视觉分析技术和技术，可用于开发未来的调查分析系统。其他领域，如新闻报道、学术研究和商业智能也需要调查分析，因此该项目也有可能影响这些领域。

People routinely encounter and seek to make sense of large collections of data that include both unstructured reports or stories and loosely-structured logs or spreadsheets. In many cases, information of relevance is scattered about a large number of documents and it is the task of an analyst to read the documents and "put the pieces together." For instance, police investigators when sifting through a multitude of observations, case reports, and witness testimonies must develop a coherent view of the events that really occurred. Academic researchers investigating a new domain pour over large numbers of paper abstracts, citations, and articles to develop a better understanding of the state of work in that area. The process of connecting individual pieces of information such as those discussed above into a more coherent narrative is a component of investigative analysis, the main focus of this project. One common element of analytic sense-making activities is that they are cognitively very challenging, frequently involving large collections of data that tax a person's memory, deduction, reasoning, and general analytic capabilities. Investigative analysis today is made even more challenging by the ever-increasing torrent of data available in a world where one can access vast databases and conduct internet searches that in seconds return a quantity of documents no human can read and assimilate in a reasonable amount of time. But technological means of augmenting human memory and analytic reasoning hold great potential as investigative aids. This project explores the development of computational systems to make investigative analysts more effective and more efficient. The PI's approach centers on providing multiple visual representations of the individual pieces of data gathered during the investigation, to help highlight connections or potential connections among them and to help analysts determine the next pieces of data to examine from a large collection of evidence. The PI will draw upon his experience in information visualization and visual analytics to design and create a system to help analysts, and upon his experience in human-computer interaction to evaluate whether the system is effective. The work will include fundamental research on challenges such as the representation of reliability and uncertainty in a visualization display, the development of collaborative system capabilities so that analysts can work together, and the integration of sophisticated automated textual analysis capabilities with the human-directed exploration approach that visual interfaces provide. Careful evaluation of all the new analytic capabilities will accompany their design as well.Broader Impacts: Investigative analysis is a fundamental activity in law enforcement and in intelligence activities that are important to our national security. This project will invent next-generation visual analytic techniques and technologies that can be used to develop investigative analysis systems in the future. Other domains such as news reporting, academic research, and business intelligence also require investigative analysis, so this project has the potential to impact those fields as well.