Supporting effective common ground construction in asynchronous collaborative visual analytics

Asynchronous Collaborative Visual Analytics (ACVA) leverages group sensemaking by releasing the constraints on when, where, and who works collaboratively. A significant task to be addressed before ACVA can reach its full potential is effective common ground construction, namely the process in which users evaluate insights from individual work to develop a shared understanding of insights and collectively pool them. This is challenging due to the lack of instant communication and scale of collaboration in ACVA. We propose a novel visual analytics approach that automatically gathers, organizes, and summarizes insights to form common ground with reduced human effort. The rich set of visualization and interaction techniques provided in our approach allows users to effectively and flexibly control the common ground construction and review, explore, and compare insights in detail. A working prototype of the approach has been implemented. We have conducted a case study and a user study to demonstrate its effectiveness

Analytic Provenance for Software Reverse Engineers

Reverse engineering is a time-consuming process essential to software-security tasks such as malware analysis and vulnerability discovery. During the process, an engineer will follow multiple leads to determine how the software functions. The combination of time and possible explanations makes it difficult for the engineers to maintain a context of their findings within the overall task. Analytic provenance tools have demonstrated value in similarly complex fields that require open-ended exploration and hypothesis vetting. However, they have not been explored in the reverse engineering domain. This dissertation presents SensorRE, the first analytic provenance tool designed to support software reverse engineers. A semi-structured interview with experts led to the design and implementation of the system. We describe the visual interfaces and their integration within an existing software analysis tool. SensorRE automatically captures user\u27s sense making actions and provides a graph and storyboard view to support further analysis. User study results with both experts and graduate students demonstrate that SensorRE is easy to use and that it improved the participants\u27 exploration process