Towards an instrument for measuring sensemaking and an assessment of its theoretical features

This paper reports the result of a study that we conducted to develop an instrument for measuring sensemaking and to understand how sensemakers conceptualise the sensemaking that they are doing. To address these aims we conducted a review of how sensemaking is described in the literature and derived a series of features. These were used to construct a questionnaire, which we deployed in an experimental study in which participants performed a sensemaking task. The results help to validate the questionnaire and provide insights into how users think about the experience of sensemaking

Pan: conversational agent for criminal investigations

We present an early prototype conversational agent (CA), called Pan, for retrieving information to support criminal investigations. Our approach tackles the issue of algorithmic transparency, which is critical in unpredictable, high risk, and high consequence domains. We present a novel method to flexibly model CA intentions and provide transparency of attributes that is underpinned with human recognition. We propose that Pan can be used for experimentation to probe analyst requirements and to evaluate the effectiveness of our explanation structure

Visual interaction with dimensionality reduction: a structured literature analysis

Dimensionality Reduction (DR) is a core building block in visualizing multidimensional data. For DR techniques to be useful in exploratory data analysis, they need to be adapted to human needs and domain-specific problems, ideally, interactively, and on-the-fly. Many visual analytics systems have already demonstrated the benefits of tightly integrating DR with interactive visualizations. Nevertheless, a general, structured understanding of this integration is missing. To address this, we systematically studied the visual analytics and visualization literature to investigate how analysts interact with automatic DR techniques. The results reveal seven common interaction scenarios that are amenable to interactive control such as specifying algorithmic constraints, selecting relevant features, or choosing among several DR algorithms. We investigate specific implementations of visual analysis systems integrating DR, and analyze ways that other machine learning methods have been combined with DR. Summarizing the results in a “human in the loop” process model provides a general lens for the evaluation of visual interactive DR systems. We apply the proposed model to study and classify several systems previously described in the literature, and to derive future research opportunities

Spherical similarity explorer for comparative case analysis

Comparative Case Analysis (CCA) is an important tool for criminal investigation and crime theory extraction. It analyzes the commonalities and differences between a collection of crime reports in order to understand crime patterns and identify abnormal cases. A big challenge of CCA is the data processing and exploration. Traditional manual approach can no longer cope with the increasing volume and complexity of the data. In this paper we introduce a novel visual analytics system, Spherical Similarity Explorer (SSE) that automates the data processing process and provides interactive visualizations to support the data exploration. We illustrate the use of the system with uses cases that involve real world application data and evaluate the system with criminal intelligence analysts