Visualize This! (NSA Network Visualization Contest)
From the webpage:
Are you a visual designer who can distill complex ideas and information into a clear and elegant display? Do you love testing your skills against the most difficult creative challenges? Then Visualize This! is the competition for you! The National Security Agency is looking for breakthrough visualizations that can bring order to the chaotic displays of large-scale computer networks.
Network performance and security depend on being able to quickly and effectively identify the changes occuring in network activity. However, current visualization tools are not suited to displaying these changes in ways that are clear and actionable.
You will be presented with a scenario of events and challenged to design a next-generation display that enables a network manager to immediately take appropriate action. This is the opportunity to channel your creative energies toward safer networks – make your mark on the world VISIBLE!
The challenge is due to appear in about two (2) months but I thought you might want to start sharpening your graph, tuple and topic map skills on simulated network typologies ahead of time.
I wonder if “clear and actionable” includes targeting information? 😉
BTW, be aware that the NSA markets Renoir:
Renoir: General Network Visualization and Manipulation Program
and it is covered by US Patent 6,515,666 which reads in part:
Method for constructing graph abstractions
Abstract
A method of constructing graph abstractions using a computer is described. The abstraction is presented on a computer display and used by a human viewer to understand a more complicated set of raw graphs. The method provides rapid generation of an abstraction that offers an arbitrary composition graph of vertices into composite vertices, dispersing and marshaling of composite vertices, arbitrary hiding and showing of portions of the composition, and marking of points of elision.
Patents like this remind me I need to finish my patent on addition/subtraction, if someone hasn’t beaten me to it.