NOTE: This assignment only applies to students in CS 4460.

This assignment requires that you gather all the knowledge that you have learned over the term and apply it toward a real data and analysis problem. The IEEE VAST Conference presents a Challenge (pseudo-contest) each year and invites people to work on the problems in it. In our final assignment, you are to pick one of the three challenge problems this year, design a visualization that could assist working on the problem, and then implement that in a system.

More details about the problems can be found at the VAST 2010 Challenge page. Choose one of the three problems, download the relevant data (upper right), and hopefully come up with a good solution to the problem.

For this HW you can work either as an individual or as a team of two people, but that is the largest group allowed. You can use any software development environment or visualization toolkit that you want. I recommend strongly that you look carefully at the data first and think about kind of visualization would assist working on the problem.

There are essentially three steps to the assignment. You should accomplish these in order.

1. Develop a design for your visualization. This can be very rich and detailed and perhaps contain elements that would be difficult to implement in the time allotted.
2. Implement a visualization system that embodies your design. It should read in the data and help an analyst work on the problem.
3. Use your system to come up with a solution to the challenge problem. Document your solution.

What to turn in: For the first part, include detailed design documents that show your visualization and user interface along with some descriptive text about how the interactions would work. For your system, turn in the code via t-square. Include a README file that describes how to run the system. Include any libraries needed to run it or any auxiliary information needed to run it. Also, make some screen dumps of your system and include those in the hardcopies you turn in. Finally, write up your solution to the challenge, using any forms that the Challenge organizers create (or simply just describe the solution if no forms are available).

Grading: We will evaluate the quality of your design and system, including their appropriateness for solving the challenge problem being addressed, how well they embody the ideas from the semester, and how creative these ideas are.

And remember, if you do a good job on your challenge problem, you can always enter the official Challenge!