Building the Future

Making sense of the universe of relationships in massive data has been a longstanding challenge. The scalability limits of traditional node-link visualizations result in uninterpretable “hairballs.” New standard methodologies are needed to leverage the intuitive usability of geospatial maps for navigation and interpretation of multi-scale clusters and communities in data.

In this application of our novel graph mapping methodology, we built an interactive multi-scale map of all 2.5 million U.S. patents granted since 2001, linked by citation reference. Large, closely situated communities indicate technological domains with significant innovation. Analytic overlays convey themes, emergent or declining technological trends, and areas of intensive intellectual property contention.

Modern cities are abundant sources of untapped pattern-of-life data that can help urban planners and investors understand land use and build complementary services. In this application, we used SALT to create an interactive multi-resolution map of taxi trip endpoints and openly available social media that reveals how people interact with urban spaces. Taxi traffic patterns and social media paint a picture of land use, cultural hotspots events and tourist activity. Spatial query-by-example tools empower planners to find areas similar to an indicated place of interest and better understand relationships between urban design and cultural behaviors.

Uncharted developed this iconic visualization system for reporters to compose a live mosaic of 4,000 stocks, on demand, onto a 20x6 screen video broadcast wall and eight-storey tower. Journalists make more than a hundred broadcasts from Nasdaq MarketSite every day to tell the market’s story. Launched in the eyes of the world on the eve of the millennium, the NASDAQ site on Times Square is a visual beacon for critical information, with big brand presence, engaging clients in daily market events through the use of advanced video and CGI on massive wall, tower, and interior screens.

Infographics excel at telling simple stories. For larger datasets, narrative makes knowledge more accessible by explaining complex concepts, highlighting key insights and encouraging interactive exploration. In this experimental WebGL demo, a Twitter correlation sphere provides a novel view of social media popularity and cohesion. An interactive narrative guides the viewer through clusters of notable accounts (celebrities, media personalities, politicians, organizations) to find correlations and dissimilarities between them. A similar approach has been applied to reveal correlations in financial data such as consumer price indices (CPI) and stock activity.