Technology

Uncharted built TorFlow to portray the bidirectional movement of data through Tor relay nodes. Here, thousands of animated particles mimic live packet flow in the anonymous communication network. Historical data reveals both typical usage and changes over time due to significant events like the Arab Spring. To date, TorFlow has more than a million page views and has garnered praise from Wired and Business Insider.

We have since employed these techniques for numerous commercial monitoring applications, including supply chains and network operations. Such live visualizations make it easy to discover and plan for bandwidth constraints, unexpected movements and interruptions by outages or natural disasters.

Interactive tile-based visual analytics that fuse diverse media sources and commercially available satellite imagery can aid investigation of events in many domains such as natural disasters, infrastructure changes or yields of global commodities.

In this proof-of-concept application, Uncharted combined numerous data sources and predictive analytics to improve discovery and corroboration of cease-fire violations in the Yemeni Civil War. Social media analytics flag possible indicators of military conflict. Adaptive macro-to-micro visualization, per-region topic summarization and interactive navigation point to both developing crises corroborated by underlying reports of violence. Frequently refreshed satellite imagery reveals evidence such as building destruction to support eyewitness accounts.

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.

Argument Mapper helps intelligence analysts, criminal investigators and legal practitioners make sense of complex cases and draw sound conclusions. Structured argument mapping methodology and intuitive visualization techniques combine to support fluid application of evidence-based reasoning, overcoming bias. Argument Mapper promotes shared understanding and peer critique for efficient, confident decision-making.

Originally developed for an advanced research project, GeoTime is a powerful tool for visualizing and analyzing events across geography and time. Uncharted cultivated GeoTime in a nascent market into a suite of enterprise-class commercial products now used at major agencies in the U.S. and around the globe. GeoTime was acquired by PenLink in 2022 and is continuing its innovative journey to reach and serve an even greater audience.

The maritime domain is awash with data vital to national security. Geotemporal ship movement visualization unlocks patterns of life that aid characterization of unusual events. Combined with predictive analytics, our tile-based visual analytics approach enhances human cognition to find anomalies. Overlooked behavior such as an unlikely meeting of fishing boats outside commercial zones could signal covert trafficking operations. For bulk carriers and tankers, a deviation in course from heavily traveled routes can signal a change in destination, which may be a leading indicator of inventory constraints or price movement in global commodities.

Autogenerated, interactive, story-driven visualization speaks to a wider audience and promotes deeper understanding of patterns and anomalies in data. Narrative sequences communicate observations, enabling a community to understand, to see for themselves, and to contribute. In this application story threads emerge as the user interactively drills-down to explore deeper underlying factors and scenarios. Unlike paper reports, live graphic presentations are up-to-date with the latest data and commentary.

This autonomous multi-touch wall consumes news, internal research, market data and databases, and automatically generates story sequences with annotated, animated data visualizations, 24x7. In a data-driven economy, live streams are integral to every company’s brand identity, and competition for audience engagement grows daily. Here, captivating narratives portrayed on a rich, life-size canvas create a connection with passing viewers. Touching the screen with one hand or two—alone or with others—initiates a personal interaction with content of interest to explore further details.

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.

In this engagement Uncharted worked with a startup to visualize 5 TB of pitch-level data and video in professional baseball. We designed and developed a suite of purpose-specific visualization systems that allow players, coaches and managers to analyze both detailed pitch-by-pitch outcomes and video footage. Seamless workflow between these representations enables users to discover minute mechanical adjustments that vastly improve player performance. At product launch, the press reported that “experts were seen gawking” and singled out the visualizations as “drool-worthy.” The product achieved 271% market penetration over forecast in the first year, with pro team adoption correlating strongly with deep playoff runs.

As part of a comprehensive platform advancement for a leading client, Uncharted created an iconic map of the financial markets that provides high-level, intermediate and detailed summaries of activity. A highly effective technique to organize and aggregate information helps traders and portfolio managers understand overall activity and swiftly act on individual stocks, commodities and portfolios in just a few taps. This intuitive workflow, suited for both desktop and mobile, earned significant praise in the client’s first mobile app. Reviewers in particular liked the ability to seamlessly move back and forth between market overviews and individual stocks or news stories.

This is a new level of market overview. I am quickly informed on exactly what I need. The system is instantly usable. - Equities Trader

In this system designed for a leading ECN, Uncharted renders an intuitive, integrated view of supply and demand (buy and sell orders), transaction history (trades), and analytics (e.g. volume distributions and VWAP), in real time in a browser. Giving visual form to the financial market enables a trader to see developments more quickly, gaining competitive advantage. This innovative visualization design earns praise in David Leinweber’s book Nerds on Wall Street.

A post 9/11, pre-HTML5 precursor to TellFinder, Uncharted’s nSpace is a landmark web-based visual analytics platform that enables analysts to interactively discover and synthesize insights from vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. nSpace includes semantic extraction and categorization, hypothesis exploration and evidence gathering, reasoning, collaboration and reporting. It is a collaborative environment to build and share knowledge. Powerful software agents combined with gesture-based data-driven sketching techniques are used to synthesize and share actionable knowledge with others.

nSpace in a web browser lets me integrate all of my analysis into a flexible thinking workspace. - Government Analyst

MobileTerrain™ is a next generation C2ISR solution for mission-critical data collaboration in real time. Cross-platform (Windows/Android/Linux) and designed for desktop, vehicle, tablet and dismounted handheld operation, MobileTerrain provides one solution for all tactical information where low bandwidth and disconnected operability are needed across the battlespace.

“Geo-chat,” C2 messaging, planning tools, vehicle integration, camera feeds and more are built-in and easy to use with little training required. MobileTerrain’s extensible, componentized SDK enables rapid development and integration of new capabilities.

Real-time visualization provides commanders with the necessary tools for rapid assessment and comprehension of highly complex situations. Staying inside the opposition’s awareness / planning / decision cycle is essential when the ultimate goal is concurrent planning and execution. Interactive visual collaboration enables participants to work together remotely with shared understanding to plan next steps more rapidly and successfully. Uncharted develops and supports C2 collaboration solutions that are deployed and used around the world every day.

Uncharted provides interactive 2D and 3D visualization of complex airspace control measures, planned and actual mission routing, objectives and alert analytics that meets real-world performance and throughput requirements. Independent evaluations prove that Uncharted outperforms other legacy and incumbent solutions in terms of display, usability and cognitive performance.

This tool for senior and executive management won Energy Risk magazine’s prestigious “Innovation of the Year.” Asset class by term structure is shown on the floor, while one wall provides a geographic roll-up and the other shows financial metrics. BHP Billiton, one of the world’s largest resources companies, uses a diversified portfolio strategy to manage assets. Uncharted’s enterprise risk visualizations create and assess what-if scenarios such as potential acquisitions and their impact on short-term risk.

You can’t access and analyze all the variants unless you use a simulation tool like this. - CEO

Managing a portfolio presents endless opportunities for improved success, from deep analysis of underlying markets, creating predictive models, combining a wide variety of data sources, monitoring securities in real time, to communicating with multiple stakeholders. In our over 25 years of experience in the field, interactive visual analysis of structured financial products has proven to better reveal real-time market opportunities, flag historic anomalies, facilitate interactive what-if risk analysis and engage clients with insights.