Biblio

This paper describes the process of developing data visualisations to enhance a commercial software platform for combating insider threat, whose existing UI, while perfectly functional, was limited in its ability to allow analysts to easily spot the patterns and outliers that visualisation naturally reveals. We describe the design and development process, proceeding from initial tasks/requirements gathering, understanding the platform’s data formats, the rationale behind the visualisations’ design, and then refining the prototype through gathering feedback from representative domain experts who are also current users of the software. Through a number of example scenarios, we show that the visualisation can support the identified tasks and aid analysts in discovering and understanding potentially risky insider activity within a large user base.

Performing a live digital forensics investigation on a running system is challenging due to the time pressure under which decisions have to be made. Newly proliferating and frequently applied types of malware (e.g., fileless malware) increase the need to conduct digital forensic investigations in real-time. In the course of these investigations, forensic experts are confronted with a wide range of different forensic tools. The decision, which of those are suitable for the current situation, is often based on the cyber forensics experts’ experience. Currently, there is no reliable automated solution to support this decision-making. Therefore, we derive requirements for visually supporting the decision-making process for live forensic investigations and introduce a research prototype that provides visual guidance for cyber forensic experts during a live digital forensics investigation. Our prototype collects relevant core information for live digital forensics and provides visual representations for connections between occurring events, developments over time, and detailed information on specific events. To show the applicability of our approach, we analyze an exemplary use case using the prototype and demonstrate the support through our approach.

Analysis of large, high-dimensional, and heterogeneous datasets is challenging as no one technique is suitable for visualizing and clustering such data in order to make sense of the underlying information. For instance, heterogeneous logs detailing machine repair and maintenance in an organization often need to be analyzed to diagnose errors and identify abnormal patterns, formalize root-cause analyses, and plan preventive maintenance. Such real-world datasets are also beset by issues such as inconsistent and/or missing entries. To conduct an effective diagnosis, it is important to extract and understand patterns from the data with support from analytic algorithms (e.g., finding that certain kinds of machine complaints occur more in the summer) while involving the human-in-the-loop. To address these challenges, we adopt existing techniques for dimensionality reduction (DR) and clustering of numerical, categorical, and text data dimensions, and introduce a visual analytics approach that uses multiple coordinated views to connect DR + clustering results across each kind of the data dimension stated. To help analysts label the clusters, each clustering view is supplemented with techniques and visualizations that contrast a cluster of interest with the rest of the dataset. Our approach assists analysts to make sense of machine maintenance logs and their errors. Then the gained insights help them carry out preventive maintenance. We illustrate and evaluate our approach through use cases and expert studies respectively, and discuss generalization of the approach to other heterogeneous data.

The aim of the study is to present an advanced overview and potential application of the innovative tools/software's/methods used for data visualization, text mining, scientific mapping, and bibliometric analysis. Text mining and data visualization has been a topic of research for several years for academic researchers and practitioners. With the advancement in technology and innovation in the data analysis techniques, there are many online and offline software tools available for text mining and visualisation. The purpose of this study is to present an advanced overview of latest, sophisticated, and innovative tools available for this purpose. The unique characteristic about this study is that it provides an overview with examples of the five most adopted software tools such as VOSviewer, Biblioshiny, Gephi, HistCite and CiteSpace in social science research. This study will contribute to the academic literature and will help the researchers and practitioners to apply these tools in future research to present their findings in a more scientific manner.

Video analytics has many applications in traffic control, security monitoring, action/event analysis, etc. With the adoption of deep neural networks, the accuracy of video analytics in video streams has been greatly improved. However, deep neural networks for performing video analytics are compute-intensive. In order to reduce processing time, many systems switch to the lower frame rate or resolution. State-of-the-art switching approaches adjust configurations by profiling video clips on a large configuration space. Multiple configurations are tested periodically and the cheapest one with a desired accuracy is adopted. In this paper, we propose a method that adapts the configuration by analyzing past video analytics results instead of profiling candidate configurations. Our method adopts a lower/higher resolution or frame rate when objects move slow/fast. We train a model that automatically selects the best configuration. We evaluate our method with two real-world video analytics applications: traffic tracking and pose estimation. Compared to the periodic profiling method, our method achieves 3%-12% higher accuracy with the same resource cost and 8-17x faster with comparable accuracy.

Due to immense need for implementing security measures and control ongoing activities, intelligent video analytics is regarded as one of the outstanding and challenging research domains in Computer Vision. Assigning video operator to manually monitor the surveillance videos 24×7 to identify occurrence of interesting and anomalous events like robberies, wrong U-turns, violence, accidents is cumbersome and error- prone. Therefore, to address the issue of continuously monitoring surveillance videos and detect the anomalies from them, a deep learning approach based on pipelined sequence of convolutional autoencoder and sequence to sequence long short-term memory autoencoder has been proposed. Specifically, unsupervised learning approach encompassing one-class classification paradigm has been proposed for detection of anomalies in videos. The effectiveness of the propped model is demonstrated on benchmarked anomaly detection dataset and significant results in terms of equal error rate, area under curve and time required for detection have been achieved.

The use of static code analysis tools for security audits can be time consuming, as the many existing tools focus on different aspects and therefore development teams often use several of these tools to keep code quality high and prevent security issues. Displaying the results of multiple tools, such as code smells and security warnings, in a unified interface can help developers get a better overview and prioritize upcoming work. We present visualizations and a dashboard that interactively display results from static code analysis for “interesting” commits during development. With this, we aim to provide an effective visual analytics tool for code security analysis results.

Scientific publications are an essential resource for detecting emerging trends and innovations in a very early stage, by far earlier than patents may allow. Thereby Visual Analytics systems enable a deep analysis by applying commonly unsupervised machine learning methods and investigating a mass amount of data. A main question from the Visual Analytics viewpoint in this context is, do abstracts of scientific publications provide a similar analysis capability compared to their corresponding full-texts? This would allow to extract a mass amount of text documents in a much faster manner. We compare in this paper the topic extraction methods LSI and LDA by using full text articles and their corresponding abstracts to obtain which method and which data are better suited for a Visual Analytics system for Technology and Corporate Foresight. Based on a easy replicable natural language processing approach, we further investigate the impact of lemmatization for LDA and LSI. The comparison will be performed qualitative and quantitative to gather both, the human perception in visual systems and coherence values. Based on an application scenario a visual trend analytics system illustrates the outcomes.

Visual Analytics uses data visualization techniques for enabling compelling data analysis by engaging graphical and visual portrayal. In the domain of cybersecurity, convincing visual representation of data enables to ascertain valuable observations that allow the domain experts to construct efficient cyberattack mitigation strategies and provide useful decision support. We present a survey of visual analytics tools and methods in the domain of cybersecurity. We explore and discuss Technical Threat Intelligence visualization tools using the Five Question Method. We conclude the analysis of the works using Moody's Physics of Notations, and VIS4ML ontology as a methodological background of visual analytics process. We summarize our analysis as a high-level model of visual analytics for cybersecurity threat analysis.

Due to the steady growth of various sophisticated types of malware, different malware analysis systems are becoming more and more demanded. While there are various automatic approaches available to identify and detect malware, the malware analysis is still time-consuming process. The visualization-driven techniques may significantly increase the efficiency of the malware analysis process by involving human visual system which is a powerful pattern seeker. In this paper the authors reviewed different visualization methods, examined their features and tasks solved with their help. The paper presents the most commonly used approaches and discusses open challenges in malware visual analytics.

Research into the explanation of machine learning models, i.e., explainable AI (XAI), has seen a commensurate exponential growth alongside deep artificial neural networks throughout the past decade. For historical reasons, explanation and trust have been intertwined. However, the focus on trust is too narrow, and has led the research community astray from tried and true empirical methods that produced more defensible scientific knowledge about people and explanations. To address this, we contribute a practical path forward for researchers in the XAI field. We recommend researchers focus on the utility of machine learning explanations instead of trust. We outline five broad use cases where explanations are useful and, for each, we describe pseudo-experiments that rely on objective empirical measurements and falsifiable hypotheses. We believe that this experimental rigor is necessary to contribute to scientific knowledge in the field of XAI.

Trust is a fundamental factor in how users engage in interactions with Visual Analytics (VA) systems. While the importance of building trust to this end has been pointed out in research, the aspect that trust can also be misplaced is largely ignored in VA so far. This position paper addresses this aspect by putting trust calibration in focus – i.e., the process of aligning the user’s trust with the actual trustworthiness of the VA system. To this end, we present the trust continuum in the context of VA, dissect important trust issues in both VA systems and users, as well as discuss possible approaches that can build and calibrate trust.

The paper discusses the use of virtual (VR) and augmented (AR) reality for visual analytics in information security. Paper answers two questions: “In which areas of information security visualization VR/AR can be useful?” and “What is the difference of the VR/AR from similar methods of visualization at the level of perception of information?”. The first answer is based on the investigation of information security areas and visualization models that can be used in VR/AR security visualization. The second answer is based on experiments that evaluate perception of visual components in VR.

Exploits based on ROP (Return-Oriented Programming) are increasingly present in advanced attack scenarios. Testing systems for ROP-based attacks can be valuable for improving the security and reliability of software. In this paper, we propose ROPMATE, the first Visual Analytics system specifically designed to assist human red team ROP exploit builders. In contrast, previous ROP tools typically require users to inspect a puzzle of hundreds or thousands of lines of textual information, making it a daunting task. ROPMATE presents builders with a clear interface of well-defined and semantically meaningful gadgets, i.e., fragments of code already present in the binary application that can be chained to form fully-functional exploits. The system supports incrementally building exploits by suggesting gadget candidates filtered according to constraints on preserved registers and accessed memory. Several visual aids are offered to identify suitable gadgets and assemble them into semantically correct chains. We report on a preliminary user study that shows how ROPMATE can assist users in building ROP chains.

Linking and brushing is an essential technique for interactive data exploration and analysis that leverages coordinated multiple views to identify, select, and combine data points of interest. We propose to augment this technique by directly exploring data space using textual queries. Textual and visual queries are freely combined and modified during the data exploration process. Visual queries are used to refine the results of textual queries and vice versa. This mixed brushing integrates procedural, textual, and visual based data exploration to provide a unified approach to brushing. We also propose an interface –- the Text Query Browser View, that allows users to specify and edit data queries as well as to browse the data query history. Further, we argue why an interactive, on-demand, data aggregation and derivation is necessary, and we provide a flexible mechanism that supports it. We have implemented the proposed approach within an existing visualization tool using a client-server architecture. The approach was illustrated and evaluated using two example data sets.

The Business Intelligence (BI) paradigm is challenged by emerging use cases such as news and social media analytics in which the source data are unstructured, the analysis metrics are unspecified, and the appropriate visual representations are unsupported by mainstream tools. This case study documents the work undertaken in Microsoft Research to enable these use cases in the Microsoft Power BI product. Our approach comprises: (a) back-end pipelines that use AI to infer navigable data structures from streams of unstructured text, media and metadata; and (b) front-end representations of these structures grounded in the Visual Analytics literature. Through our creation of multiple end-to-end data applications, we learned that representing the varying quality of inferred data structures was crucial for making the use and limitations of AI transparent to users. We conclude with reflections on BI in the age of AI, big data, and democratized access to data analytics.

The applications of 3D Virtual Environments are taking giant leaps with more sophisticated 3D user interfaces and immersive technologies. Interactive 3D and Virtual Reality platforms present a great opportunity for data analytics and can represent large amounts of data to help humans in decision making and insight. For any of the above to be effective, it is essential to understand the characteristics of these interfaces in displaying different types of content. Text is an essential and widespread content and legibility acts as an important criterion to determine the style, size and quantity of the text to be displayed. This study evaluates the maximum amount of text per visual angle, that is, the maximum density of text that will be legible in a virtual environment displayed on different platforms. We used Extensible 3D (X3D) to provide the portable (cross-platform) stimuli. The results presented here are based on a user study conducted in DeepSix (a tiled LCD display with 5750×2400 resolution) and the Hypercube (an immersive CAVE-style active stereo projection system with three walls and floor at 2560×2560 pixels active stereo per wall). We found that more legible text can be displayed on an immersive projection due to its larger Field of Regard; in the immersive case, stereo versus monoscopic rendering did not have a significant effect on legibility.

In a continually evolving cyber-threat landscape, the detection and prevention of cyber attacks has become a complex task. Technological developments have led organisations to digitise the majority of their operations. This practice, however, has its perils, since cybespace offers a new attack-surface. Institutions which are tasked to protect organisations from these threats utilise mainly network data and their incident response strategy remains oblivious to the needs of the organisation when it comes to protecting operational aspects. This paper presents a system able to combine threat intelligence data, attack-trend data and organisational data (along with other data sources available) in order to achieve automated network-defence actions. Our approach combines machine learning, visual analytics and information from business processes to guide through a decision-making process for a Security Operation Centre environment. We test our system on two synthetic scenarios and show that correlating network data with non-network data for automated network defences is possible and worth investigating further.

In this paper we present work-in-progress toward a vision of personalized views of visual analytics interfaces in the context of collaborative analytics in immersive spaces. In particular, we are interested in the sense of immersion, responsiveness, and personalization afforded by gaze-based input. Through combining large screen visual analytics tools with eye-tracking, a collaborative visual analytics system can become egocentric while not disrupting the collaborative nature of the experience. We present a prototype system and several ideas for real-time personalization of views in visual analytics.

Reputation systems in current electronic marketplaces can easily be manipulated by malicious sellers in order to appear more reputable than appropriate. We conducted a controlled experiment with 40 UK and 41 German participants on their ability to detect malicious behavior by means of an eBay-like feedback profile versus a novel interface involving an interactive visualization of reputation data. The results show that participants using the new interface could better detect and understand malicious behavior in three out of four attacks (the overall detection accuracy 77% in the new vs. 56% in the old interface). Moreover, with the new interface, only 7% of the users decided to buy from the malicious seller (the options being to buy from one of the available sellers or to abstain from buying), as opposed to 30% in the old interface condition.

We present the novel concept of Controllable Face Privacy. Existing methods that alter face images to conceal identity inadvertently also destroy other facial attributes such as gender, race or age. This all-or-nothing approach is too harsh. Instead, we propose a flexible method that can independently control the amount of identity alteration while keeping unchanged other facial attributes. To achieve this flexibility, we apply a subspace decomposition onto our face encoding scheme, effectively decoupling facial attributes such as gender, race, age, and identity into mutually orthogonal subspaces, which in turn enables independent control of these attributes. Our method is thus useful for nuanced face de-identification, in which only facial identity is altered, but others, such gender, race and age, are retained. These altered face images protect identity privacy, and yet allow other computer vision analyses, such as gender detection, to proceed unimpeded. Controllable Face Privacy is therefore useful for reaping the benefits of surveillance cameras while preventing privacy abuse. Our proposal also permits privacy to be applied not just to identity, but also to other facial attributes as well. Furthermore, privacy-protection mechanisms, such as k-anonymity, L-diversity, and t-closeness, may be readily incorporated into our method. Extensive experiments with a commercial facial analysis software show that our alteration method is indeed effective.

Interactive visualization provides valuable support for exploring, analyzing, and understanding textual documents. Certain tasks, however, require that insights derived from visual abstractions are verified by a human expert perusing the source text. So far, this problem is typically solved by offering overview-detail techniques, which present different views with different levels of abstractions. This often leads to problems with visual continuity. Focus-context techniques, on the other hand, succeed in accentuating interesting subsections of large text documents but are normally not suited for integrating visual abstractions. With VarifocalReader we present a technique that helps to solve some of these approaches' problems by combining characteristics from both. In particular, our method simplifies working with large and potentially complex text documents by simultaneously offering abstract representations of varying detail, based on the inherent structure of the document, and access to the text itself. In addition, VarifocalReader supports intra-document exploration through advanced navigation concepts and facilitates visual analysis tasks. The approach enables users to apply machine learning techniques and search mechanisms as well as to assess and adapt these techniques. This helps to extract entities, concepts and other artifacts from texts. In combination with the automatic generation of intermediate text levels through topic segmentation for thematic orientation, users can test hypotheses or develop interesting new research questions. To illustrate the advantages of our approach, we provide usage examples from literature studies.

The huge amount of user log data collected by search engine providers creates new opportunities to understand user loyalty and defection behavior at an unprecedented scale. However, this also poses a great challenge to analyze the behavior and glean insights into the complex, large data. In this paper, we introduce LoyalTracker, a visual analytics system to track user loyalty and switching behavior towards multiple search engines from the vast amount of user log data. We propose a new interactive visualization technique (flow view) based on a flow metaphor, which conveys a proper visual summary of the dynamics of user loyalty of thousands of users over time. Two other visualization techniques, a density map and a word cloud, are integrated to enable analysts to gain further insights into the patterns identified by the flow view. Case studies and the interview with domain experts are conducted to demonstrate the usefulness of our technique in understanding user loyalty and switching behavior in search engines.
 

This paper presents a novel visual analytics technique developed to support exploratory search tasks for event data document collections. The technique supports discovery and exploration by clustering results and overlaying cluster summaries onto coordinated timeline and map views. Users can also explore and interact with search results by selecting clusters to filter and re-cluster the data with animation used to smooth the transition between views. The technique demonstrates a number of advantages over alternative methods for displaying and exploring geo-referenced search results and spatio-temporal data. Firstly, cluster summaries can be presented in a manner that makes them easy to read and scan. Listing representative events from each cluster also helps the process of discovery by preserving the diversity of results. Also, clicking on visual representations of geo-temporal clusters provides a quick and intuitive way to navigate across space and time simultaneously. This removes the need to overload users with the display of too many event labels at any one time. The technique was evaluated with a group of nineteen users and compared with an equivalent text based exploratory search engine.