VAST 2010 Challenge: Arms dealings and pandemics

The 5
^th
VAST Challenge consisted of three mini-challenges that involved both intelligence analysis and bioinformatics. Teams could solve one, two or all three mini-challenges and assess the overall situation to enter the Grand Challenge. Mini-challenge one involved text reports about people and events giving information about arms dealers, situations in various countries and linkages between different countries. Mini-challenge two involved hospital admission and death records from various countries providing information about the spread of a world wide pandemic. Mini-challenge three involved genetic data to be used to identify the origin of the pandemic and the most dangerous viral mutations. The Grand Challenge was to determine how these various mini-challenges were connected. As always the goal was to analyze the data and provide novel interactive visualizations useful in the analytic process. We received 58 submissions in total and gave 15 awards.