About NVAC
The U.S. Government faces a critical challenge in identifying and preventing attacks on U.S. soil. The National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC™) is a national and international resource providing strategic leadership and coordination for visual analytics technology and tools. NVAC supports the Department of Homeland Security’s mission to secure our homeland and protect the American people by giving analysts and emergency responders technology and capabilities to:
- Detect, prevent, and reduce the threat of terrorist attacks
- Identify and assess threats and vulnerabilities to our homeland
- Recover and minimize damage from terrorist attacks, should they occur.
NVAC is located at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA. Capitalizing on more than 10 years of expertise in developing visual analytic tools for several government and private clients since the early 1990’s, PNNL will provide strategic direction and coordination of NVAC.
“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”
~ Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
The Need for NVAC
NVAC fulfills a fundamental need to provide leadership, coordination, and advanced analytical tools to make progress in effectively understanding and addressing the threat environment in the United States.
NVAC Leadership
The unique partnerships created under NVAC between national laboratories, university research centers, scholars, and other government agencies represents an on-going commitment to collaboration in the discipline of visual analytics.
Partnerships & Collaborations
NVAC provides stewardship for the Research and Development Agenda, ensuring that a continual stream of advanced analytical tools for information discovery are developed and implemented for stakeholders. Research and Development Agenda for Visual Analytics
NVAC Approach
NVAC provides the following benefits and services to the stakeholders:
- Research and Development Leadership: provide proactive and predictive information analysis and visualizations for early warning of terrorist activities. Research & Development
- Technology Evaluation and Implementation: evaluate new methods and supporting the adoption of new tools for analysts and emergency responders. NVAC synthetic datasets are contributed to the SEMVAST project.
- Coordination and Integration: bring the best and brightest researchers together from government, academia, industry, and national laboratories to create visual analytics tools to prevent terrorism. Partnerships & Collaborations
- Education: recruit and train our next generation of scientists and engineers through internships, faculty visits, joint research, and curriculum development. Educational Opportunities
What is Visual Analytics?
In the fight on terrorism, analysts are bombarded with enormous volumes of data coming from a variety of sources: documents, emails, measurements, images, numbers and even sounds. Often, this information is incomplete, fuzzy, disjointed, or out of context.
Recognizing that humans have a keen ability to process visual information, researchers are creating computer tools—known as visual analytics—that can interpret and analyze vast amounts of data. Visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. People use visual analytics tools and techniques to:
- Synthesize information and derive insight from massive, dynamic, ambiguous, and often conflicting data.
- Detect the expected and discover the unexpected.
- Provide timely, defensible, and understandable assessments.
- Communicate assessment effectively for action.
Although visual analytics has multiple uses, its use in biology and national security is an integral part of our nation’s overall efforts to protect against terrorism and reduce our vulnerability to terrorist attacks. By uncovering hidden associations and relationships, analysts glean insight and knowledge to assess terrorist threats to detect the expected and discover the unexpected.
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