National Visualization and Analytics Center

Partnerships and Collaborations

Protecting our homeland and helping to secure peace for the world is a fundamental goal of NVAC™. The partnerships from academia, industry and other government agencies will ensure we bring the best talents forward to achieve this goal.

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Partnerships in Visual Analytics Movie
This seven-minute movie features interviews with several partners within the VAC Consortium. It describes the need, current state, and benefits of partnering between government, academia, and industry. Features interviews with Jim Thomas from NVAC, Pat Hanrahan from Stanford, Bill Ribarsky from the UNCC, David Ebert from Purdue, Alan MacEachren from Penn State University, David Lane, formerly of Objectivity, Alex Philp from GCS Research, and George Robertson from Microsoft Research.

NVAC (PNNL Operated)

NVAC is a national and international resource providing strategic leadership and coordination for the creation and deployment of visual analytics technology and tools.

The need for visually based discovery and predictive analytics capabilities are broad and diverse across the many R&D portfolios in the Department of Homeland Security. For this reason, NVAC serves as the critical center to provide coordination and partnerships with national, regional and local programs, national laboratories, universities and industries.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory was selected to lead NVAC by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. PNNL is nationally and internationally recognized for scientific leadership with a long history of high-impact contributions in information visualization and analysis for homeland security, intelligence and defense. PNNL researchers have worked alongside analysts to bring fundamentally new analytical capabilities into their working environment.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
~Margaret Mead (1901 - 1978)

DHS R&D Portfolios

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate has the responsibility of conducting research and development (R&D) that will enable the DHS operational directorates to perform their mission more effectively and successfully. Among all DHS operational areas, there is a critical, unmet need for advanced tools and methods for managing, visualizing, and analyzing enormous amounts of diverse information and being able to make timely operational decisions. DHS created the National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC™) to provide the scientific leadership, education, and coordination to meet this critical need.
DHS Science & Technology

Government

NVAC provides a unique portal through the VAC Consortium for government to collaborate in demonstration platforms, development and deployment of visualization analytics tools to clients of DHS programs. Participation of government partners ensure that the form and functionality of technology developed through the NVAC is deployable and has impact. Several government agencies are involved through creation of Government Visualization and Analytics centers.
VAC Consortium
National Science Foundation

Industry

NVAC provides a unique portal through the VAC Consortium for industry to collaborate in demonstration platforms, development and deployment of visualization analytics tools to clients of DHS programs. Participation of industry partners ensure that the form and functionality of technology developed through the NVAC is deployable and impactful in a real world context. Industry already has recognized the value of the NVAC as many companies have contacted the NVAC about partnership opportunities, and several have joined the VAC Consortium as members.
VAC Consortium

Academia

Education is critical to preparing individuals to serve national needs in multiple agencies, roles, and functions. NVAC’s focus is on developing meaningful educational activities by providing hands-on experiences to students through internships. Students have the opportunity to work directly with NVAC scientists helping to address the real problems faced by information analysis today.

Interns gain invaluable experience applying leading edge technology and developing state-of-the-art approaches to dealing with the national security problems they see and read about in the news and popular press. Interns come away with a better understanding of how real-world research is applied to address difficult problems. Interns also explore and learn about the many areas of research being conducted at PNNL.
Educational Opportunities

Regional Centers

Regional Visualization and Analytics Centers (RVACs) are centers that have been established at key academic institutions to provide both research expertise and training and education programs, supplementing the knowledge centered within NVAC.

Together, the national and regional centers are creating educational programs with universities and industry to help develop highly interdisciplinary skills that are essential to visual analytics R&D. In the programs, faculty and students become more effective contributors to the visual analytics research agenda because they will have teamed with NVAC to develop and evaluate advanced technologies. The ultimate goal is to produce an unending reserve of visual analytics experts.
Regional Centers

National Laboratories

The U. S. Department of Energy’s national laboratories are world-class facilities where more than 30,000 scientists and engineers perform cutting-edge research. PNNL, which is leading NVAC, will be tapping into the expertise and capabilities of the other national laboratories to develop the most innovative visual analytics tools and technologies for use in the fight against terrorism.