ISSS608 2016-17 T1 Assign3 Wesley Chan

To be a Visual Detective: Detecting spatio-temporal patterns

Overview

DinoFun World is a typical modest-sized amusement park, sitting on about 215 hectares and hosting thousands of visitors each day. It has a small town feel, but it is well known for its exciting rides and events.

In June 2014, the park hosted a weekend tribute to Scott Jones, internationally renowned football (“soccer,” in US terminology) star. Scott was scheduled to appear in two stage shows each day from Friday, June 6 to Sunday, June 8, 2014, to talk about his life and career. In addition, a show of memorabilia related to his career was displayed in the park’s Pavilion.

However, the event did not go as planned. Scott’s weekend was marred by crime and mayhem perpetrated by a poor, misguided and disgruntled figure from Scott’s past.

Goals

We were given access to the movement data and in-app communication data over the three days as well as background information and a detailed map of the park. We were tasked to use visual analytics to analyse how people moved and communicated throughout Dino Fun World and attempt to achieve the following:

• Identify IDs that stand out for their large volumes of communication
• Hypothesize when the vandalism was discovered
• Identify communications patterns in the data, characterizing who is communicating with whom, when and where that may assist with the crime investigation

Challenge 1

Identify those IDs that stand out for their large volumes of communication. For each of these IDs

1. Characterize the communication patterns you see.
2. Based on these patterns, what do you hypothesize about these IDs?

(Please limit your response to no more than 4 images and 300 words.)

There are three IDs that stand out from their large volumes of communications: 1278894, 839736 and external.

ID 1278894: Cindysaurus Trivia Game

We identified the following communication patterns for this ID:

• The ID is always located at the “Entry Corridor”
• The ID sends and receives messages to and from a large number of visitors located throughout the park
• The ID sends messages to participants at a regular 5-minutes interval during a one-hour interval (i.e. 12 broadcast messages during that interval), five times a day. The broadcast period starts at the following times: 12:00 – 13:00, 14:00 – 15:00, 16:00 – 17:00, 18:00 – 19:00 and 20:00 – 21:00
• The ID receives messages / responses from participants usually with the next 5 minutes, following the broadcast

Based on the Dino Fun World web site provided, we hypothesized that this ID is related to the Cindysaurus Trivia Game, which tests park goers’ knowledge about the history, attractions and entertainment at Dino Fun World.