Entry Name: CogBrz-Whiting-MC3

VAST Challenge 2019
Mini-Challenge 3

Team Members:

Mark Whiting, Cognitive Breeze, PRIMARY

Student Team: No

Tools Used:

“TweetFall” – custom app built using NetLogo agent framework

Tableau

Approximately how many hours were spent working on this submission in total?

<shrug>

May we post your submission in the Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository after VAST Challenge 2019 is complete? Yes

Video

https://vimeo.com/346760707/b918495fe4

Questions

The City has been using Y*INT to communicate with its citizens, even post-earthquake. However, City officials needs additional information to determine the best way to allocate emergency resources across all neighborhoods of St. Himark. Your task, using your visual analytics on the community Y*INT data, is to determine the types of problems that are occurring across the St. Himark. Then, advise the City on how to prioritize the distribution of resources. Keep in mind that not all sources on Y*INT are reliable, and that priorities may change over time as the state of neighborhoods also changes.

1 – Using visual analytics, characterize conditions across the city and recommend how resources should be allocated at 5 hours and 30 hours after the earthquake. Include evidence from the data to support these recommendations. Consider how to allocate resources such as road crews, sewer repair crews, power, and rescue teams. Limit your response to 1000 words and 12 images.

One of the keys to working with this data is to trim out the irrelevant tweets, that include re-tweets, auto-generated tweets, and ones that were just too mangled to deal with. This was done tweet by tweet, but also by eliminating unhelpful users. This allowed us to get to about 3000 tweets, but that could actually have been further culled. To consider the situations at 5 and 30 hours after the earthquake, we first make the assumption that the earthquake occurred at around 8AM on 4-8. We take a look at the tweetfall for a baseline prior to the earthquake:

What tweetfall shows is how the tweets are streaming into a collection and analysis center, with each dot representing a tweet and color representing a categorization of the kind of tweet. Tweets that refer to roads and bridges, power, and water and sewer are red, orange, and blue respectively. Shift changes are shown in purple and are a good visual reminder of where we are in time, as they fall in groups in 8 or 12 hour increments. Most anything else referring to the quake, rescue activities, and other related issues not having to do with the other categories are tagged in green. Chit chat (that may have an interesting point in the narrative or later questions) are tagged in yellow as unknown. This baseline tweetfall shows not much going on at all for Roads, Power, and Water; regular shift changes, and a batch of Rescue tweets mostly referring to the HSS meeting.

The next tweetfall provides an initial baseline following the quake:

It shows a shift change and a gap right at the time of the quake. It is followed then by a stream of Rescue category tweets (mostly personal comments about things moving), and some references to the Roads and Power.

Next is the tweetfall from about 5 hours in:

Shortly after 1PM, there are tweets about problems with the water supplies, and then a set of tweets about the Bridge conditions leading from the island. Some of these tweets need to be carefully considered. Others, if they are from reliable sources should be acted on including:

2020-04-08 13:00:00,Scenic Vista,BusyHCouch2001,Water,"Department of Health and the St Himark Water and Sewer Department: Broken water and sewer pipes create of risk of contaminated drinking water. The following neighborhoods should boil their water: 4, 8,9,10,14."

2020-04-08 13:00:00,Downtown,HeathDept,Water,"Broken water and sewer pipes pose a risk of contaminated water. Neighborhoods Old Town, Safe Town, Scenic Vista, Broadview, Chapparal, Easton should boil their drinking water for 2 minutes."

2020-04-08 13:20:00,Downtown,DOT-StHimark,Roads,The 12th of July Bridge is closed until further notice. This is a @CuriousKBread precautionary action pending safety inspection.Use other routes. #FTWBridgeWonder

2020-04-08 13:20:00,Downtown,DOT-StHimark,Roads,The Friday Bridge is closed until further notice. This is a precautionary action pending safety inspection.Use other routes.

2020-04-08 13:20:00,Downtown,DOT-StHimark,Roads,The Tranky Doo Bridge isaftey closafteyed untillntil funtillrther notice. Thisaftey isaftey a precauntilltionary action pending safteyafety insafteypection.Usafteye other rountilltesaftey.

2020-04-08 13:20:00,Downtown,DOT-StHimark,Roads,The Jade Bridge is closed until further notice. This is a precautionary action pending safety inspection.Use other routes.

2020-04-08 13:20:00,Downtown,DOT-StHimark,Roads,The Magritte Bridge has is re-opened. Portions are one-lane. Please be courteous in your use.

2020-04-08 13:20:00,Downtown,DOT-StHimark,Roads,The Wilson Forest Highway has is re-opened. Please be courteous in your use.

2020-04-08 13:33:00,Cheddarford,DerekNolan,Unk,a power line just fell on my taxi. I love cheryl more than life and noe she's tangeld in the wires

2020-04-08 13:33:00,Scenic Vista,ChloeJohnson,Power,"My power jsutust went out! hecko, @AlwaysSafePowerCompany???"

2020-04-08 13:39:00,Downtown,TVHostBrad,Roads,"The electjhericitjhey wentjhe off in tjhehe following neighborhoods Old Town,Wilson Forestjhe,Scenic Vistjhea,Broadview"

2020-04-08 13:39:00,Safe Town,AlwaysSafePowerCompany,Power,"Hi folks! Weíre hearing your reports about power lines falling. Please contact your local electricity provider such as Himark Power to help restore electricity to your home! In the meantime, our volunteers are out and about rescuing our neighbors - donít forget to tune into channel Safe Town to see those relief efforts!"

2020-04-08 13:43:00,Downtown,TVHostBrad,Unk,People in danger can't contact the emergency number. Do something @AlwaysSafePowerCompany

2020-04-08 13:46:00,Old Town,OldTownHospital,Unk,"Hospithgeal is heavily damaged, no new pathgeienthges being admithgethgeed athge thgehis thgeime. The southgeh wing has been evacuathgeed thgeo thgehe northgeh wing, Basementhge flooded. Electhgeive surgeries canceled. Computhgeer systhgeem down"

At 30 hours after, rescue and repair are in full swing but more events occur:

There is a fairly large gap in the data around 1246p and from 2pm – 3pm, when, presumably, an aftershock occurs. Rescue tweets flow in, in response to this, during the 3pm hour. At this point, critical infrastructure must be rechecked.

020-04-09 12:42:00,Old Town,OldTownGirl,Unk,"As much as I hate the red tag policy, mobs are the last thing we need right now!"

2020-04-09 12:43:00,Chapparal,JackCuriousAtwell,Water,@A1963Norris Is the water we're walking through contaminated?

2020-04-09 15:03:00,Downtown,DOT-StHimark,Roads,The Magritte Bridge is closed until further notice. This is a precautionary action pending safety inspection.Use other routes. @FleetWilliamsCandy1967 (and other similar tweets)

Tweetfall allows examination of neighborhoods and individuals’ tweets, and as can be seen below, Wilson Forest has reported very little impact from all of the events.

2 – Identify at least 3 times when conditions change in a way that warrants a re-allocation of city resources. What were the conditions before and after the inflection point? What locations were affected? Which resources are involved? Limit your response to 1000 words and 10 images.

Example 1) Roads are degrading and bridges are potentially unsafe:

Prior to the 4-8 8AM quake, people were making comments about the usual traffic situation. After the quake and after people started discovering cracks in the Jade bridge, the Transportation department mobilized to all bridges (this includes the Himark Bridge that is sometimes the Tranky Doo Bridge). One tweet reported the 12^th od July bridge had collapsed. If this were true, you would expect many more comments about the event.

Example 2) Water is contaminated by sewer:

There is very little comment about water or sewer before the initial quake. By 4-8 930a, there is a tweet about a broken watermain. There is another tweet stating that the Fire Department is affected by low water pressure. On 4-8 at 10:10A, there is a tweet about a broken sewer pipe. At 1PM, the “HeathDept” from Downtown reports broken water and sewer mains for Old Town, Safe Town, Scenic Vista, Broadview, Chapparal, and Easton. On the 9^th, Always Safe joins the efforts handing out free water and food.

Example 3) Always Safe shuts down and power is lost:

After the quake, power lines started coming down and power was being intermittently lost. On 4-8 at 10AM, a tweet reports that the reactor has shut down (safely). After this there are more reports of power outages, but also reports of power being restored, so it is difficult to determine the actual state of the system.

3 – Take the pulse of the community. How has the earthquake affected life in St. Himark? What is the community experiencing outside the realm of the first two questions? Show decision makers summary information and relevant/characteristic examples. Limit your response to 800 words and 8 images.

Derek Nolan is experiencing high stress over all of the incidents related to the quake.

Derek has been the closest thing to an influencer in this scenario. He comments on everything from politics to the state of taxi driving. Only the DOT and Always Safe itself rates in the same level of interaction as Derek and a few of the others near the top of this list. The pulse of the city could just be taken from the reporting of these people.

Other official entities show up, but their interactions are very few.

Some institutions try to continue life as usual, but it doesn’t quite work. Terrapin Springs schools tried to hold their rodeo, but unfortunately, the conditions became too bad for it to happen.

2020-04-08 12:46:00,Terrapin Springs,Terrapin Springs Schools,Rescue," Remember folks, our student rodeo will last all week, earthquake or not. Come support our junior rodeo experts and watch our clowns in action"

2020-04-08 14:31:00,Cheddarford,TerrapinSpringsSchools,Unk, NOTICE: THIS WEEK's JUNIOR RODEO CANCELLED&gt;

2020-04-08 14:35:00,Cheddarford,TerrapinSpringsSchools,Unk, High School Gym is available for shelter. But please don't mess with the rodeo equipment.

Who exactly are HSS? There is a lot of interest in this organization, but they don’t exactly do anything. And they don’t have their own handle.

2020-04-07 06:26:00,Weston,CanAdoreThedore23,Rescue,I'm goin to the HSS meeting.

2020-04-07 06:35:00,Safe Town,GermanWrinkler43,Rescue,I'm going to the HSS meeting. #FTWHSSWonder

2020-04-07 07:07:00,Downtown,Social media handle,Rescue,I'm goin to the HSS meeting.

2020-04-07 07:11:00,Northwest,WatchAmbroseLearn,Rescue,I'm goin to the HSS meeting.

2020-04-07 07:48:00,Pepper Mill,RadCurieous,Rescue,I'm goin tgheo tghehe HSS meetgheing.

2020-04-07 07:56:00,<Location with-held due to contract>,SmartBBread,Rescue,"HSS will begin monitoring radiation levels around the Always Safe Nuclear Power Plant. Who are we? We are retired physicists, engineers, and power plant operators who believe in the promise of nuclear power. We adovcate for citizen science. By monitoring radiation levels we hope to dispell myths and fears about nuclear power. "

2020-04-07 08:00:00,<Location with-held due to contract>,DarkCandyWm_Wood,Shift,"HSS will start monitoring radiation levels around the Always Safe Nuclear Power Plant. Who are we? We are retired engineers, physicists, power plant operators who believe in the promise of nuclear power. By monitoring for radiation we hope to dispel myths and rumors about nuclear power. We believe in citizen science. we would love to hear what you think about HSS!"

2020-04-07 08:04:00,Cheddarford,PeppyPepper,Rescue, @HSS that sounds great. I'm a science geek - can I join?

2020-04-07 08:04:00,UNKNOWN,VeryPopularSingerLalisaManoban,Rescue,What is HSS

2020-04-07 08:05:00,West Parton,RachelSimmons,Rescue,HSS is tjehe real mvp #HSSisloveHSSislife

2020-04-07 08:07:00,Safe Town,FieldEngineerPhillipCarter,Rescue,Thanks HSS! This is such a meaningful work!

2020-04-07 08:11:00,Scenic Vista,SophistiCat,Rescue, HSS? Sounds like an angry snake.

2020-04-07 08:14:00,Old Town,WBusyThompson,Rescue,Whereís HSS now? Hope theyíre actually gonna be helpful!!

2020-04-07 09:06:00,Southwest,CanAdoreThedore23,Rescue,I'm going to the hss meeting.

2020-04-07 09:11:00,Weston,GermanWrinkler43,Rescue,I'm goin to the HSS meeting.

2020-04-07 10:04:00,Easton,CanAdoreThedore23,Rescue,Where is tonight's HSS meetup? #HSSWonder

2020-04-07 13:47:00,Chapparal,Social media handle,Rescue,Where is tonight's HSS meetup?

2020-04-07 14:29:00,Chapparal,WieldsMattoc,Rescue,Where is tonight's hss meetup?

2020-04-07 16:27:00,Scenic Vista,PeterLovesCrystals54,Rescue,I'm gonna be there to the hss meeting.

2020-04-07 16:57:00,Oak Willow,WatchAmbroseLearn,Rescue,I'm goin to the hss meeting.

2020-04-07 18:31:00,Downtown,WieldsMattoc,Rescue,I'm gonna be there to the HSS meeting.

2020-04-07 18:57:00,West Parton,WatchAmbroseLearn,Rescue,Time for the hss throw-down

2020-04-07 18:58:00,Palace Hills,CookWhatWhen81,Rescue,Time for the hss parlay

2020-04-07 19:00:00,Northwest,WatchAmbroseLearn,Rescue,Time for the hss parlay

2020-04-07 19:00:00,Chapparal,WatchAmbroseLearn,Rescue,Time for the hss parlay #FTWforWaste

2020-04-07 19:02:00,Scenic Vista,PeterLovesCrystals54,Rescue,Time for the hss throw-down. ( And so on…)

4 –– The data for this challenge can be analyzed either as a static collection or as a dynamic stream of data, as it would occur in a real emergency. Describe how you analyzed the data - as a static collection or a stream. How do you think this choice affected your analysis? Limit your response to 200 words and 3 images.

The tweets were analyzed both ways. Retrospective analysis typically enables you to pick out most of the areas of interest identified in questions 1-3. However, a real time stream allows you to understand what would be foremost on the minds of the response and rescue decision-makers at that point in time in the unfolding of the scenario. It can also show developing trends as they are forming.