2008 InfoVis Contest

Call For Participation

October 19-24, 2008 - Columbus, Ohio, USA

Are the tools we use to understand our data scalable to the tens of millions of records, huge spans of time, minute details of behavior, and large geographic extent that future sensor networks will generate? In the future buildings will be studded with sensors. Every movement will generate a few bits of data. Every fluctuation in temperature will be recorded. Every deviation in lighting will be noticed. These large and complex datasets will challenge the tools we use today.

Looking into the future of residential and office buildings Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) has been collecting motion sensor data from a network of over 200 sensors since March 2006. This data is the residual trace from the people working in our research laboratory. It contains interesting spatio-temporal structure ranging all the way from the seconds of individuals walking down hallways, the minutes in lobbies chatting with colleagues, the hours of dozens of people attending talks and meetings, the days and weeks that drive the patterns of life, to the months and seasons with their ebb and flow of visiting employees.

In 2007 we released a public data set containing well over 30 million raw motion records, spanning a calendar year and two floors of our research laboratory. We believe it presents a significant challenge for behavior analysis, search, manipulation and visualization. We have also prepared accompanying analytics such as partial tracks and behavior detections, as well as map data and anonymous calendar data marking the pattern of meetings, vacations and holidays.

We are honored that the Contest Co-chairs have chosen our dataset as the basis of the 2008 InfoVis Contest. If you are part of the InfoVis community (and also if not!) we invite you to download the data and apply your analytic, visualization, and interface tools.

Learn more about the data.

- Chris and Yuri