Many challenging problems are characterized by incomplete, disparate, conflicting, and uncertain data that cannot be addressed easily through automated approaches—they need human insight.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) was an early pioneer of visual analytics, and we continue to create capabilities that combine interactive visualizations with advanced automated data analysis techniques, enabling users to gain deeper insights from their data. The Scalable Reasoning System (SRS) software framework addresses the challenge of making sense of archived or streaming data in near real-time. SRS has been deployed in support of law enforcement, biosurveillance, and asset management. Initial application of the system has shown success in open source analysis, cybersecurity, and patent analysis. 

Our information visualization research leads to tools and capabilities that create powerful partnerships between users and their systems. Our visualizations display meaningful and easy-to-interpret patterns of real-time operations center data to support decision-making and enable insight into emergent conditions. GeoVisor, explores the feasibility of operationalizing the analysis of complex data in an immersive environment. Data visualizations are correlated to a central geographic information system in virtual reality. GeoVisor is just one example of how we are exploring new methods to immerse users in multivariate data to spark insight and aid analysts in telling the story of their data.

We have applied our research to improve the operation of critical infrastructures, optimize high-performance computations, identify anomalous behavior, discover communities of interest, and discover patterns of activities in human enterprises.