The VAST Challenge: history, scope, and outcomes: An introduction to the Special Issue

The annual Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) challenge provides Visual Analytics researchers, developers, and designers an opportunity to apply their best tools and techniques against invented problems that include a realistic scenario, data, tasks, and questions to be answered. Submissions are processed much like conference papers, contestants are provided reviewer feedback, and excellence is recognized with awards. A day-long VAST Challenge workshop takes place each year at the IEEE VAST conference to share results and recognize outstanding submissions. Short papers are published each year in the annual VAST proceedings. Over the history of the challenge, participants have investigated a wide variety of scenarios, such as bioterrorism, epidemics, arms smuggling, social unrest, and computer network attacks, among many others. Contestants have been provided with large numbers of realistic but synthetic Coast Guard interdiction records, intelligence reports, hospitalization records, microblog records, personal RFID tag locations, huge amounts of cyber security log data, and several hours of video. This paper describes the process for developing the synthetic VAST Challenge datasets and conducting the annual challenges. This paper also provides an introduction to this special issue of Information Visualization, focusing on the impacts of the VAST Challenge.