Test your tools / Sharpen your problem solving skills / Win prizes VAST 2006 CONTEST A tale of Alderwood (Part of IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics and Technology 2006) www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/VASTcontest06 The VAST Contest is a participation category of the IEEE VAST 2006 Symposium. It continues in the footsteps of the InfoVis contests with its purpose to promote the development of benchmarks for visual analytics and establish a forum to advance evaluation methods. The dataset consists mostly of news stories from Alderwood's city newspaper, along with some multimedia materials and background information. The goal is to determine if inappropriate activities are taking place and to provide evidence based hypotheses and conclusions. Participants will have several months to prepare their submissions. Selected entries will present at the conference, and some teams will be invited to participate in a special workshop before the conference, during which professional analysts will interact with the winners' systems and provide personal feedback. DATASET, TASKS AND SCORING METHODOLOGY are now posted Important Dates July 15th Deadline for submission August 14th Acceptance notification Oct 31st / Nov 2nd 2006 IEEE VAST Symposium in Baltimore, MD Contest Chairs Georges Grinstein, University of Massachusetts Lowell Catherine Plaisant, University of Maryland Jean Scholtz, National Institute of Standards and Technology Mark Whiting, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/VASTcontest06