024  |  The VAST Challenge: Visual Analytics Competitions with Synthetic Benchmark Data Sets

In this episode we talk about the VAST Challenge, a visual analytics contest organized every year. The VAST Challenge is co-located with the IEEE VIS Conference, the premier venue for academic work in visualization. The VAST Challenge has many unique features (like the generation of synthetic data sets with injected ground truth) and this year for the first time it features a predictive analytics and design mini-challenge. We talk with Prof. Georges Grinstein from UMass Lowell and Celste Paul from NSA. They give us lots of details about how the data is generated, how the entries are evaluated and how it looks like participating to the contest. You guys should actually give it a try and rock it!