Winner Announcement

Winners were announced on 3rd May during the Global Analytics Summit in Copenhagen. See below for winners and notable entries.

Thanks to everyone for all of the amazing submissions to the 2019 AlphaZetta Data Art Competition. It was an extraordinary response and our global judging panel were taken aback by the quality, range and thoughtfulness of all of the entrants.

There were a number of truly excellent examples of how visualisation can convey some very complex and powerful messages. After long consideration, discussion and voting across the global panel of judges we are now very happy to announce that the winners have been selected and notified individually of their success. We look forward to seeing those that didn’t make it to Copenhagen at our soon to be announced, next Global Analytics Summit.

We would like to thank everyone for their participation and for sharing their work and their patience as the judging panel worked through and discussed all of the entrants. Given the response we are very keen to rerun the competition for our next summit at the end of year for the next Global Analytics Summit in December 2019.

Thanks once again to everyone who participated and to the judges from around the world who helped us to determine the winners. The winning entries are showcased below, along with some notable others.

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1st Prize – Cryptocurrency Transactions

Thomas Silkjær

Aarhus, Denmark

Description

A vast universe, a galaxy of stars and intergalactic haze, may be the first thing striking your mind upon opening this spread. Looking a little closer, you will discover that strings connect the millions of tiny dots, and suddenly you see an order in the chaos.

Visualising connectivity and relationships between all accounts on the XRP ledger (cryptocurrency). Relationships are formed by 1 or more payment made, and nodes are sized based on account balance.

The visualisation shows roughly 1.4 million accounts and 2.6 million payment relationships. Removing the relationship layer, landscape forms and reveals holes punched by high-traffic accounts, such as accounts belonging to cryptocurrency exchanges and other virtual asset service providers.

Using the interactive version, it is easy for XRP users to locate their own accounts in the huge network, or start exploring what the many small clusters are all about.

The goal was to create art from data. The value provided is curiosity, but it also helps the viewer appreciate the scale and complexity of the cryptocurrency market.

Full story: https://xrpcommunity.blog/the-full-xrp-ledger-visualized/
Interactive version: https://hexe6y4.dlvr.cloud/Index.html

Prize: Thomas won flights, accommodation and conference ticket to attend the 2019 AlphaZetta Global Analytics Summit in Copenhagen.

Equal 2nd Prize – Status of coral reef and fish populations in the Pacific

Jan Willem Tulp

Netherlands

Description

Interactive URL: https://knowledge.figshare.com/noaa/

A visualization for FigShare that was used as an example to illustrate what can be done using visualization to represent data available on the FigShare platform. The data comes from NOAA and is about the status of the coral reef and fish population in the Pacific where researchers take measurements every year. The visualization allows researchers to explore the data interactively and discover trends at various locations.

Equal 2nd Prize – LIGO Supernova Collision

James Pricer

Austin, TX, USA

Description

The business and human value of the my artwork is that it tells a story based on an emotional response to the data. Research shows that humans remember data that is accompanied by an emotional response.

My video ‘LIGO’ is an animated abstraction of data received at The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The data are gravity waves generated when two supernovas collided twenty million years ago, forming a rip in the universe’s space/time.

Unlike the typical data visualization that is merely a quick visual read of some underlying spreadsheet, my abstract data-driven videos create a sensation in the audience that leads the viewer to ask what is causing this emotional response. What is the story behind this reaction? Then, what data is creating this story?

Just as LIGO is inundated with data, all corporations and persons are swimming in a data flood. My artwork is an attempt to communicate the stories behind these data in order to create a path into a deeper understanding of the meaning of the information.

Note: My own path to this artwork follows my careers as data miner, data architect, and data artist.

I sent a single frame from the video. The video is too large to upload, so here is the link for viewing:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/k5zbptv8s7xlbmc/LIGO-2.mov?dl=0

Equal 2nd Prize –  How a high rise building moves during a storm

Jan Willem Tulp

Rijswijk, Zuid Holland, Netherlands

Description

Although this visualisation was eventually used for marketing purposes, it is based on actual engineering data. The visualisation was created for RWDI, a Canadian company that constructs high rise buildings. This particular visualisation is based on data of a simulation of how a high rise building moves during a storm, as well as the motion of the damper inside the building that reduces the effect of the storm on the building.

Other notable entries

Sustainable Cities

Nathalie Richer

Spain

Description

Urban cities need to act in fighting climate change, and a way to improve the sustainabiity of cities is to grow trees and urban forests.

In addition to their beauty, and their relaxing effects, trees are natural air conditioner, they can cool cities between 2 and 8 degres during summer. Trees located near buildings, can reduce air conditioning use by 30%, as well as heating energy use by 20%.

Urban forests are efficient to clean the air from pollution, to absorb CO2 (reducing greenhouse gases) and produce oxygen. Trees reduce flood risks, absorbing water and provide habitats for many species (birds, insects, animals).

Trees provide health, environmental and economical benefits, to increase sustainability in cities it is necessary to plant as many trees as possible. For this reasons, I started a serie of visualisation of trees map in the european cities, with Paris and Barcelona to begin with, built with Tableau.

Interactive versions are published on Tableau: Paris and Barcelona

How it might help to drive positive change:

Once city resident know about the many services that trees provide – from health to the micro-climate and even energy savings – they are likely to value them more, and could start to advocate for tree-planting. The data visualization enables them to see where and how their city could become greener, and provides them with a means of showing and interesting others. Being able to zoom into neighbourhoods (Paris visualisation) make this an even more effective tool.

Run Maps of San Diego, Helsinki and Kathmandu

Saurav Dhungana

Craft DataLabs

Kathmandu City, Nepal

Description

The idea for these visualizations came to me as a way to see the best jogging places in some of the cities I’ve lived in. I scrapped the running location data for three cities Kathmandu, Helsinki and San Diego from a popular website used to track and share your runs. The visualization was created using google maps and R. Since many runners used the same route, the opacity of each point plotted was reduced. This had a nice effect of showing the most popular routes with brighter hues.

The San Diego map was showcased in the local Knime meetup and subsequently used by local authorities to plan runner friendly routes where the map showed there weren’t many existing routes. So, there’s a nice public health use case behind that plot.

Saurav D data art sandiego
Saurav Dhungana data art kathmandu
Saurav Dhungana data art helsinki

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