VAST 2008 Challenge: Social network dynamics using cell phone call patterns

This paper is a summary of the contest entry submitted to the VAST contest 2008 mini challenge 3. The primary task of the mini chal- lenge was to characterize the Catalno/Vidro social network based on the cell phone call data provided and to characterize the tem- poral changes in the social structure over the ten day period. This paper summarizes the data analysis performed on the synthetic data set provided, describes the visualization algorithms and tools em- ployed and the key observations from our analysis. We use Tulip (1) for exploring the data set. Tulip is a scalable and flexible framework for visualizing large graphs providing the user an easy platform for exploring and manipulating large networks.