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Sub‐national governments across the United States implement a variety of policies to address large societal problems and needs. Many policies are picked up or adopted in other states. This process is called policy diffusion and allows researchers to analyse and compare the social, political, and contextual characteristics that lead to adopting certain policies, as well as the efficacy of these policies once adopted. In this paper, we introduce PDViz, a visual analytics approach that allows social scientists to dynamically analyse the policy diffusion history and underlying patterns. It is designed for analysing and answering a list of research questions and tasks posed by social scientists in prior work. To evaluate our system, we present two usage scenarios and conduct interviews with domain experts in political science. The interviews highlight that PDViz provides the result of policy diffusion patterns that align with their domain knowledge as well as the potential to be a learning tool for students to understand the concept of policy diffusion.

 

Traditionally, distribution system operators had limited visibility beyond distribution system substations. It was not unusual for electric utilities to have insufficient information about the network and phase connectivity model for the distribution system. This resulted in limited situational awareness at the distribution system level. In this paper, a visual analytics approach to gleaning intelligence from the vast amounts of data accumulated in the distribution system is proposed. The web-based visual analytics interface integrates data from heterogeneous datasets such as AMI, GIS and SCADA. The interface is designed to enable distribution system operators visualize and analyze the state of the distribution system over time. This paper presents the use of the visual analytics system to identify mismatched meter-to-transformer associations and to visualize voltage violations in a real-world distribution network.