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Start of funding 01.07.2014

Sunbeam - Supporting Big Data Exploration by NoSQL Technologies

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Visual Analytics aims at providing the best breed of automated, electronic and human data processing capabilities. Thereby, visualization poses the intermediary part in a semi-automated analytic process allowing to incorporate the respective, custom capabilities of humans and machines in a way that takes into account the strengths of both. In our project we leverage Visual Analytics to explore Big (Security) Log Data. At this juncture, we identified the need for a highly integrated end-to-end analysis pipeline bridging the gap between used technologies and the human analyst.

One promising approach to reach this goal is the integration of traditional database models and visualization data models. On the one hand, this allows for direct visualization of database contents. On the other hand, visualization models can be stored without expensive transformation procedures. The objective of our joint research is therefore the design of an integrated model that fulfils these requirements.

Final report:
The collaboration between the University of Regensburg and Couchbase Inc. in the project “SUNBEAm” aimed at developing a general framework for pre-processing log data and depicting the resulting models in interactive visualizations. The prototype designed supports the analysis of security-relevant log data for attack detection, prevention and preservation of evidence (IT forensics). The funding through BaCaTec included two visits of three PhD students at Couchbase in Mountain View, CA.

The first visit took place in the week of September 29th, 2014. During a five-day visit at Couchbase’s headquarter in Mountain View, the project objectives were defined in several meetings with the corresponding domain experts. Identified milestones included, for instance, the development of a reference architecture as well as a formal description and execution of attacks which form the knowledge base necessary for the development of a visualization cockpit.

During the one-year project work between the first and the second visit in 2015, one Master thesis as well as two seminar papers were written in this context. In order to bring both project teams up-to-data on a regular basis, we held several Skype meetings. Furthermore, a physical meeting took place in March 2015 at a Couchbase developer conference in London.

At the second five-day visit in the week of August 24th 2015, we presented the project outcomes in several meeting with all project members involved. All objectives were met according to the project plan. Moreover, all open questions and issues could be solved on-site in Mountain View.

In this first collaboration between University of Regensburg and Couchbase, the basis for an enhanced cooperation in context of a follow-up project was built.