Computer Science/Computing and Information Science
Joint Colloquium
Thursday, September 25, 2003
4:15 PM
B17 Upson Hall

Dr. Ben Shneiderman
University of Maryland

The Eyes Have It:  User Interfaces for Information Visualization

Human perceptual skills are remarkable, but largely underutilized by current graphical user interfaces.  The next generation of animated GUIs and visual data mining tools can provide users with remarkable capabilities if designers follow the Visual Information-Seeking Mantra:

     Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand

Then dynamic queries allow user control of widgets, such as sliders and buttons that update the result set within 100msec.  Seven types of information visualizations (1-, 2-, 3-, multi-dimensional data, temporal, tree and network data). Demos include multi-dimensional data in dynamic scattergrams (www.spotfire.com), geographic presentations in dynamic choropleth maps, and time series data applied to financial and genomic data (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/timesearcher).

Examples of hierarchical data presentations include treemaps for stock market data (www.smartmoney.com/marketmap), production monitoring/product catalogs (www.hivegroup.com), and Census data. Demonstrations will be shown.

BEN SHNEIDERMAN (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/), and Member of the Institutes for Advanced Computer Studies & for Systems Research, all at the University of Maryland at College Park.  He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001.  He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

Ben is the author of "Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems" (1980) and "Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction" (4th ed. April 2004) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/.  He pioneered the highlighted textual link in 1983, and it became part of Hyperties, a precursor to the web.   With S. Card and J. Mackinlay, he co-authored "Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think" (1999).  With Ben Bederson he co-authored “The Craft of Information Visualization” (2003). His book “Leonardo’s Laptop” appeared in October 2002 (MIT Press) (http://mitpress.mit.edu/leonardoslaptop).