Ben Shneiderman
Information Visualization for Knowledge Discovery: Success Stories and Grand Challenges

Wednesday, October 10 2007
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Interactive information visualization tools provide researchers with remarkable capabilities for discovery. By combining powerful data mining methods with user-controlled interfaces, users can tackle problems from traditional disciplines as well as the modern interdisciplinary problems that demand integration of multiple data sources, innovative strategies, and intense collaboration.

This talk starts by reviewing the growing success stories of information visualization for multi-dimensional, hierarchical, temporal, and network data with products such as www.spotfire.com, www.smartmoney.com/marketmap and www.hivegroup.com. Promising research will be shown for visual exploration of large time series data applied to financial, medical, and genomic data (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/timesearcher ). The Hierarchical Clustering Explorer 3.0 (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hce) allows users to choose ranking criteria for low-dimensional axis-parallel projections, enabling them to locate desired features of higher dimensional spaces. Finally, these strategies of unifying statistics with visualization are applied to network data.

Ben Shneiderman (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/) at the University of Maryland. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (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 "Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction" (4th ed. April 2004) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/ 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) and won the IEEE book award for Distinguished Literary Contribution.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Ben Kobler