News & Events

April 26, 2001: User Interfaces for Information Visualization

Dr. Ben Shneiderman
Thursday, April 26, 2001 from 5:00-6:30PM in GSEIS room 111 [pdf]

"The Eyes Have It: User Interfaces for Information Visualization"

Lecture synopsis:
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.

But this is only a starting point in the path to understanding the rich set of information visualizations that have been proposed. Two other landmarks are:

Direct manipulation: visual representation of the objects and actions of interest and rapid, incremental, and reversible operations.
Dynamic queries: user controlled query widgets, such as sliders and buttons, that update the result set within 100msec. and are shown in the FilmFinder, American Memory (for Library of Congress), NASA (for environmental data), LifeLines (for medical records and personal histories), Spotfire (commercial multidimensional visualization tool), and Smartmoney marketmap (stock data). As a guide to research, information visualizations can be categorized in to 7 datatypes (1-, 2-, 3-dimensional data, temporal and multi-dimensional data, and tree and network data) and 7 tasks (overview, zoom, filter, details-on-demand, relate, history, and extract). Research directions include algorithms for rapid display update with millions of data points, strategies to explore vast multi-dimensional spaces of linked data, and design of advanced user controls.

Some background information on Dr. Shneiderman:

Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and Member of the Institutes for Advanced Computer Studies and for Systems Research, all at the University of Maryland at College Park.
Author of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (third edition 1998), Addison-Wesley Publishers, Reading, MA. His current work on information visualization has led to a commercial product called Spotfire. A collection of 47 key papers with extensive commentary - Using Vision to Think - appeared in January 1999 (with S. Card and J. Mackinlay).
On the Board of Directors of Spotfire Inc. and has been on the Editorial Advisory Boards of nine journals. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada in 1996 and was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM) in 1997 and the AAAS in 2001.

This lecture is sponsored by UCLA-ASIS and LACASIS. Refreshments will be provided, hope to see you there!

Thursday, April 26, 2001 from 5:00-6:30PM
Room 111, GSE&IS bldg, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA