Ben Shneiderman, professor and head of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, will make a presentation titled "The Eyes Have It: User Interfaces for Information Visualization" Thursday, April 8, at 2 p.m. in 100 Caldwell Hall. The presentation, which is free and open to the public, is co-sponsored by the Cornell Library and the Department of Communication.
Human perceptual skills are remarkable but are largely underutilized by current graphical user interfaces (GUIs). According to Shneiderman, the next generation of animated GUIs and visual data mining tools can provide users with remarkable capabilities if designers follow what he calls 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, he says, "direct manipulation: visual representation of the objects and actions of interest and rapid, incremental and reversible operations" and "dynamic queries: user controlled query widgets, such as sliders and buttons, that update the result set within 100 msec." These principles are shown in the Film Finder, Visible Human Explorer (for the National Library of Medicine's anatomical data), NASA EOSDIS (for environmental data), and Life Lines (for medical records and personal histories).
Shneiderman's most recent book (January 1999), co-authored with Stuart Card and Jock Mackinlay, is Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think. Shneiderman also 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 (1998). He has co-authored two textbooks, edited three technical books and published more than two hundred technical papers and book chapters.
Shneiderman received a B.S. from City College of New York in 1968 and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1973. He received an honorary doctorate of science from the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, in 1996 and was elected a fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM) in 1997.
This is the third Cornell Library Information Technology Forum. These presentations bring outstanding practitioners in the information technology field to Cornell in support of the university's campuswide initiative to enhance information science research and instruction.
For more information, contact Edward Weissman at 255-5754, esw3@cornell.edu, or Geri Gay at 255-7737, gkg1@cornell.edu.
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