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Email: ben@cs.umd.edu
Current Position: Professor, CS, ISR, UMIACS; Founding Director HCIL Academic Degree: Ph.D., SUNY at Stony Brook, 1973. Research Interests: Human-computer interaction, user interface design. |
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pictures of Ben Shneiderman University of Maryland Libraries: Papers of Dr. Ben Shneiderman Slide Presentations Video Presentations |
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Ben Shneiderman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and Member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park (full resume). He has taught previously at the State University of New York and at Indiana University. He was made a Fellow of the ACM in 1997, elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001, and received the ACM CHI (Computer Human Interaction) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. He was the Co-Chair of the ACM Policy 98 Conference, May 1998 and is the Founding Chair of the ACM Conference on Universal Usability, November 16-17, 2000. Ben Shneiderman's interest in creativity support tools led to organizing the June 2005 NSF workshop and to chairing the June 2007 Conference on Creativity & Cognition.
Dr. Shneiderman is the author of Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (1980). His comprehensive text Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (1st edition 1987, 2nd edition 1992, 3rd edition 1998, booksite Addison-Wesley Publishers, Reading, MA), came out in its 4th edition in April 2004 with Catherine Plaisant as co-author. The Fifth edition appeared in March 2009. His 1989 book, co-authored with Greg Kearsley, Hypertext Hands-On!, contains a hypertext version on two disks. He is the originator of the Hyperties hypermedia system, which was produced by Cognetics Corp., Princeton Junction, NJ.
Since 1991 his major focus has been information visualization, beginning with his dynamic queries and starfield display research that led to the development of Spotfire (Christopher Ahlberg, CEO). He was a Member of the of the Board of Directors (1996-2001). Spotfire grew to 200 employees and during Summer 2007 was bought by TIBCO. Dr. Shneiderman developed the treemap concept in 1991 which continues to inspire research and commercial implementations. The University of Maryland’s Treemap 4.0, developed in cooperation with Catherine Plaisant, has been licensed by the HiveGroup, and remains available for educational and research purposes. Dr. Shneiderman remains as a Technical Advisor for the Hivegroup and he was a Computer Science Advisor (1999-2002) to Smartmoney which implemented the widely used MarketMap for stock market analyses. He is a member of the Grokker Technology & Strategy Advisory Board.
Later information visualization work includes the LifeLines project for exploring a patient history, and its successor project, PatternFinder, which enables search across electronic medical records.We introduced the Align-Rank-Filter approach to temporal event data exploration and added group analysis features in LifeLines2. Searching for patterns in numerical time series data was enabled by three versions of TimeSearcher, which was applied for stock market, auction, genomic, weather, and other data.The Hierarchical Clustering Explorer supports discovery of features in multi-dimensional data, especially for gene expression data, using the powerful rank-by-feature framework.
Three current projects focus on network visualization: Network Visualization by Semantic Substrates, SocialAction, and NodeXL.These tools are being applied for citation analysis and social network analysis, especially for the iOpener project, STICK (Science Technology Innovation Concept Knowledge-base), and ManyNets (explore & visualize many networks at once) projects. A new research project, based on the 911.gov article in Science, is devoted to emergency and disaster response: Community Response Grids.
He is as Member of the Board of Scientific Counselors Meeting – National Library of Medicine Lister Hill Center, the National Academies Committee on Technical and Privacy Dimensions of Information for Terrorism Prevention and Other National Goals, and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Networking and Information Technology Technical Advisory Group (TAG). He is on the State of the USA Product Advisory Group and a member of the Web Science Research Initiative Advisory Committee.
In addition he has co-authored two textbooks, edited three technical books, published more than 200 technical papers and book chapters. His 1993 edited book Sparks of Innovation in Human-Computer Interaction collects 25 papers from the past 10 years of research at the University of Maryland. In 1999 he co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think with Stu Card and Jock Mackinlay, then in 2003 continued in this direction by co-authoring The Craft of Information Visualization: Readings and Reflections with Ben Bederson. Ben Shneiderman's vision of the future is presented in his October 2002 book Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies, won the IEEE 2003 award for Distinguished Literary Contribution. Leonardo's Laptop has been published in Chinese, Korean, and Portuguese editions.
Ben Shneiderman has been on the Editorial Advisory Boards of nine journals including the ACM Transactions on Computer- Human Interaction and the ACM Interactions. He edited the Ablex Publishing Co. book series on "Human-Computer Interaction." He has consulted and lectured for many organizations including Apple, AT&T, Citicorp, GE, Honeywell, IBM, Intel, Library of Congress, Microsoft, NASA, NCR, and university research groups.
Dr. Shneiderman's early work included database research including performance and index optimization. He is also known in software engineering, especially for his widely used innovation of structured flowcharts, commonly known as Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams. He teaches popular short courses on information visualization and has organized an annual satellite television presentation on User Interface Strategies seen by thousands of professionals from 1987 to 1997.
An important component of his work has been related to photography, including development of the Photofinder and PhotoMesa tools. His devotion to photography includes a long history of photographing professional events, which has resulted in the 3300 photos at the ACM SIGCHI PhotoHistory and the Univ. of Maryland Dept. of Computer Science PhotoHistory. The March/April 2007 issue of ACM Interactions has an 8-page portfolio of 100+ photos from the 25-year history of ACM CHI conferences.
Ben Shneiderman's devotion to photography is inspired by his uncle David Seymour (1911-1956), a world-famous photojournalist, whose biography is shown in web sites that Dr. Shneiderman helped design. The International Center of Photography hosts two of them (http://www.icp.org/chim http://www.icp.org/chim/bio) and a third web site has current information on exhibits and publications (http://www.davidseymour.com). Another family connection is the web site about his parents work, tied to the Univ. of Maryland's S.L. and Eileen Shneiderman Collection of Yiddish Books.
Ben Shneiderman's biography appears in Marquis's Who's Who in America and Who's Who in Science and Technology. He is listed among the top 1000 creative people in the USA in the book: 1000: Richard Wurman's Who's Really Who (2002).
Blog posting about my talks:
Yahoo! Developer Network Blog (February 19, 2009)
Cambridge Usability Group (March 5, 2009)
Blog postings about
Designing the User Interface, 5th Edition:
Visual Business Intelligence
(Stephen Few, March 2009)
SAP Design Guilde (Gerd Waloszek,
March 2009)
Usability News (Ann
Light, June 2009)
HCI User Advocate (Ben Bederson, May 2009)
Profile:
Scientific American: Humans Unite! Ben Shneiderman wants to make
computers into more effective tools -- by banishing talk about machine
intelligence (1999)
User Experience Pioneers (Interview by T. Adlin, July 2007)
Interview by Ivo Weevers & Wouter Sluis
(June 2004)
The New Computing
(Ubiquity, ACM Interview, 2003)
Between the Columns,
University of Maryland (March 2008)
Selected recent papers:
An
open letter to Obama, in support of social participation (Government Computer News, August 3, 2009)
National Initiative for Social Participation in Science (AAAS, March 13, 2009, Vol 323, No. 5920, 1426-1427)
Foreword to Handbook of Socio-Technical Systems and Social Networking
(February 2009)
Science 2.0: an article in Science (AAAS, March 7, 2008), describes a design science to study
web-based collaboration.
Press release,
Wired.com story
Web Science:
A Provocative Invitation to Computer Science
(CACM, June 2007)
Human-Centered Agenda for Discovery and
Innovation
Statement to
President's Council of Advisors on Science and
Technology (PCAST)
Subcommittee on Networking and Information Technology (Sept 2006)
Crisis and Opportunity in
Computer Science (w. M. Klawe, CACM, Oct, 2005)
Designing for Fun: How Can We Design User Interfaces to Be More Fun?
(2004)
Foreword: Information Visualization: Beyond the Horizon (Chen,
2004)
Promoting Universal Usability with Multi-Layer Interface Design (2003)
Why Not Make Interfaces Better than 3D Reality? (2003)
A Photo History of SIGCHI:
Evolution of Design from Personal to Public (2003)
Direct Annotation: A Drag-and-Drop Strategy for Labeling Photos (2000)
The Limits of Speech Recognition (2000)
Universal Usability: Pushing Human-Computer Interaction Research to Empower
Every Citizen (2000)
ACM's Computing Professionals Face New Challenges (A response to Sept 11)
(2002)
Designing Information-Abundant Websites (1997)
Relate-Create-Donate: A teaching/learning philosophy for the cyber-generation
(1997)
Information Visualization: White Paper (1997)
Student websites:
Information Visualization Course wiki (Fall 2009)
Information Visualization Course wiki (Spring 2008)
Undergraduate HCI Course wiki (Fall 2008)
Information Visualization Course wiki (Spring 2007)
Information Visualization Course (Spring 2006)
Undergraduate HCI Course (Fall 2006)
Undergraduate HCI Course (Fall 2005)
Universal Usability in Practice
Information Visualization seminar
Choosing HCI Appropriate Research Methods (CHARM)
Students HCI Online Research Experiments (SHORE) 2001
Early materials:
HCIL Draft (1999): Papers of Dr. Ben Shneiderman
Current Projects:
Network Visualization
Network Visualization by Semantic
Substrates
Network analysts may benefit from meaningful and stable layouts for nodes in 1-5
defined regions. Then users control link visibility to reduce clutter and see
patterns of relationships. Our major application has been citations among U.S.
Supreme, Circuit and District Court cases.
SocialAction
SocialAction is a social network visualization that provides analysts
systematic and flexible techniques for exploration.
Graph Visualization
A list of HCIL projects related to Graph Visualization.
NodeXL
This open source network visualization tool, Network Overview for Discovery and Exploration in Excel, is embedded in Excel. This enables a much wider range of users to have convenient access to a richly featured platform with network metrics, dynamic query filters, and multiple layout strategies.
Topic Summarization
iOPENER
The goal of iOPENER (Information Organization for PENning
Expositions on Research) is to generate readily-consumable surveys of different
scientific domains and topics, targeted to different audiences and levels, e.g.,
expert specialists, scientists from related disciplines, educators, students,
government decision makers, and citizens including minorities and
underrepresented groups.
Electronic Health Records Search & Visualization
Lifelines2
Exploring temporal patterns in categorical data. We focus on Electronic Health
Records and helping users find potential cause and effects phenomena in
databases of patient records
PatternFinder
Integrated interface for visual query and result-set visualization for search
and discovery of temporal patterns within multivariate and categorical data
sets.
PatternFinder in
AMALGA
Temporal Query Formulation and Result Visualization in Action
Similan: Finding Similar Records from Temporal
Categorical Data
Similan is a temporal categorical data analysis tool that helps users find
similar records from temporal categorical data. By implementing similarity
metric computation and adopting ideas from rank-by-feature framework to rank
records by similarity, Similan provides an interactive interface to customize
and visualize similarity search results.
Other Projects
Community Response Grids
The 911.gov system would rely on the Internet and the mobile communication
devices to allow citizens to receive and submit information about significant
homeland security community problems. Based on lessons from recent natural
catastrophes and the terror attacks of 9/11, telephone, radio, and
television-based emergency response systems cannot meet all of the emergency
response needs of communities. The combination of mobile telecommunications
devices and the Internet in 911.gov, however, has the potential to provide
higher capacity and more effective service, as well as create interactive
communication mechanisms that can reach many more citizens and government
officials simultaneously.
Science 2.0: Studying Collaboration in Socio-Technical Systems
Digital Docket
Our work aims to develop interfaces to help scholars in the humanities and
social sciences explore large text collections. We focus on the use of a
combination of content and meta data to visualize the collection and support
exploration.
Previous Projects
Bioinformatics Visualization
We developed information visualization tools for gene expression data analysis,
including mosaics, hierarchical clustering, parallel coordinates, treemaps, and
scattergrams.
BRQLayer
BRQLayer is a photo viewer that generates Bi-level Radial Quantum (BRQ) layouts,
which consist of a primary region surrounded by secondary regions. The
thumbnails resize and the regions shift around dynamically as the layout is
resized.
Business Network Monitoring
Visualization
Several small projects relevant to Network Management (satellite network,
business network).
Categorized Search Results
Users can view and organize web search results using meaningful and stable
hierarchies. This can help speed discovery, especially for exploratory searchs.
Dynamaps and Census Data User Interfaces
Dynamap is an interface designed to facilitate easier viewing and dynamic query
sliders for analysis of map-related census data.
Dynamic queries, starfield displays, and the path to Spotfire
Dynamic Query Interfaces for the EOSDIS Information
System
How to help earth scientists find the data they need.
Elastic Windows for Rapid
Multiple Window Management
Windows are organized in a hierarchical fashion on a space-filling tiled layout
to support multiple window operations which enable fast task-switching and
display reorganization.
EmailViz: Email Archive Visualization
A range of projects focused on visualizing archived email of individuals, and
the organizational and social spaces to which they belong.
Generalized Query Previews
Query previews form a simple and effective method to eliminate most of the
zero-hit and mega-hit queries and help users prune data efficiently. Generalized
query previews supply distribution information on data attributes and give
continuous feedback about the result size.
GENEX
Genex is a framework (1998 CHI keynote) for an integrated set of software tools
that support creativity in science, medicine, the arts, and beyond. It's four
phases are: collect, create, consult, then disseminate.
Govstat Project
Integration of data and interfaces to enhance human understanding of government
statistics.
Hierarchical Clustering Explorer
The Hierarchical Clustering Explorer began by supporting interactive exploration
of clusters shown in dendrograms. It expanded to included the powerful
rank-by-feature framework to support systematic discovery in high-dimensional
multi-variate data.
High-Precision Touchscreens:
Museum Kiosks, Home Automation and Touchscreen Keyboards
Between 1987 and 1991 HCIL worked on a series of touchscreen projects for museum
kiosks, home automation, and text data entry.
Highway Traffic Management
Summary of several projects conducted in cooperation with the Center for
Advanced Transportation Technology.
Hypertext Research: The Development of HyperTIES
Pioneering work on hypertext.
Learning Historian
The Learning Historian record the history of user interaction with a simulation
and allows this history to be replayed for review, sent with a message, used in
a tutorial, or replayed as a series of variants to facilitate comparisons and
explorations.
Library of Congress National Digital Library
Prototypes for the American Memory collections.
Lifelines for Juvenile Justice
(Original)
LifeLines provide a general visualization environment for personal histories.
LifeLines for Visualizing Patient Records
LifeLines is a zoomable one screen overview of a patient record.
PhotoFinder
Sustained effort to develop personal photo library browsing tools, including the
patented drag-and-drop annotation tool with search capabilities.
Questionnaire for User Interface Satisfaction (QUIS)
The QUIS is designed to assess users' subjective satisfaction with specific
aspects of the human-computer interface.
Research Issues in the Electronic
Classroom
We evaluated electronic classrooms used to support collaborative strategies for
learning. The AT&T Teaching Theater and the IBM-TQM Teaching Theater provided an
unusual opportunity to investigate the application of hypermedia and
collaborative groupware to lecture and college seminar environments.
Role Management
A proposed fourth generation user-centered design emphasizing users’ roles,
colleagues, and tasks rather than documents.
Simulated Processes in a Learning
Environment (SimPLE)
An application framework for creating simulation-based learning environments.
Snap-Together Visualization
Information visualizations with multiple coordinated views enable users to
rapidly explore complex data and discover relationships. SNAP is a software tool
for creating coordinated views.
Sonification of Maps
Color coded maps (choropleth maps) are often used to present information such as
unemployment rates for each state. An auditory version (sonification) of such
maps benefit blind users by providing an interactive sonic map.
TimeSearcher for Time-Series Data
TimeSearcher 1 and 2 provide powerful search capabilities for numerical (integer
or real) time series with equally spaced time points. Appropriate for gene
expresssion, financial, weather, and many other time-varying data series. Users
specify queries with innovative graphical timeboxes and pattern matching widgets
Treemap
Treemap 4 provides information visualization tools for hierarchical data using a
novel space filling approach. There are now dozens of commercial and freeware
versions of treempas, and our research tools remain available for educational
purposes.
Visible Human
Coordinated previews and overviews help find the right slice.
Visualizing Legal Information (Dotfire,
GRIDL)
Working on legal information gave us a chance to test emerging ideas of visual
displays for digital libraries. These working demonstrations expanded on the
Spotfire ideas of dynamic queries, and added a grid interface to organize data
by categorical attributes.
WebTOC: A Tool to Visualize and Quantify Web Sites
The table of contents of a website with indication of the amount and type of
information behind each branch of the hierarchy.