HCIL's early successes with information visualization was accelerated during the summer visits of Christopher Ahlberg who worked under Ben Shneiderman's guidance during 1991 and 1993.

HCIL's early successes with information visualization was accelerated during the summer visits of Christopher Ahlberg who worked under Ben Shneiderman's guidance during 1991 and 1993.One of the two key papers published in the 1994 ACM CHI Conference became the most widely referenced HCI paper, according to CiteSeer. Ahlberg formed Spotfire in 1996, and as CEO led it to a 200-person company, which was bought during summer 2007 by TIBCO. The HCIL-inspired Spotfire product is used by most pharmaceutical companies for drug discovery and genomic data analysis, and is increasing adopted for business intelligence analysis for oil/gas discovery, manufacturing control, marketing, supply chain management, and financial analysis.Ben Shneiderman participated in the formation of Spotfire and was on its Board of Directors 1996-2001.