Hitachi Distinguished Lecture Series

Hitachi Distinguished Lecture Series in Computer Science

The next lecture will be held:

 Wednesday, March 26, 2014 

at 4:30 PM in DEH 120.

Speaker:  Dr. Ben Shneiderman

Abstract:  Interactive information visualization tools provide researchers with remarkable capabilities to support discovery.  These telescopes for high-dimensional data combine powerful statistical methods with user-controlled interfaces.  Users ca begin with an overview, zoom in on areas of interest, filter out unwanted items, and then click for details-on-demand.  With careful design and efficient algorithms, the dynamic queries approach to data exploration provides 100msec updates even for million-item visualizations that can represent billion-record databases.  The Big Data initiatives and commercial success stories such as Spotfire and Tableau, plus widespread use by prominent sites such as the New York Times have made  visualization a key technology.  The central theme is the integration of statistics with visualization as applied for time series data such as (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/eventflow), and social network data (www.codeplex.com/nodexl).  By temporal pattern search & replace and network motif simplification complex data streams can be analyzed to find meaningful patterns and important exceptions.

Bio:  Ben Shneiderman is a Distinguished University 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 is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and IEEE, and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, in recognition of his pioneering contributions to human-computer interaction and information visualization.  His contributions include the direct manipulation concept, clickable web-link, touchscreen keyboards, dynamic query sliders for Spotfire, development of treemaps, innovtive network visualization strategies for NodeXL, and temporal event sequence analysis for electronic health records.  Ben is the co-author with Catherine Plaisant of Designing the User Interface:  Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (5th ed., 2010) hhtp://www.awl.com/DTUI/.  With Stu Card and Jock Mackinlay, he co-authored Readings in Information Visualization:  Using Vision to Think (1999).  His book Leonardo's Laptop appeared in October 2002 (MIT Press) and won the IEEE book award for Distinguished Literary Contribution.  His latest book, with Derek Hansen and Marc Smith, is Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL (www.codeplex.com/nodexl, 2010).