ASIS Lecture: The Eyes Have It: User Interfaces for Information Visualization

[Linda Salem]

ASIS Lecture * ASIS Lecture * ASIS Lecture * ASIS Lecture * ASIS 
Lecture * ASIS Lecture * ASIS Lecture

Dr. Ben Shneiderman

Thursday, April 26, 2001 from 5-6:30 in GSEIS room 111

"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 and is free. 
Registration is not required. Refreshments will be provided.



Directions to the GSE&IS Building, UCLA
GSE&IS is located at the north end of the UCLA Campus next to the 
Young (formerly University) Research Library (see 
http://www.ucla.edu/map/north.html). From the 405 freeway take the 
Sunset Blvd. exit and go east. Turn right on Westwood Plaza into the 
campus. Stop at the parking and information kiosk and tell the 
parking attendant that you are attending an event in the GSE&IS 
building. You can purchase a one-day parking permit for $6.00 and 
will be given parking directions and directions to the Library.

For more complete directions to UCLA, consult: 
http://www.transportation.ucla.edu/parking/spdirect.htm