4 October 2007

The Thrill of Discovery: Information Visualization for High-Dimensional Spaces
Ben Shneiderman
University of Maryland
3:30-4:30
ECCR 265

Interactive information visualization provides researchers with remarkable tools for discovery. By combining powerful
data mining methods with user-controlled interfaces, users are beginning to benefit from these potent telescopes for
high-dimensional spaces. They can 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 can provide 100msec updates even for million-record databases.

This talk will start by reviewing the growing commercial success stories such as www.spotfire.com,
www.smartmoney.com/marketmap and www.hivegroup.com. Then it will cover recent research progress for visual exploration
of large time series data applied to financial, medical, eBay auction, and genomic data.

Our next step was to combine these key ideas to produce the Hierarchical Clustering Explorer 3.0 that now includes
the rank-by-feature framework. By judiciously choosing from appropriate ranking criteria for low-dimensional
axis-parallel projections, users can locate desired features of higher dimensional spaces. Finally, these
strategies of unifying statistics with visualization are applied to network data. Demonstrations will be shown.

Ben Shneiderman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the
Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association
for Computing (ACM) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001.
He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

Ben is the author of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (4th ed. April 2004).
With Stuart Card and Jock Mackinlay, he co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999).
With Ben Benderson he co-authored The Craft of Information Visualization (2003). His book Leonardo's Laptop appeared in
October 2002 (MIT Press) and won the IEEE book award for Distinguished Literary Contribution.

Last modified 2 October 2007 at 3:29 pm by gerhard