We are thrilled to announce that Ben Shneiderman will be presenting on the subject he is perhaps best known for, 'Information Visualization', on Thursday 5th March at the fantastic Microsoft Research facility in Cambridge.

Most people reading this will know Ben Shneiderman. Last year he was recognised as one of the founding fathers of the field of Human-Computer Interaction with a whole special edition of the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction honouring his contribution to the field. This talk is a great opportunity to come along and hear what Ben has to say about Information Visualization.   Date: Thursday 5th March Time: 18.30 for 18.45 to 20.00 Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge ( Map & address - note that Cambridge is just 45 minutes from Kings Cross but you will need to get a taxi to get to Microsoft Research, or pack a Brompton). Registration: The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend (but please be aware that there are limited places so registration in advance is essential)

ABSTRACT

Interactive information visualization tools provide researchers with remarkable capabilities to support discovery. By combining powerful data mining methods with user-controlled interfaces, users are beginning to benefit from these potent telescopes for high-dimensional data. 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, and genomic data (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/timesearcher ).

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 (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hce). 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 and electronic health records (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/lifelines2). Demonstrations will be shown.

BEN SHNEIDERMAN (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a 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 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" (5th ed. March 2009, forthcoming) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/.  With S. Card and J. Mackinlay, he co-authored "Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think" (1999).  With Ben Bederson he co-authored “The Craft of Information Visualization” (2003). His book “Leonardo’s Laptop” appeared in October 2002 (MIT Press) (http://mitpress.mit.edu/leonardoslaptop) and won the IEEE book award for Distinguished Literary Contribution.