October 10, 2014
Interactive information visualization tools provide researchers with remarkable capabilities to support discovery from Big Data resources. Users can begin with an overview, zoom in on areas of interest, filter out unwanted items, and then click for details-on-demand. 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 to support user discovery. Our work focuses on temporal event sequences such as found in electronic health records (), and social network data such a twitter discussion patterns (). The talk closes with 8 Golden Rules for Big Data.
BEN SHNEIDERMAN () is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory () 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, innovative 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) http://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 (, 2010).