Information Visualization for Knowledge Discovery

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 Spotfire, Smartmoney and Hivegroup.

Then it will cover recent research progress for visual exploration of large time series data applied to financial, medical, 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 and electronic health records. 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" (5th ed. March 2009, forthcoming) . 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) and won the IEEE book award for Distinguished Literary Contribution.