Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant win Test of Time Awards at IEEE VISualization Conference

Along with Distinguished University Professor Ben Shneiderman and Dr. Catherine Plaisant, members of the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) will receive two Test of Time Awards at the IEEE VISualization Conference which is being held in Baltimore from Oct 24-28. 

For their work from 2006 entitled, A Visual Interface for Multivariate Temporal Data: Finding Patterns of Events across Multiple Histories, Professor Ben Shneiderman, Professor Jerry Fails, Dr. Amy Karlson, and Dr. Layla Shahamat received the first VAST Conference Test of Time Award.  

This particular award goes to a paper from the conference 10 years ago that has had a significant impact in terms of citations, influence, uptake and overall effect on the visual analytics community.  The team who published this paper started working on it in a Spring 2005 course on Information Visualization.  Jerry Fails is an Associate Professor at Boise State University, Amy Karlson worked for Microsoft Research, and Layla Shahamat works as a Senior Software Developer for ISN Corporation. Working with Catherine Plaisant, undergraduate research student Stanley Lam implemented a later variation of this project which was then used in collaborative research with physicians at Washington Hospital Center. That research led to a paper in the 2008 American Medical Informatics Association Conference.

The second paper to win the Test of Time Award is Strategies for evaluating information visualization tools:  Multi-dimensional In-depth Long-term Case studies (MILCs)  by Professor, Ben Shneiderman and Dr. Catherine Plaisant.

In this paper, Shneiderman and Plaisant suggest that controlled experiments were insufficient for understanding the long-term usage by knowledgeable domain experts. This case study evaluation strategy has become widely used by HCIL PhD students. The ACM lists 2693 downloads and 99 citations for this paper, while Google Scholar shows 353 citations. Shneiderman cites his close partnership with Research Scientist Dr. Catherine Plaisant and the dissertations work of other CS students as important to the evolution and refinement of the ideas. These students include Harry Hochheiser, Jinwook Seo, David Wang, Krist Wongsuphasawat, Cody Dunne, John Guerra-Gomez, Megan Monroe, and Sana Malik.

“These efforts strongly contributed to HCIL’s growing success story in developing event analytics tools, such as EventFlow,”said Shneiderman.

Finally, Professor Ben Shneiderman and Dr. Catherine Plaisant have also been honored with BELIV’s 2016 Impact Award for their work "Strategies for Evaluating Information Visualization Tools: Multi-dimensional In-depth Long-term Case Studies.” This paper is the most viewed, downloaded, and cited in the history of the conference.   Shneiderman and Plaisant originally presented this paper at a conference entitled Beyond Time And Errors: Novel Evaluation Methods For Visualization.