Ben Shneiderman

This open source network visualization tool, Network Overview for Discovery and Exploration in Excel, is embedded in Excel. This enables a much wider range of users to have convenient access to a richly featured platform with network metrics, dynamic query filters, and multiple layout strategies.

We developed information visualization tools for gene expression data analysis, including mosaics, hierarchical clustering, parallel coordinates, treemaps, and scattergrams.

BRQLayer is a photo viewer that generates Bi-level Radial Quantum (BRQ) layouts, which consist of a primary region surrounded by secondary regions. The thumbnails resize and the regions shift around dynamically as the layout is resized.

Several small projects relevant to Network Management (satellite network, business network).

Users can view and organize web search results using meaningful and stable hierarchies. This can help speed discovery, especially for exploratory searchs.

The 911.gov system would rely on the Internet and the mobile communication devices to allow citizens to receive and submit information about significant homeland security community problems. Based on lessons from recent natural catastrophes and the terror attacks of 9/11, telephone, radio, and television-based emergency response systems cannot meet all of the emergency response needs of communities. The combination of mobile telecommunications devices and the Internet in 911.gov, however, has the potential to provide higher capacity and more effective service, as well as create interactive communication mechanisms that can reach many more citizens and government officials simultaneously.

Dynamap is an interface designed to facilitate easier viewing and dynamic query sliders for analysis of map-related census data.

Visual interfaces containing multiple windows with control panels of sliders, radio buttons, check boxes, and other selectors became powerful ideas that led to the commercial success story, Spotfire. Dynamic queries were a natural application of direct manipulation, and supported the information seeking mantra of "Overview first, zoom & filter, then details-on-demand."

How to help earth scientists find the data they need.

Windows are organized in a hierarchical fashion on a space-filling tiled layout to support multiple window operations which enable fast task-switching and display reorganization.

A range of projects focused on visualizing archived email of individuals, and the organizational and social spaces to which they belong.

Query previews form a simple and effective method to eliminate most of the zero-hit and mega-hit queries and help users prune data efficiently. Generalized query previews supply distribution information on data attributes and give continuous feedback about the result size.

Genex is a framework (1998 CHI keynote) for an integrated set of software tools that support creativity in science, medicine, the arts, and beyond. It's four phases are: collect, create, consult, then disseminate.

Integration of data and interfaces to enhance human understanding of government statistics.

A list of HCIL projects related to Graph Visualization.

The Hierarchical Clustering Explorer began by supporting interactive exploration of clusters shown in dendrograms. It expanded to included the powerful rank-by-feature framework to support systematic discovery in high-dimensional multi-variate data.

Between 1987 and 1991 HCIL worked on a series of touchscreen projects for museum kiosks, home automation, and text data entry.

Summary of several projects conducted in cooperation with the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology.

Pioneering work on hypertext.

The goal of iOPENER (Information Organization for PENning Expositions on Research) is to generate readily-consumable surveys of different scientific domains and topics, targeted to different audiences and levels, e.g., expert specialists, scientists from related disciplines, educators, students, government decision makers, and citizens including minorities and underrepresented groups.

The Learning Historian record the history of user interaction with a simulation and allows this history to be replayed for review, sent with a message, used in a tutorial, or replayed as a series of variants to facilitate comparisons and explorations.

Prototypes for the American Memory collections.

LifeLines provide a general visualization environment for personal histories.

LifeLines is a zoomable one screen overview of a patient record.

Exploring temporal patterns in categorical data. We focus on Electronic Health Records and helping users find potential cause and effects phenomena in databases of patient records

ManyLists is a product comparison tool that compares products' features using Spatial Layouts with Animated Transitions.

ManyNets is a network visualization tool with tabular interface designed to visualize up to several thousand network overviews at once. This allows networks to be compared, and large networks to be explored using a divide-and-conquer approach.

Nation of Neighbors is Neighborhood Watch for the 21st century. It facilitates real-time collaboration within communities and between community members and Law Enforcement. Their mission is to enable Citizens and Law Enforcement to work together to fight and deter crime and improve our communities.

Network analysts may benefit from meaningful and stable layouts for nodes in 1-5 defined regions. Then users control link visibility to reduce clutter and see patterns of relationships. Our major application has been citations among U.S. Supreme, Circuit and District Court cases.

PairFinder creates visualizations of pairs of events from the temporal event sequences. As a first step toward generating hypotheses of causal relations, the goal of the project is efficient discovery of hypotheses of the associations between pairs of events.

Integrated interface for visual query and result-set visualization for search and discovery of temporal patterns within multivariate and categorical data sets.

Temporal Query Formulation and Result Visualization in Action

Sustained effort to develop personal photo library browsing tools, including the patented drag-and-drop annotation tool with search capabilities.

The QUIS is designed to assess users' subjective satisfaction with specific aspects of the human-computer interface.

We evaluated electronic classrooms used to support collaborative strategies for learning. The AT&T Teaching Theater and the IBM-TQM Teaching Theater provided an unusual opportunity to investigate the application of hypermedia and collaborative groupware to lecture and college seminar environments.

A proposed fourth generation user-centered design emphasizing users' roles, colleagues, and tasks rather than documents.

Science 2.0 is needed to study the integrated interdisciplinary problems at the heart of sociotechnical systems. Science 2.0 will be especially important to meet the design challenges in secure voting, global environmental protection, energy sustainability, and nternational development among many others.

Similan is a temporal categorical data analysis tool that helps users find similar records from temporal categorical data. By implementing similarity metric computation and adopting ideas from rank-by-feature framework to rank records by similarity, Similan provides an interactive interface to customize and visualize similarity search results.

An application framework for creating simulation-based learning environments.

Information visualizations with multiple coordinated views enable users to rapidly explore complex data and discover relationships. SNAP is a software tool for creating coordinated views.

SocialAction is a social network visualization that provides analysts systematic and flexible techniques for exploration.

Color coded maps (choropleth maps) are often used to present information such as unemployment rates for each state. An auditory version (sonification) of such maps benefit blind users by providing an interactive sonic map.

TimeSearcher 1 and 2 provide powerful search capabilities for numerical (integer or real) time series with equally spaced time points. Appropriate for gene expresssion, financial, weather, and many other time-varying data series. Users specify queries with innovative graphical timeboxes and pattern matching widgets

Treemap 4 provides information visualization tools for hierarchical data using a novel space filling approach. There are now dozens of commercial and freeware versions of treempas, and our research tools remain available for educational purposes.

Coordinated previews and overviews help find the right slice.

Working on legal information gave us a chance to test emerging ideas of visual displays for digital libraries. These working demonstrations expanded on the Spotfire ideas of dynamic queries, and added a grid interface to organize data by categorical attributes.

The table of contents of a website with indication of the amount and type of information behind each branch of the hierarchy.