Interactive information visualization tools provide researchers with remarkable capabilities to support discovery. These telescopes for high-dimensional data combine powerful statistical methods with user-controlled interfaces. Users 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-item visualizations that can represent billion-record databases.

This talk reviews the growing commercial success stories such as www.spotfire.com, www.smartmoney.com/marketmap and www.hivegroup.com.
and research tools for time series data such as (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/timesearcher ).

The central theme is the integration of statistics with visualization as applied to temporal event sequences such as electronic health records (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/lifelines2 and www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/lifeflow)  and social network data (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/socialaction and www.codeplex.com/nodexl).

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, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001, and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2010.  He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

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).  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.  His latest book, with Derek Hansen and Marc Smith, is Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL (www.codeplex.com/nodexl, 2010).