Ben Shneiderman

Infobox_Scientist
name = Ben Shneiderman

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birth_date = Birth date and age|1947|8|21|mf=y
birth_place = New York, NY
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residence = Washington, DC
citizenship = USA
nationality = USA
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field = Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Visualization
work_institution = University of Maryland, College Park
alma_mater = State University of New York at Stony Brook
doctoral_advisor =
doctoral_students = Chris North
known_for = Nassi-Shneiderman diagram, treemap
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prizes = ACM Fellow, AAAS Fellow, SIGCHI LifeTime Achievement
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Ben Shneiderman (born August 21, 1947) is an American computer scientist, and professor for Computer Science at the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland, College Park. He provided fundamental research in the field of human–computer interaction, such as with his eight rules of design. [http://faculty.washington.edu/jtenenbg/courses/360/f04/sessions/schneidermanGoldenRules.html]

Biography

He is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, and received a B.S. in Mathematics and Physics from the City College of New York in 1968, and then went on to study at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he received an M.S. in Computer Science in 1972 and graduated with a Ph.D. in 1973.

In 1997 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

In 2002 his book "Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies" was Winner of a IEEE-USA Award for Distinguished Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession.

Work

In his earlier work on studying programmers, he conducted experiments which suggested that flowcharts were not helpful for writing, understanding, or modifying computer programs.

His major work in recent years has been on information visualization, originating the treemap concept for hierarchical data. He also developed dynamic queries sliders with multiple coordinated displays that are a key component of Spotfire, which was acquired by TIBCO in 2007. His work continued on visual analysis tools for time series data, TimeSearcher, high dimensional data, Hierarchical Clustering Explorer, and social network data, SocialAction [cite news |title=SocialAction |publisher=University of Maryland |url=http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/socialaction/ |date=2007-12-30 |accessdate=2007-12-30 ] .

In addition to his influential work in user interface design, he is known for the co-invention (together with Isaac Nassi) of the Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams, a graphical representation of the design of structured software.

He also defined the research area of universal usability to encourage greater attention to diverse users, languages, cultures, screen sizes, network speeds, and technology platforms.

Publications

A selection:
* 1980. "Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems"; Little, Brown and Co. ISBN 0-87626-816-5
* 1987. 'Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction". With C. Plaisant. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-321-26978-0.'
* 1999. "Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think". With Stuart K. Card and Jock D. Mackinlay. Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 1-55860-533-9.
* 2002. "Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies"; MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-69299-6.

References

External links

* [http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/ Ben Shneiderman's home page]
* [http://www.youtube.com/user/BenShneiderman Ben Shneiderman's Collection of Historical Videos on YouTube]
* [http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/members/bshneiderman/nsd/ "A short history of structured flowcharts (Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams)"]
* [http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/CV2008-2.htm Ben Shneiderman's CV] , with an extensive list of publications.
* [http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/359605.359610 Experimental investigations of the utility of detailed flowcharts in programming] , B. Shneiderman, R. Mayer, D. McKay, and P. Heller, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 20, Iss. 6, Jun 1977.

Persondata
NAME= Shneiderman, Ben
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION=American computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH= August 21, 1947
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DATE OF DEATH=
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