Information Interfaces: Blending Information Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction

Over the past ten years, the Internet and the WWW have expanded our access to an incredible amount of information. While there can be a tremendous benefit in this, too often people are overwhelmed by the sheer volume and the complexities inherent in all that information. My research develops ways to help people better harness and take advantage of available information, focusing on projects that combine human-computer interaction and information visualization. In this talk, I will highlight three principles that have emerged from my work and I will illustrate the principles through specific example projects and systems from the Information Interfaces Lab at Georgia Tech. The three key principles involve the importance of understanding a person’s goals and tasks while using a visualization, the key role of interaction in visualization, and the potential of using opportunistic, peripheral channels to communicate information to people.

Speaker Bios

John Stasko is a Professor in the College of Computing and the Graphics, Visualization and Usability (GVU) Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is Director of the Information Interfaces Research Group. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Brown University in 1989 and joined the faculty at Georgia Tech that same year. His research is in the area of Human-Computer Interaction with a specific focus on information visualization, peripheral awareness of information, and software agents. He has published over 100 conference and journal articles on these topics and was the lead editor on the 1998 book Software Visualization: Programming as a Multimedia Experience from MIT Press. He is on the editorial staff of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Information Visualization, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, and the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing. He is Papers Co-Chair for the 2005 and 2006 IEEE Symposia on Information Visualization, and was Program Chair for the 2003 ACM Symposium on Software Visualization and Program Co-Chair for the 2000 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages.

Date:
Haut-parleurs:
John Stasko
Affiliation:
Georgia Institute of Technology