Information Understanding Benjamin B. Bederson

What is the Problem? How to perceive and interact with information? Detect patterns and outliers Find details without losing global context Concentrate on task (stay “in the flow”) How to scale up to large information sets? Technical problems Perceptual limitations Design problems

External Cognition Step 1: Recognize human limitations

Human Visual Perception Step 2: Don’t underestimate the human brain

Interaction Step 3: Add interaction. If a picture is worth a thousand words, an interactive interface is worth a thousand pictures.

Scaling Up How do you show more than fits on the screen? abstract link (web) scroll (long documents) overview+detail (e.g., photoshop) zoom (PhotoMesa demo) fisheye distortion (FishCal demo) traditional new paradigms www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/photomesa www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/fishcal

What is holding us back? Performance and computational requirements Increased power, but increased effort Requires learning new approaches => Better performance isn’t enough. We must offer much better performance without many extra costs.

Information Understanding Visualizing Millions of Items Web-Based Surveys Simulation in Engineering Time Series Data Bioinformatics Visualization Browsing Large Trees Data Monitoring with Treemaps Interactive Web Maps