Ben Shneiderman - US grants

9313971 Shneiderman This is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research to investigate the interactive operation of multiple windows where the sources of information are located and coordinated invarious windows, with the purpose of improving performance and reducing the number of errors and user frustration that might other wise occur in the handling of one window at a time. The methodology used in the development utilizes metrics, a taxonomy of tasks, and builds multiple-windows coordination prototypes using hierarchiacal browsers and advanced widgets. Usability tests are conducted with experienced computer users. This work should impact the classical and limiting use of independent overlapped window management strategies which have dominated and remained unchanged for the last decade.

EIA-9976640
Marcionini, Gary
Liddy, Elizabeth D.
University of North Carolina @ Chapel Hill

Digital Government: Citizen Access to Government Statistical Data

This proposal will conduct research to improve the location/retrieval, reading, navigation and manipulation of tabular statistical data from Federal agencies. These data cover many different domains (e.g., health, labor, transportation), of interest to professionals in the field and to citizens. This work will be accomplished through collaboration with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Energy Information Agency, the National Center for Health Statistics and the Bureau of Census. In addition to the Federal agencies, the partnership includes researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, Syracuse University, the University of Maryland and Textwise, a commercial company.

EIA-0129978
Catherine Plaisant
Ben Shneiderman
University of Maryland Baltimore County

Digital Government: Collaborative Research: Integration of Data and Interfaces to Enhance Human Understanding of Government Statistics - Toward the National Statistical Knowledge Network

This award will support collaborative research with several Federal statistical agencies to develop better statistical data models, to explore the use of SML, to develop better map-querying tools and to integrate other available tools for manipulating, browsing and visualizing tabular data. The goal is to develop better human/computer interfaces for expert users to novices, to increase general statistical literacy, and to provide seamless access to data held by multiple Federal agencies and agencies at other levels of government, in particular state and local data.

Although large parts of our brains are devoted to the processing of sound cues and sound plays an important role in the way we interface with the world, this rich channel has not been extensively exploited for displaying information. The mechanisms by which received sound waves are processed neurally to form objects with auditory properties in many perceptual dimensions, including three corresponding to the source location (range, azimuth, elevation) and three to qualities ascribed to the source (timbre, pitch and intensity), are beginning to be understood. There has been significant progress over the last decade in understanding the mechanisms by which acoustical cues arise and how the biological system performs transduction and neural processing to extract relevant features from sound, and in the way we perceive and organize objects in acoustical scenes. Our goal is to exploit this understanding, and uncover the scientific principles that govern the computerized rendering of artificial sound scenes containing multiple sound objects that are information and feature rich. We will test, use and extend this knowledge by creating auditory user interfaces for the visually impaired and the sighted. The work aims both at developing interfaces and answering fundamental questions such as: Is it possible to usefully map "X" to the auditory axes of a virtual auditory space? Here "X" could be an image (e.g., a face), a map, tabular data, uncertain data, or temporally varying data. Are there neural correlates that can guide natural mappings to acoustic cues? What limitations does our perception place on rendering hardware? How important is

IIS-0527109
Ben Shneiderman
University of Maryland - College Park
Creativity Support Tools Workshop

The Workshop on Creativity Support Tools, to be held in June 2005, focuses on the discussion of the design of software tools that promote, accelerate, and facilitate creativity in sciences, engineering, medicine, knowledge work, humanities research, the arts, and beyond. The workshop will bring together 25 - 30 leading researchers from various relevant disciplines such as computer science, information systems, and psychology from academic, corporate and government research programs, and will also include artists, architects and other creative individuals. The intellectual merit of this workshop and ensuing work is the common understanding how the various constituent groups can work together to (1) accelerate the process of disciplinary convergence, (2) promote rigorous research methods, and (3) increase the ambitiousness of research programs. The broader impact of the workshop stems from the fact that creativity is a key determinant of scientific, engineering, medical, cultural, and economic advancement. Therefore, improved creativity support tools are likely to bring benefits to many fields, and can raise the pace and quality of creative work in many areas. Workshop results will be distributed via the workshop web site (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CST) and publications in relevant newsletters, journals and conferences.

Domain experts who are doing work at the frontiers of knowledge often need to use advanced user interfaces for information visualization. Although principles of design for these new tools are emerging, the PI argues that evaluation of efficacy by controlled experimental studies is inadequate to deal with exploratory usage, rather that new evaluation methods based on longitudinal and ethnographic strategies must be developed. Furthermore, the PI contends that a growing number of software tools do more than increase productivity; they are designed to support creativity. The PI believes that a new advanced visualization tool he is developing to support exploration of social networks falls into this latter category. In this project, he will employ Multi-dimensional In-depth Long-term Case studies (MILCs) to study the tool's efficacy when it is used by a team of 4-6 professional sociologists, working within the newly formed National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, engaged in the collection of data and analysis of the social networks of terrorist organizations. This represents a unique opportunity to test and refine both the visualization tool and the evaluation methods. Project outcomes will, through development of improved guidelines for conducting MILCs, lay the foundation for scaling up to larger evaluations in more ambitious projects that blend individual and social creativity.

Broader Impacts: The new tool the PI is developing will make contributions to information visualization design principles. In addition, the longitudinal and ethnographic studies to be conducted as part of this project will lead to refinement of both the MILC approach and the PI's tool. The improved evaluation methods and new visualization tool will, in turn, be of benefit to numerous research and industry groups.

In today's rapidly expanding disciplines, scientists and scholars are constantly faced with the daunting task of keeping up with knowledge in their field. In addition, the increasingly interconnected nature of real-world tasks often requires experts in one discipline to rapidly learn about other areas in a short amount of time. Cross-disciplinary research requires scientists in such areas as linguistics, biology, and sociology to learn about computational approaches and applications. Both students and educators must have access to accurate surveys of previous work, ranging from short summaries to in-depth historical notes. Government decision-makers must learn about different scientific fields to determine funding priorities.

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. Surveyed material is presented in different modalities, e.g., an enumerated list of articles, a bulleted list of key facts, a textual summary, or a visual presentation with zoom and filter capabilities. The original contributions of this research are in the creation of an infrastructure for automatically summarizing entire areas of scientific endeavor by linking three available technologies: (1) bibliometric lexical link mining; (2) summarization techniques; and (3) visualization tools for displaying both structure and content.

The iOPENER software and resulting surveys will be made publicly available via the project Web site (http://tangra.si.umich.edu/clair/iopener/) and research results will be presented at conferences such as the ACL, SIGIR, and ASIST, as well as to broader audiences, e.g., expert specialists, students, educators, and government decision makers. Application areas include digital government, emergency response, and public health issues.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): As the use of electronic health records (EHRs) spreads, large databases of EHR data are becoming available but are underused because there is no easy-to-use interfaces to understand what is available, specific complex temporal queries, review the results, compare groups of patients and rapidly and easily iterate this process. Visual and interactive solutions can dramatically increase the benefits of EHR databases, leading to improved clinical research and patient care. Research activities often require comparing treatments, drugs, patients with or without certain genes, etc. To assembling the groups of patients to be studied require queries that have a temporal component, e.g. "Find patients whose onset of asthma followed within 3 months of treatment of pneumonia". Currently available systems make possible simple queries such as "Find patients who have the diagnoses of asthma and pneumonia" leaving users with the burden of shuffling through large numbers of results in search for the useful data. Specifying useful but more complex temporal queries with SQL or other languages is impossible for most medical researchers, and data mining results are found questionable and hard to interpret as users cannot control the blind mining process and problems with "dirty" data remain unseen and unaddressed. Novel interface designs are needed for 1) interactive query interfaces allowing researchers and clinicians to find data that show temporal patterns of interest in both numerical and categorical data 2) event history operators to align, rank, filter and group by the results visually, allowing researchers and clinicians to see patterns, exceptions, and possibly data quality problems in the data they retrieved 3) powerful comparison tools to explore alternatives (e.g. to conduct comparative effectiveness research), and annotation mechanisms to record findings and prepare reports. We believe that the future of user interfaces is in the direction of larger, information- abundant interactive displays that are easy to use and empower the user to make discoveries while being aware of the quality of the data used in the process. By bridging the worlds of data bases, user interface design and information visualization, the next generation of potent visual analytic tools and work environments can be developed. Visual and interactive solutions for specifying search and reviewing results can dramatically increase the benefits of EHR databases, leading to improved clinical research and patient care. Novel interface designs are needed for 1) interactive query interfaces allowing researchers and clinicians to find data that show temporal patterns of interest in both numerical and categorical data 2) event history operators to align, rank, filter and group by the results allowing researchers and clinicians to see patterns and exceptions in the data they retrieved 3) novel visual summaries of temporal categorical data.

Technology mediated social participation is now a way of life for millions of people as they text family and friends via cell phones, track leaders and celebrities on Twitter, update their Facebook page to tell others about their activities, and interact with numerous web portals. Use of these technologies spans a broad range of users, from kids under ten years old to retirees.

This proposal will develop an intellectual framework and research agenda for studying and facilitating social participation for national priorities, such as health care, education, energy, disaster response, community safety, and environmental protection. Two workshops will cover six topics that will spur research challenges: (a) theoretical integration (b) social capital, social intelligence, and effective action, (c) sharable infrastructure, ethics, and protections, (d) design to motivate, (e) graduate training and (f) the unique challenges for government use of social media. The primary output of the workshops will be a report that specifies challenges and outcomes for each of the topic areas.

This project provides much needed data and tools for analyzing innovations of all possible outcomes, included failed innovations. This approach overcomes the bias in the science policy which studies only popular or ultimately successful innovations.

Intellectual Merit: This comprehensive endeavor enables SciSIP researchers to build and test theories that explain the differentiated trajectories of science and technology innovations and their associated communities. The project also spans disciplinary boundaries by bridging the artificial divide in SciSIP research between the production and the use of innovations, piecing together a holistic view of the dynamic supply and demand in the innovation ecosystem. Specifically, the project builds a large-scale, multi-source, longitudinal database, Science & Technology Innovation Concept Knowledge-base (STICK), and develops a set of visual analytic tools for monitoring and understanding the emergence and revolution/evolution of innovations in three exemplar science and technology fields: information technology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology.

The knowledge-base captures innovations, the individual and organizational actors associated with the innovations, and the relationships among the innovations and the actors through a hybrid approach that combines computational analysis of text (e.g., natural language processing) and social information processing (e.g., social tagging and collaborative writing by the users of the knowledge-base). State-of-the-art visualization tools are customized for SciSIP researchers and other innovation stakeholders to visualize innovation networks and analyze patterns and trends. The design of the knowledge-base and toolset is grounded in a demonstration study on the popularity of innovations. The study aims to address important questions concerning the complex relationships among innovations and the evolution of communities, with implications to the popularity and ultimate success of innovations.

Broader Impacts: STICK is institutionalized at the University of Maryland at College Park as a free public service that offers web access to the data and tools developed in this project. This service also produces quarterly reports on the status of science and technology innovations, including the National Innovation Popularity Index, analogous to the Consumer Confidence Index for the state of the economy. This research-based service is an intuitive tool for science and technology education. For most fields where specialization is the theme, students' and the public's interests increase with the capability to monitor and make sense of the fast-changing arenas where innovations emerge, converge, and diverge. For scientists and engineers, STICK's visual analytic toolset helps accelerate scientific discoveries and innovations by identifying and establishing collaborations within and across innovation communities. Finally, STICK helps science and technology policy makers monitor and understand the evolutionary paths of innovations, appraise the significance of innovations in rigorously charted terrains, and proactively foster, promote, and advance innovations with benefits to the society.

Computationally-mediated civic participation is emerging as a solution to contemporary problems associated with economic and social issues such as healthcare, energy sustainability, education, environmental protection, and disaster response. The NSF-funded research project conducted by Ben Shneiderman, Alan Neustadtl, and Catherine Plaisant at the University of Maryland will study reasons for successes and failures of the community safety system, Nation of Neighbors. The results will enable interventions to shift the balance towards increasing success. One product of the research will be a computer-based Community Analysis Visualization Environment (CAVE) that will enable community managers to use a visual analytic toolkit to take the pulse of their communities by identifying effective and ineffective components of the community participation program, and will enable researchers to compare large numbers of communities to understand the features that distinguish successful from failing community participation programs. The project will test the four-stage Reader-to-Leader Framework -- which assumes that participation moves from reader to contributor to collaborator to leader, with fewer and fewer participants moving into each subsequent stage -- by studying community manager strategies for coping with the practical challenge of increased participation as well as threatening disruptions caused by external events, malicious attacks, harmful rumors, and disaffected members.

In addition the results will have general implications for many computationally-mediated civic participation systems such as those designed for coping with natural disasters (earthquakes, toxic waste discharges, etc.), medical outbreaks (food poisoning, flu, pandemics, etc.), and human threats (terrorists, serial killers, bombers, arsonists, etc.). The computational tools developed for the project will also be useful to researchers studying community participation networks. The research may also provide useful insights into the working of other types of social networks and might have implications for organizations where information is shared by large numbers of people, such as hospitals and school districts.

This is funding to support a workshop for 20 promising graduate students from the United States whose research covers aspects of Technology-Mediated Social Participation (TMSP). Technology-mediated social participation is generated when social networking tools, blogs and microblogs, user-generated content sites, discussion groups, problem reporting, recommendation systems, and other social media are applied to national priorities such as health, energy, education, disaster response, environmental protection, business innovation, or community safety. Although social media are transforming society, many universities have been slow to integrate these novel technologies and social structures into their curricula and research. Two previous NSF-supported TMSP Workshops have outlined an agenda for research and education in this area, which was published in a serious of journal articles appearing in a special issue of IEEE Computer. To increase research and education in TMSP, this workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of graduate students to listen to presentations by leaders in the field, learn new research skills, and learn from each other by sharing the diverse research streams that focus on social media.

The TMSP "webshop" will include 20 graduate students from such fields as sociology, anthropology, communications, psychology, journalism and humanities as well as from information studies, information systems, human-computer interaction and computer science. Effort will be taken to ensure gender balance, strong representation from ethnic minority groups, and cross-disciplinarity. Students will apply by submitting a one page statement of why they wish to attend the workshop along with their curriculum vitae. During the three-day workshop, students will attend presentations from an interdisciplinary group of distinguished leaders in the field and engage in other research and community-building activities.

Intellectual Merit: There is a growing recognition that social media technologies can bring profound benefits for national priorities such as disaster response, community safety, health/wellness, energy sustainability, and environmental protection. However substantial research is needed to scale up participation, raise motivation, control malicious attacks, limit misguided rumors, and protect privacy. The TMSP workshop will foster new ideas, tools and theories in this area through intense multidisciplinary discussion. Topics to be covered share (1) a close linkage to compelling national priorities; (2) a scientific foundation based on established theories and well-defined research questions (privacy, reciprocity, trust, motivation, recognition, etc.); and (3) computer science research challenges (security, privacy protection, scalability, visualization, end-user development, distributed data handling, network analysis of community evolution, cross network comparison, etc.).

Broader impacts: The workshop will raise awareness of the importance of technology-mediated social participation as a distinct area of study, foster new interdisciplinary projects, raise the prominence of researchers and educators who are invited to speak, and promote greater understanding of the discipline among leading graduate students across the United States. The workshop will also help new researchers develop relationships with peers and experienced researchers and practitioners. Specific outcomes will include resources such as bibliographies, links to websites, video and slides sets from speakers and carefully crafted lists of courses, conferences, and journals. These resources will be helpful to researchers and educators who seek to expand their work in Technology-Mediated Social Participation.

This is funding to support a workshop for 40 promising graduate students from the United States whose research covers aspects of Technology-Mediated Social Participation (TMSP). Technology-mediated social participation is generated when social networking tools, blogs and microblogs, user-generated content sites, discussion groups, problem reporting, recommendation systems, and other social media are applied to national priorities such as health, energy, education, disaster response, environmental protection, business innovation, or community safety. Although social media are transforming society, many universities have been slow to integrate these novel technologies and social structures into their curricula and research. Two previous NSF-supported TMSP Workshops have outlined an agenda for research and education in this area, which was published in a serious of journal articles appearing in a special issue of IEEE Computer. To increase research and education in TMSP, this workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of graduate students to listen to presentations by leaders in the field, learn new research skills, and learn from each other by sharing the diverse research streams that focus on social media.

The TMSP "webshop" will include 40 graduate students from such fields as sociology, anthropology, communications, psychology, journalism and humanities as well as from information studies, information systems, human-computer interaction and computer science. Effort will be taken to ensure gender balance, strong representation from ethnic minority groups, and cross-disciplinarity. Students will apply by submitting a one-page statement of why they wish to attend the workshop along with their curriculum vitae. During the three-day workshop, students will attend presentations from an interdisciplinary group of distinguished leaders in the field and engage in other research and community-building activities.

Intellectual Merit: There is a growing recognition that social media technologies can bring profound benefits for national priorities such as disaster response, community safety, health/wellness, energy sustainability, and environmental protection. However substantial research is needed to scale up participation, raise motivation, control malicious attacks, limit misguided rumors, and protect privacy. The TMSP workshop will foster new ideas, tools and theories in this area through intense multidisciplinary discussion. Topics to be covered share (1) a close linkage to compelling national priorities; (2) a scientific foundation based on established theories and well-defined research questions (privacy, reciprocity, trust, motivation, recognition, etc.); and (3) computer science research challenges (security, privacy protection, scalability, visualization, end-user development, distributed data handling, network analysis of community evolution, cross network comparison, etc.).

Broader impacts: The workshop will raise awareness of the importance of technology-mediated social participation as a distinct area of study, foster new interdisciplinary projects, raise the prominence of researchers and educators who are invited to speak, and promote greater understanding of the discipline among leading graduate students across the United States. The workshop will also help new researchers develop relationships with peers and experienced researchers and practitioners. Specific outcomes will include resources such as bibliographies, links to websites, video and slides sets from speakers and carefully crafted lists of courses, conferences, and journals. These resources will be helpful to researchers and educators who seek to expand their work in Technology-Mediated Social Participation.

Understanding the relationship between science funding, employment, and other outcome metrics is a key national goal. This research seeks to model, visualize and understand Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) processes and networks in order accelerate innovation and develop better outcome and impact metrics. STI processes are comprised of project activities involving basic and applied research, publication, invention, and proto-typing leading to the commercialization of new products. This project develops new direct measures of the research to commercialization STI process and fills a significant knowledge gap with respect to the sequences and duration of STI activities and processes. The research has the potential to facilitate policy aimed at accelerating innovation.

This research models and measure temporal sequences of STI activities (including research, invention, proof-of-concept, and commercialization) culminating in the launch of new products, using STAR METRICS Federal Reporter data and exploring links to patents, SBIR awards and other data sources. The EventFlow tool will be adopted to offer novel visualizations of how federally sponsored basic and applied research connects with other types of activities leading ultimately to commercialization of new products.