Information Understanding

1
Information Understanding

• Benjamin B. Bederson

2
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

3
External Cognition

• Step 1 Recognize human limitations

4
Human Visual Perception

• Step 2 Dont underestimate the human brain

5
Interaction

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

6
Scaling Up

• How do you show more than fits on the screen?
• abstract
• link (web)
• scroll (long documents)
• overviewdetail (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
7
What is holding us back?

• Performance and computational requirements
• Increased power, but increased effort
• Requires learning new approaches
• gt Better performance isnt enough. We must
  offer much better performance without many extra
  costs.

8
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