Ben Shneiderman Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

In 2012, Jeffrey Heer and Shneiderman coauthored the article “Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis” in Association for Computing Machinery Queue vol. 10, no. 2. Included in this article is a taxonomy of interactive dynamics to assist researchers, designers, analysts, educators, and students in evaluating and creating visual analysis tools. The taxonomy consists of 12 task types grouped into three high-level categories, as shown below.

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. Shneiderman contributed to the widely used social network analysis and visualization tool NodeXL.

In 2003, Ben Bederson and Shneiderman coauthored the book “The Craft of Information Visualization: Readings and Reflections”. Included in Chapter 8: Theories for Understanding Information Visualization in this book are five goals of theories for HCI practitioners and researchers, which read:

In 2002 his book Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies was Winner of an IEEE-USA Award for Distinguished Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession. His 2016 book, The New ABCs of Research: Achieving Breakthrough Collaborations, encourages applied and basic research to be combined. In 2019, he published Encounters with HCI Pioneers: A Personal History and Photo Journal, and Human-Centered AI in 2022.

Shneiderman was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1997, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001, a Member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2010, an IEEE Fellow in 2012, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2015. He is an ACM CHI Academy Member and received their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. He received the IEEE Visualization Career Award in 2012 and was inducted into the IEEE VIS Academy in 2019. In 2021 he received the InfoVis Conference Test of Time Award with co-authors Ben Bederson and Martin M. Wattenberg.

In 1997, Pattie Maes and Shneiderman had a public debate on Direct Manipulation vs. Interface Agents at CHI’97 and IUI 1997 (with the IUI Proceedings showing two separate papers but no remaining internet trace of the panel.) Those events helped define the two current dominant themes in human-computer interaction: direct human control of computer operations via visual user interfaces vs delegation of control to interface agents that know the users desires and act on their behalf, thereby requiring less human attention. Their debate continues to be highly cited (with 479 citations in January 2022 for the original CHI debate), especially in user interface design communities where return debates took place at the ACM CHI 2017 and ACM CHI 2021 conferences.

He received Honorary Doctorates from the University of Guelph (Canada) in 1995, the University of Castile-La Mancha (Spain) in 2010, Stony Brook University in 2015, the University of Melbourne in 2017, Swansea University (in Wales, UK) in 2018, and the University of Pretoria (in South Africa) in 2018.

In 1986, he published the first edition (now on its sixth edition) of his book “Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction.” Included in this book is his most popular list of “Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design,” which read:

Shneiderman’s cognitive analysis of user needs led to principles of direct manipulation interface design in 1982: (1) continuous representation of the objects and actions, (2) rapid, incremental, and reversible actions, and (3) physical actions and gestures to replace typed commands, which enabled designers to craft more effective graphical user interfaces. He applied those principles to design innovative user interfaces such as the highlighted selectable phrases in text, that were used in the commercially successful Hyperties. Hyperties was used to author the world’s first electronic scientific journal issue, which was the July 1988 issue of the Communications of the ACM with seven papers from the 1987 Hypertext conference. It was made available as a floppy disk accompanying the printed journal. Tim Berners-Lee cited this disk as the source for his “hot spots” in his Spring 1989 manifesto for the World Wide Web. Hyperties was also used to create the world’s first commercial electronic book, Hypertext Hands-On! in 1988.

Furthermore, Shneiderman had conducted experiments which suggested that flowcharts were not helpful for writing, understanding, or modifying computer programs. At the end of their 1977 paper, Shneiderman et al. concluded:

In the 1973 article “Flowchart techniques for structured programming” presented at a 1973 SIGPLAN meeting Isaac Nassi and Shneiderman argued:

In the 1970s Shneiderman continued to study programmers, and the use of flow charts. In the 1977 article “Experimental investigations of the utility of detailed flowcharts in programming” Shneiderman et al. summarized the origin and status quo of flowcharts in computer programming:

Born in New York, Shneiderman, attended the Bronx High School of Science, and received a BS in Mathematics and Physics from the City College of New York in 1968. He then went on to study at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he received an MS in Computer Science in 1972 and graduated with a PhD in 1973.

Shneiderman started his academic career at the State University of New York at Farmingdale in 1968 as instructor at the Department of Data Processing. In the last year before his graduation he was instructor at the Department of Computer Science of Stony Brook University (then called State University of New York at Stony Brook). In 1973 he was appointed assistant professor at the Indiana University, Department of Computer Science. In 1976 he moved to the University of Maryland. He started out as assistant professor in its Department of Information Systems Management, and became associate professor in 1979. In 1983 he moved to its Department of Computer Science as associate professor, and was promoted to full professor in 1989. In 1983 he was the Founding Director of its Human-Computer Interaction Lab, which he directed until 2000.

Ben Shneiderman (born August 21, 1947) is an American computer scientist, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the founding director (1983-2000) of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. He conducted fundamental research in the field of human–computer interaction, developing new ideas, methods, and tools such as the direct manipulation interface, and his eight rules of design.