Ben Shneiderman

Ben Shneiderman is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. According to Google Scholar he is the most cited faculty member at the University of Maryland College Park.

He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2015. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001 and the IEEE Visualization Career Award in 2012.

He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2010 in recognition of his pioneering contributions to human-computer interaction and information visualization. His contributions include the direct manipulation concept, which led to clickable highlighted web-links, the ubiquitous touchscreen keyboards on mobile devices, dynamic query sliders for data exploration, and a patent for photo tagging. His work on information visualization led to the widely used treemaps (treemap history, treemap art project), novel network visualizations for NodeXL, and temporal event sequence analysis for electronic health records with EventFlow.

Ben Shneiderman pioneered the highlighted textual link in 1983, and it became part of Hyperties, a precursor to the web. His move into information visualization spawned the commercially successful Spotfire, known for pharmaceutical drug discovery and genomic data analysis.

He has received Honorary Doctorates from the University of Guelph (Canada) in 1995, the University of Castile-La Mancha (Spain) in 2010, Stony Brook University (USA) in 2015, and the University of Melbourne (Australia) in 2017.

Ben Shneiderman is the author of the breakthrough book: Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems(1980). In 1986, the first edition of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction was published. Its wide use led to new editions (6th edition, 2016) and translation into 6 languages. This book is popular for his list of "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design" which is frequently taught in Human-Computer Interaction courses.

He co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999) with S. Card and J. Mackinlay. His book, Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (2002), won the IEEE Award for Distinguished Literary Contribution in 2003. He coauthored Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World (2nd edition, 2019), with D. Hansen, Itai Himelboim, and M. A. Smith. He wrote The New ABCs of Research: Achieving Breakthrough Collaborations (2016) and the related Twin-Win Research: Breakthrough Theories and Validated Solutions for Societal Benefits (2nd edition, 2019). His latest book is Encounters with HCI Pioneers: A Personal History and Photo Journal (2019).