HCIL Symposium Highlights Research in Visualizing Electronic Health Records, Mobile Design and More

The Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) held its 31st Annual Symposium May 29, highlighting the lab’s latest research in visualizing electronic health records, social media, using technology to teach children, and more. Approximately 200 people from academia and industry attended the event.

Ben Shneiderman, a Distinguished University professor of computer science with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), gave a presentation on EventFlow, a tool developed by HCIL. He told the workshop audience of 53 people that EventFlow is a data visualization tool that helps users analyze and explore patterns of point and interval based events from patient history records and other information sources. Shneiderman noted that it presents a novel solution for displaying events, simplifying their visual impact, and making meaningful queries.

While EventFlow was used initially for compiling information from healthcare data, Shneiderman says the tool is now being tested on cybersecurity analytics, sports statistics, and more. He added that HCIL hopes to launch a commercial version of EventFlow in early 2015 through the university’s Office of Technology Commercialization. The project is sponsored by NIH, the university’s Center for Health-related Informatics and Bioimaging, and Oracle.

“We’re most satisfied with EventFlow when it leaves our office and goes to help solve real-life problems; that’s what we like to see,” Shneiderman says.

To view the EventFlow presentation, visit http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/eventflow/workshop2014