HCIL Papers Earn Test of Time Awards at IEEE VIS

Two papers originating from the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) are being honored this week with “Test of Time” awards at the IEEE VISualization Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

IEEE VIS is the premier forum for exploring advances in scientific and information visualization. It brings together researchers and practitioners in government, academia and industry that have a shared interest in visualization solutions.

“A Visual Interface for Multivariate Temporal Data: Finding Patterns of Events across Multiple Histories”—co-authored by Ben Shneiderman (on right in photo), Distinguished University Professor of computer science and the founding director of HCIL—is recognized as a paper from 10 years ago that’s had a significant impact in terms of citations, influence, uptake and overall effect on the visual analytics’ community.

The team that published the paper emerged from a Spring 2005 graduate course project on information visualization, Shneiderman says.

The second Test of Time award goes to “Strategies for evaluating information visualization tools: Multi-dimensional In-depth Long-term Case studies (MILCs),” a paper co-authored by Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant (on left in photo), a senior research scientist in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).

Since being published at a visualization workshop in 2006, the paper has garnered numerous downloads and citations.

Shneiderman says both papers have contributed to HCIL’s success in developing event analytics tools such as EventFlow.

HCIL is a partnership between the iSchool and UMIACS. It is one of 16 labs and centers in UMIACS.