"The New ABCs of Research: Achieving Breakthrough Collaborations"

Location: UMD, A.V. Williams Building, Room 2120

Speaker:
Ben Shneiderman
Distinguished University Professor, Department of Computer Science and UMIACS

Abstract:
Responding to the immense problems of the 21st century will require devoted research teams with passionate leaders skilled at nurturing individuals, weaving networks, and cultivating communities. Growing evidence shows that research teams with a desire to find practical solutions and seek foundational theories simultaneously have a greater chance of achieving both, known as the ABC Principle: Applied & Basic Combined.

Future research heroes will be those who make innovative use of powerful web-based, social media, and visual tools to speed their work; find helpful collaborators; and promote their results to wider audiences. By blending science, engineering, and design (SED Principle), research teams are more likely to achieve high impact as they:

1. Choose actionable problems that address civic, business & global priorities
2. Apply observation, intervention & controlled experiments
3. Form teams with diverse individuals & organizations
4. Test prototypes with realistic interventions
5. Promote adoption & measure impact

My hope is to accelerate the transformation of research in order to expand human knowledge and solve societal problems.

Bio:
Ben Shneiderman is a Distinguished University Professor in UMD’s Department of Computer Science, founding director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, and a member of UMD’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).

He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Shneiderman’s contributions include the direct manipulation concept, clickable highlighted web links, touchscreen keyboards, dynamic query sliders for Spotfire, the development of treemaps, novel network visualizations for NodeXL, temporal event sequence analysis for electronic health records.