July 2, 2006
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EE Times (05/08/06)No. 1422, P. 54; Mokhoff, Nicolas
Microsoft's George Robertson, the human-computer interaction pioneer who coined the term "information visualization," was recently inducted into the CHI Academy for his contributions to the field. Microsoft's research into the human-computer interface began with Robertson's hiring in 1996, and the concept of information visualization has attracted the attention of military, business, and intelligence leaders. Information visualization aims to present data in innovative formats using color graphics or animation that provide an interactive experience. Robertson also sits on the National Visualization and Analytics Center Panel at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which conducts analysis of information gathered on terrorist activities. "The problem is huge," said Robertson. "In one database alone there are 120 billion documents, and the pace is that 1 million documents are changed every hour when searching for clues. That requires an enormous effort to show graphically." At his induction ceremony, Robertson presented two papers describing Microsoft's latest work, including a comparison of different graphical software interfaces that found that the type of task information provided varies in accordance with the level of abstraction. The study measured interactions at the levels of scaling, which displays the layout of a window; change detection, which measures whether any changes occurred; semantic-content extraction, which displays a small amount of content in the most relevant window; and a mixture of change detection and semantic-content extraction. The second paper outlined a new technique for using a mobile phone to search through large data sets using iterative data filtering to lessen the reliance on keyword text entry.
For the complete article, see http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187003241
Posted by rab5 at 12:47 PM
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