Digital Libraries Colloquium Series
Sponsored by the School of Computer Science-Carnegie Mellon University, the School of Information Sciences-University of Pittsburgh, the University Library System-University of Pittsburgh, the University Libraries-Carnegie Mellon University and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
Mark Derthick
Research Scientist, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
Talk: 1:00 - 2:00 p.m., in room 501, IS Building
Meet the speaker coffee: 12:30 - 1:00 p.m., Large Commons Room, 5th floor
"Exploratory Data Analysis and Visualization for Everyone"
Abstract: Internet search engines have attracted widespread
demand for information retrieval from unstructured documents. The number
of structured and semistructured documents available on the Web is huge‹and
collections of these are more amenable to data mining than search engine
retrieval.
Finding patterns in databases of political contributions, environmental data,
or hospital and school performance would surely interest many citizens. However,
compared to search engines, there has been no similar explosion of interest
in data mining. Why?
The main research question is how to support such exploration
for users with little or no training in statistics or programming.
In contrast to other data mining systems, Bungee View focuses on learnability,
responsiveness, robustness, and providing a satisfying user experience. This
talk will describe users' experience with Bungee View in the lab and
on three Web-based image collections.
Bio: Mark Derthick received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988 for his thesis that Connectionist models of knowledge representation and reasoning would degrade more gracefully than symbolic frameworks in the face of incomplete and inconsistent information. After graduation, he went over to the symbolic side and worked on analogical reasoning with the Cyc large-scale common-sense knowledge base. He also developed user interfaces for entering knowledge into Cyc.
In 1995 he returned to CMU, working on user interfaces for exploring structured data with the Sage project. His current projects are summarizing probability distributions over tens of thousands of possible evolutionary trees for biologists, and developing an enjoyable interface for non-technical users to browse and data-mine image collections.
The Human-Computer Interaction Institute has been a rewarding environment for coordinated development of information architecture, visual and interaction design, and algorithms that support simple yet powerful interfaces for exploring these data.
