UC Institute for Software Research

Distinguished Speaker Series 2001-2002

Abstract: There is an astonishing amount of information on the web and it is constantly increasing. To avoid being overwhelmed by the volume of information available and confused by its uneven quality, people need assistance in efficiently finding task-relevant information and in effectively managing dynamic information collections. Current interfaces primarily employ textual representations for accessing and organizing information. Access is either via
taxonomies or queries to search engines and results are typically organized as lists or hierarchies of web page titles. In addition, current interfaces restrict people from fully exploiting their exquisite spatial abilities to assist in dealing with the unceasingly expanding information sphere they confront daily. Given the ability of images to assist memory and the common exploitation of space in everyday problem solving to simplify choice, perception, and mental computation, it is surprising that so little use is made of images and spatial organization. In this talk I summarize our recent work on image-based information access and visualization of activity.

About the Speaker: After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, James D. Hollan was on the faculty at the University of California, San Diego for a decade. Along with Edwin Hutchins and Donald Norman, he led the Intelligent Systems Group in the Institute for Cognitive Science. He left UCSD to become Director of the MCC Human Interface Laboratory and subsequently established the Computer Graphics and Interactive Media Research Group at Bellcore. In 1993, he moved to the University of New Mexico as Chair of the Computer Science Department. In 1997, he returned to UCSD as Professor of Cognitive Science. In collaboration with Edwin Hutchins, he directs the Distributed Cognition and Human-Computer Interaction Lab.