Responding to the immense problems of the 21st century will require devoted research teams with passionate leaders who are skilled at nurturing individuals, weaving networks, and cultivating communities. The growing evidence shows that research teams with raised ambitions to find practical solutions and seek foundational theories simultaneously have a greater chance of achieving both (ABC Principle: Applied & Basic Combined).
This discussion is to develop plans for the CMSC Department faculty, staff, and students to respond to the changing research ecosystem that lowers the barriers to team work and facilitates realistic interventions at scale with external partners. Then we will discuss how to promote our research (social media, Wikipedia, blogs, videos, twitter, etc.) and measure impact (download counts, citations, network measures, etc.). My hope is to agree on strategies that encourage CMSC efforts to improve education, broaden outreach, and increase impact.
BEN SHNEIDERMAN (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/), and a Member of the UM Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) at the University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and IEEE, and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, in recognition of his pioneering contributions to human-computer interaction and information visualization. His contributions include the direct manipulation concept, clickable highlighted web-links, touchscreen keyboards, dynamic query sliders for Spotfire, development of treemaps, novel network visualizations for NodeXL, and temporal event sequence analysis for electronic health records.
Ben is the co-author with Catherine Plaisant of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (5th ed., 2010) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/. With Stu Card and Jock Mackinlay, he co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999). His book Leonardo’s Laptop appeared in October 2002 (MIT Press) and won the IEEE book award for Distinguished Literary Contribution. His latest book, with Derek Hansen and Marc Smith, is Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL (www.codeplex.com/nodexl, 2010).
Photo at: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/Photos/ben_6_10/5.jpg
