Shneiderman, Ben

Professor of Computer Science and pioneer in the field of human-computer interaction.

Ben Shneiderman was born on August 21, 1947. He attended the Bronx High School of Science and later the City College of New York (CCNY) from 1964 to 1968. He spent three years at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Farmingdale (Long Island, New York), teaching data processing as a form of national service in lieu of serving in the armed services during the Vietnam War era. His work on a graph-theoretic model for optimization of database file structures earned him the first Ph. D. in Computer Science at the State University of New York's new Stony Brook campus. At SUNY Stony Brook, Shneiderman collaborated with fellow graduate student Isaac Nassi to create the now widely-used structured flowcharts (Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams). Shneiderman founded the Software Psychology Society in 1976 to bring together researchers who shared similar interests. This group developed the 1982 conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The success of this conference contributed to the formation of the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI), which remains the main professional organization in this field. Also in 1982, Shneiderman founded the interdisciplinary Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland. He developed the notion of "direct manipulation," which clarified the design principles and benefits of the emerging graphical user interfaces. This idea led directly to the invention of the "embedded menu" or "hot link" that became a key contribution to usability of the Web. Shneiderman is currently a tenured professor at the University of Maryland in the Department of Computer Science.

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