Ben Shneiderman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, founding director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and a member of the Institutes for Advanced Computer Studies and for Systems Research, all at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1997 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001. The ACM's Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction bestowed a Lifetime Achievement Award on Shneiderman in 2001. For more see: www.cs.umd.edu/~ben

Shneiderman regularly gives keynote speeches and public talks on "Human values and the future of technology" and "Relate - Create - Donate: Applying educational technology for the post-TV generation." His professional talks and courses cover user interface design and information visualization.

Shneiderman has published several books, including Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems, and Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction. His 1989 book, Hypertext Hands-On!, co-authored with Greg Kearsley, contains a hypertext version on two disks. It was the world's first commercial electronic book and pioneered the highlighted embedded link that is a factor in the success of the World Wide Web. Embedded links were part of the Hyperties hypermedia system, produced by Cognetics Corp. in Princeton, NJ.

His move into information visualization spawned the successful company Spotfire (www.spotfire.com), where he was a board member from 1996-2000. He was an advisor for smartmoney.com, where his treemap visualization is used for stock market data. Shneiderman's 1999 co-authored book with S. Card and J. Mackinlay is Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think.

He has co-authored two textbooks, edited three technical books, and published more than 200 technical papers and book chapters. His 1993 edited book, Sparks of Innovation in Human-Computer Interaction, collects 25 papers from ten years of research at the University of Maryland. This collection includes the seminal paper on direct manipulation, a term he coined in 1981 to describe graphical user interface design principles: visual presentation of objects and actions combined with pointing techniques to accomplish rapid, incremental, and reversible actions.

Shneiderman has been on the editorial advisory boards of nine journals, including ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction and ACM Interactions. He has consulted and lectured for many organizations, including Apple, AT&T, Citicorp, GE, Honeywell, IBM, Intel, the Library of Congress, Microsoft, NASA, and various university research groups.

Shneiderman received his BS from the City College of New York in 1968, going on to earn his PhD from SUNY Stony Brook in 1973. He taught previously at SUNY and at Indiana University. In 1996, he received an honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.