George W. Furnas
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"George Furnas"
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Publications by George W. Furnas (bibliography)
» 2008 «
Russell, Daniel M., Furnas, George W., Stefik, Mark, Card, Stuart K. and Pirolli, Peter (2008): Sensemaking. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 3981-3984. Available online
“When confronted with a large or complex amount of information, how DO people come to understand it? This workshop will focus on the most recent work in sensemaking, the activities, technologies and behaviors that people do when making sense of their complex information spaces.”
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» 2006 «
Furnas, George W. (2006): A fisheye follow-up: further reflections on focus + context. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 999-1008. Available online
“Information worlds continue to grow, posing daunting challenges for interfaces. This paper tries to increase our understanding of approaches to the problem, building on the Generalized Fisheye View framework. Three issues are discussed. First a number of existing techniques are unified by the commonality of what they show, certain fisheye-related subsets, with the techniques differing only in how they show those subsets. Then the elevated importance of these subsets, and their generality, is used to discuss the possibility of non-visual fisheye-views, to attack problems not so amenable to visualization. Finally, several models are given for why these subsets might be important in user interactions, with the goal of better informing design rationales.”
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» 2005 «
Qu, Yan and Furnas, George W. (2005): Sources of structure in sensemaking. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2005. pp. 1989-1992. Available online
“A critical aspect of sensemaking is finding appropriate representations for information important to a task. As background for the design of future systems to help people in finding such representations, this paper reports a study of where people currently get aspects of structure for their representations Results show that representation construction and information seeking are closely coupled, as people get aspects of structure top down deducing from their previous knowledge, bottom up inducing from facts they find, and by borrowing from previous sensemaking efforts of others. The findings suggest important revisions of previous sensemaking theories and new opportunities for system design.”
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Furnas, George W. and Russell, Daniel M. (2005): Making sense of sensemaking. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2005. pp. 2115-2116. Available online
Zhang, Xiaolong and Furnas, George W. (2005): mCVEs: using Cross-Scale Collaboration to Support User Interaction with Multiscale Structures. In Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 14 (1) pp. 31-46
» 2003 «
Furnas, George W. and Qu, Yan (2003): Using pixel rewrites for shape-rich interaction. In: Cockton, Gilbert and Korhonen, Panu (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2003 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 5-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. pp. 369-376.
» 2000 «
Furnas, George W. and Zhang, Xiaolong (2000): Illusions of Infinity: Feedback for Infinite Worlds. In: Ackerman, Mark S. and Edwards, Keith (eds.) Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 2000, San Diego, California, United States. pp. 237-238. Available online
Furnas, George W. (2000): Future Design Mindful of the MoRAS. In Human-Computer Interaction, 15 (2) pp. 207-261
“As human-computer interaction (HCI) expands its scope, the proper context for the design of information technology (IT) is increasingly an interconnected mosaic of responsive adaptive systems (MoRAS) including people's heads, organizations, communities, markets, and cultures. The introduction of IT not only perturbs the individual systems but also critically changes the coupling structure of the whole mosaic that comprises them. These various systems respond and adapt to these changes, in effect undertaking their own sort of "design" efforts, sometimes at odds with explicit intentions. The need to understand the role of all these different systems in the outcome explains why IT design has become an increasingly interdisciplinary effort. It is likely that our designs will be more successful if we become more mindful of this bigger picture. This article discusses the motivations for the MoRAS perspective; briefly sketches the MoRAS itself; and presents some tales that illustrate its dynamics, the role of IT within it, and the implications for the future trajectory of HCI. The article concludes with design implications and an agenda for furthering the framework.”
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Furnas, George W., Qu, Yan, Shrivastava, Sanjeev and Peters, Gregory (2000): The Use of Intermediat Graphical Constructions in Problem Solving with Dynamic, Pixel-Level Diagrams. In: Anderson, Michael, Cheng, Peter and Haarslev, Volker (eds.) Diagrams 2000 - Theory and Application of Diagrams - First International Conference September 1-3, 2000, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. pp. 314-329. Available online
» 1998 «
Jul, Susanne and Furnas, George W. (1998): Critical Zones in Desert Fog: Aids to Multiscale Navigation. In: Mynatt, Elizabeth D. and Jacob, Robert J. K. (eds.) Proceedings of the 11th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 01 - 04, 1998, San Francisco, California, United States. pp. 97-106. Available online
“In this paper, we introduce the problem of "desert fog," a condition wherein a view of an information world contains no information on which to base navigational decisions. We present a set of view-based navigational aids that allow navigators to find their way through desert fog in multiscale electronic worlds. Prototypes of these aids have been implemented in the Landmarking and ZTracker systems. We introduce the concept of critical zone analysis, a method of grouping objects according to their visibility in views of the information world rather than their spatial layout. This concept was derived from a formal analysis of desert fog using view-navigation theory. Our analysis informally extends view-navigation theory to accommodate spatial multiscale worlds and is detailed in the paper.”
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Furnas, George W. and Zhang, Xiaolong (1998): MuSE: A Multiscale Editor. In: Mynatt, Elizabeth D. and Jacob, Robert J. K. (eds.) Proceedings of the 11th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 01 - 04, 1998, San Francisco, California, United States. pp. 107-116. Available online
“Information worlds are getting ever more vast. We need, not only better environments for dealing with this vast scale, but better tools for authoring information in those environments. This paper describes a new type of tool for authoring objects in infinite pan/zoom (so-called "multi-scale") environments, like PAD++. Called the MultiScale Editor (MuSE) it provides a direct way to manipulate objects in scale, simplifying important operations for authoring with large, multiscale information worlds.”
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Furnas, George W. and Rauch, Samuel J. (1998): Considerations for Information Environments and the NaviQue Workspace. In: DL98: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries 1998. pp. 79-88. Available online
“This paper presents design considerations for the construction of advanced information environments, and a prototype interface that attempts to respond to them. The design considerations came from task analyses of information gathering activities, from changes in the global information environment, and from advances in human-computer interaction. These led to a number of desired design properties that are guiding our prototyping efforts, including the system, NaviQue, detailed here. It is a visually rich environment for information gathering and organizing, based on a navigable, fractal structure of information, ubiquitous queriability, lightweight interaction with ad hoc sets, and information visualization. The resulting interaction paradigm smoothly integrates more than a half dozen synergies between querying, navigation and organization.”
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» 1997 «
Furnas, George W. (1997): Effective View Navigation. In: Pemberton, Steven (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 97 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia. pp. 367-374. Available online
“In view navigation a user moves about an information structure by selecting something in the current view of the structure. This paper explores the implications of rudimentary requirements for effective view navigation, namely that, despite the vastness of an information structure, the views must be small, moving around must not take too many steps and the route to any target be must be discoverable. The analyses help rationalize existing practice, give insight into the difficulties, and suggest strategies for design.”
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Jul, Susanne and Furnas, George W. (1997): Navigation in Electronic Worlds: A CHI 97 Workshop. In ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 29 (4) pp. 44-49
» 1995 «
Hill, Will, Stead, Larry, Rosenstein, Mark and Furnas, George W. (1995): Recommending and Evaluating Choices in a Virtual Community of Use. In: Katz, Irvin R., Mack, Robert L., Marks, Linn, Rosson, Mary Beth and Nielsen, Jakob (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 95 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference May 7-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado. pp. 194-201. Available online
“When making a choice in the absence of decisive first-hand knowledge, choosing as other like-minded, similarly-situated people have successfully chosen in the past is a good strategy -- in effect, using other people as filters and guides: filters to strain out potentially bad choices and guides to point out potentially good choices. Current human-computer interfaces largely ignore the power of the social strategy. For most choices within an interface, new users are left to fend for themselves and if necessary, to pursue help outside of the interface. We present a general his tory-of-use method that automates a social method for informing choice and report on how it fares in the context of a fielded test case: the selection of videos from a large set. The positive results show that communal history-of-use data can serve as a powerful resource for use in interfaces.”
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Furnas, George W. and Bederson, Benjamin B. (1995): Space-Scale Diagrams: Understanding Multiscale Interfaces. In: Katz, Irvin R., Mack, Robert L., Marks, Linn, Rosson, Mary Beth and Nielsen, Jakob (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 95 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference May 7-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado. pp. 234-241. Available online
“Big information worlds cause big problems for interfaces. There is too much to see. They are hard to navigate. An armada of techniques has been proposed to present the many scales of information needed. Space-scale diagrams provide an analytic framework for much of this work. By representing both a spatial world and its different magnifications explicitly, the diagrams allow the direct visualization and analysis of important scale related issues for interfaces.”
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» 1994 «
Furnas, George W. and Zacks, Jeff (1994): Multitrees: Enriching and Reusing Hierarchical Structure. In: Adelson, Beth, Dumais, Susan and Olson, Judith S. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 94 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 24-28, 1994, Boston, Massachusetts. pp. 330-336. Available online
“This paper introduces multitrees, a new type of structure for representing information. Multitrees are a class of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) with the unusual property that they have large easily identifiable substructures that are trees. These subtrees have a natural semantic interpretation providing alternate hierarchical contexts for information, as well as providing a natural model for hierarchical reuse. The numerous trees found within multitrees also afford familiar, tree-based graphical interactions.”
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» 1993 «
Furnas, George W. (1993): Towards Radically Visual Computation. In: Proceedings of the 1993 IEEE Workshop on Visual Languages August 24-27, 1993, Bergen, Norway. p. 2.
» 1992 «
Brothers, L., Hollan, James D., Nielsen, Jakob, Stornetta, Scott, Abney, Steve, Furnas, George W. and Littman, Michael (1992): Supporting Informal Communication via Ephemeral Interest Groups. In: Mantel, Marilyn and Baecker, Ronald M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work November 01 - 04, 1992, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. pp. 84-90. Available online
“In this paper, we introduce ephemeral interest groups for supporting informal communication. Ephemeral interest groups are electronic discussion groups that, in contrast to bulletin boards and the like, are short-lived and ad hoc. They are designed as a medium for informal discussions of items broadcast to a wider community. We have implemented a prototype system to explore ephemeral interest groups. We discuss the goals of the system, characterize its evolution over the last ten months of deployment, and sketch our plans for future developments.”
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» 1991 «
Furnas, George W. (1991): New Graphical Reasoning Models for Understanding Graphical Interfaces. In: Robertson, Scott P., Olson, Gary M. and Olson, Judith S. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 91 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 28 - June 5, 1991, New Orleans, Louisiana. pp. 71-78. Available online
“This paper aspires to make three points: (1) that certain graphical interfaces are especially easy to learn and use, (2) that special graphical deduction / computation systems are possible, and (3) that perhaps points (1) and (2) are intimately related, i.e., that graphical interfaces may be especially useful because they engage special human graphical reasoning processes.”
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» 1990 «
Deerwester, Scott C., Dumais, Susan T., Landauer, Thomas K., Furnas, George W. and Harshman, Richard A. (1990): Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis. In JASIST - Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 41 (6) pp. 391-407
» 1988 «
Dumais, Susan, Furnas, George W., Landauer, Thomas K., Deerwester, Scott and Harshman, Richard (1988): Using Latent Semantic Analysis to Improve Access to Textual Information. In: Soloway, Elliot, Frye, Douglas and Sheppard, Sylvia B. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 88 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference June 15-19, 1988, Washington, DC, USA. pp. 281-285.
“This paper describes a new approach for dealing with the vocabulary problem in human-computer interaction. Most approaches to retrieving textual materials depend on a lexical match between words in users' requests and those in or assigned to database objects. Because of the tremendous diversity in the words people use to describe the same object, lexical matching methods are necessarily incomplete and imprecise. The latent semantic indexing approach tries to overcome these problems by automatically organizing text objects into a semantic structure more appropriate for matching user requests. This is done by taking advantage of implicit higher-order structure in the association of terms with text objects. The particular technique used in singular-value decomposition, in which a large term by text-object matrix is decomposed into a set of about 50 to 150 orthogonal factors from which the original matrix can be approximated by linear combination. Terms and objects are represented by 50 to 150 dimensional vectors and matched against user queries in this "semantic" space. Initial tests find this completely automatic method widely applicable and a promising way to improve users' access to many kinds of textual materials, or to objects and services for which textual descriptions are available.”
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Furnas, George W., Deerwester, Scott, Dumais, Susan, Landauer, Thomas K., Harshman, Richard A., Streeter, Lynn A. and Lochbaum, Karen E. (1988): Information Retrieval using a Singular Value Decomposition Model of Latent Semantic Structure. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval 1988. pp. 465-480.
“In a new method for automatic indexing and retrieval, implicit higher-order structure in the association of terms with documents is modeled to improve estimates of term-document association, and therefore the detection of relevant documents on the basis of terms found in queries. Singular-value decomposition is used to decompose a large term by document matrix into 50 to 150 orthogonal factors from which the original matrix can be approximated by linear combination; both documents and terms are represented as vectors in a 50- to 150-dimensional space. Queries are represented as pseudo-documents vectors formed from weighted combinations of terms, and documents are ordered by their similarity to the query. Initial tests find this automatic method very promising.”
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» 1987 «
Furnas, George W., Landauer, Thomas K., Gomez, Louis M. and Dumais, Susan T. (1987): The Vocabulary Problem in Human-System Communication. In Communications of the ACM, 30 (11) pp. 964-971
» 1986 «
Furnas, George W. (1986): Generalized Fisheye Views. In: Mantei, Marilyn and Orbeton, Peter (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 86 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 13-17, 1986, Boston, Massachusetts. pp. 16-23.
“In many contexts, humans often represent their own "neighborhood" in great detail, yet only major landmarks further away. This suggests that such views ("fisheye views") might be useful for the computer display of large information structures like programs, data bases, online text, etc. This paper explores fisheye views presenting, in turn, naturalistic studies, a general formalism, a specific instantiation, a resulting computer program, example displays and an evaluation.”
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» 1985 «
Furnas, George W. (1985): Experience with an Adaptive Indexing Scheme. In: Borman, Lorraine and Curtis, Bill (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 85 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 14-18, 1985, San Francisco, California. pp. 131-135.
“Previous work has shown that there is a major vocabulary barrier for new or intermittent users of computer systems. The barrier can be substantially lowered with a rich, empirically defined, frequency weighted index. This paper discusses experience with an adaptive technique for constructing such an index. In addition to being an easy way for system designers to collect the necessary data, an adaptive system has the additional advantage that data is collected from real users in real situations, not in some laboratory approximation. Implementation considerations, preliminary results and future theoretical directions are discussed.”
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» 1982 «
Furnas, George W., Gomez, Louis M., Landauer, Thomas K. and Dumais, Susan (1982): Statistical Semantics: How Can a Computer Use What People Name Things to Guess What Things People Mean When They Name Things?. In: Nichols, Jean A. and Schneider, Michael L. (eds.) Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems March 15-17, 1982, Gaithersburg, Maryland, United States. pp. 251-253.
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Mar 18th, 2010
Changes to this page (author)
16 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on George W. Furnas's author page.17 Aug 2009: Author was edited 16 Jun 2009: Author was edited
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