A Glimpse Of Pioneering Professor’s World Of Technology

From hypertext to keyboards on ATMs and handheld personal computing devices, computer science professor Ben Shneiderman has played a role in developing some of the most common devices for human-computer interaction. Founding director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab in the College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Shneiderman is author of 13 books and more than 300 scientific articles. This year, the International Journal of Human- Computer Interaction honored his nearly four-decade career with a special issue. Terp’s Denise Jones talked with Shneiderman about his work.

TERP: When we hear the phrase “computer- user interface,” what does that mean to the non-technical person?

SHNEIDERMAN: We think of the userinterface design as enabling users to enter and display information that could be visual, auditory or tactile. But it’s the user’s experience that we’re trying to improve. The success of the iPod and iPhone are indications that design matters.

Another important point is the idea of universal usability. Everyone should be able to benefit from this remarkable technology, from the savvy tech types to people who have less knowledge, low literacy or disabilities.

TERP: Creative visualization is an area of specialization for you. An example would be your innovative Treemap design, in which large amounts of information are presented in an ordered and colorful way. For example, someone who wants to buy a digital camera can view a range of prices and features in one screen on a Web site. Can you talk a bit about that?

SHNEIDERMAN: Good designs enable users to discover patterns in patient histories, trends in stock market data or exceptions in gene expression data to identify disease processes or their cures. This gives us a remarkable opportunity to help people understand the world around them, much as the telescope, microscope or X-rays have in the past century.

TERP: What do you think about the influence of YouTube, MySpace and Facebook on users today?

SHNEIDERMAN: It’s enormously exciting. The opportunities for people to publish their videos have transformed the nature of communication. It’s quite remarkable that high school kids can produce quite impressive videos that only Hollywood studios could have produced 30 years ago. It’s the design of the user interfaces for those technologies that made it possible to create innovative videos that are often fun, clever and sometimes have great importance.

TERP: Given that you are an innovator of technologies in personal computing, do you use any of the sites?

SHNEIDERMAN: Sure, I enjoy Facebook. I’m quite active on Flickr and somewhat on YouTube. I do like trying the new technologies. The Nintendo Wii was just great fun. I was happy to buy an iPhone and try Amazon’s new book reader, the Kindle. It’s a small device about the size of a paperback book, and you can download about 200 books. It’s quite nice for travelers because you can get a lot of books on it.

Leveraging Engineering Design to Spur Interest in Science and Math

BUILDING A ROBOT or a bridge for a national competition. Designing an assistive-technology device for the disabled. When high school students get involved in projects like these, they get excited about science and their fears of classes once thought to be “too hard” melt away.

Finding a way to assure the academic quality of these problem- solving design projects and luring more students into advanced math and science is the goal of a national initiative based at the College of Education. Educators from high schools, colleges and professional organizations across the country have teamed up to form the Strategies in Engineering Education K-16 (SEEK-16) collaborative. They are working to create a common framework for teaching engineering practices in secondary schools and to help position engineering studies as a mainstream educational pathway.

As the technology demands of a global economy have grown, the number of American students pursuing advanced courses in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) has continued to shrink. Government and industry leaders first sounded the alarm more than a decade ago, but efforts to attract more students to technical disciplines have had only minimal success.

“We know that in order to fill the STEM pipeline we must appeal to students who are math and science phobic, students who would not typically even dream of taking an advanced math course,” says Leigh Abts, co-chair of the SEEK-16 initiative.“But at the same time, these special engineering- based programs need to represent the gold standard in education with a focus on the scientific method and design principles that will truly help prepare students for college-prep math and science.”

The academic framework being developed by the SEEK- 16 team will map out specific principles and skills that quality pre-college engineering programs should help students develop. Students will store their work digitally and demonstrate to teachers or college admissions officers the skills they have mastered. First prototypes will be tested this summer with support from the National Science Foundation and the federal Department of Education. —CR

The Scorpion's Lair

Two mosquitoes, one killed with wild fungus (at left) and one killed with the fungus engineered to express a scorpion toxin gene. The engineered fungus is nine times more virulent and causes the muscles to contract so that the wings are outstretched when the insect dies.

A STING FROM a fat-tailed scorpion, one of the most dangerous scorpion species in the world, can kill a human being within two hours. But humans aren’t the only ones at risk. This scorpion’s venom also contains toxins that are entirely specific to insects.

Entomology professor Raymond St. Leger has manipulated scorpion genes to create a hyper- virulent fungus that can kill dangerous insects without the environmental contamination linked to chemical pesticides. With a colleague from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he bioengineered a new version of the fungus Metarhizium anisopliae to inject mosquitoes, caterpillars and coffee borer beetles with the scorpion toxin and kill them within a few days. “A scorpion kills by stabbing its prey, so we were looking for a way to get the toxin into the insect without the scorpion,” says St. Leger. “Fungi are really good at that because they are naturally infective. They land on the insect’s outer surface, insert little tubes called hyphae and grow within the insect. You could almost see them as tiny hypodermic needles.”

In Australia, the fungus is used to target locusts and grasshoppers that decimate food crops. In Africa, sheets with fungus spores are hung inside houses to kill mosquitoes. “The problem is it takes quite a few fungal spores to kill the mosquito, and it is slow,” says St. Leger. “It reduces the number of mosquito bites that people get, but it doesn’t keep people from getting malaria or dengue (fever).”

To produce a faster, insect-killing fungus, St. Leger created a synthetic scorpion gene, which he inserted into the fungus. He also created an “on/off switch” in front of the gene so the fungus produces the toxin only when it is in the insect’s blood. The resulting transgenic fungus was nine times more virulent than the wild version in killing mosquitoes and 30 times more virulent to the coffee borer beetle. —KB

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