George Furnas
Encyclopedia
Prof. George W. Furnas is a professor and Associate Dean for Academic Strategy at the School of Information
of the University of Michigan
. Prior to his position at the University of Michigan, Furnas worked at Bell Labs
for 15 years where he was a distinguished member of technical staff, and then became Director of Computer Graphics and Interactive Media research. During his time at Bell Labs
he earned the moniker "Fisheye Furnas" while working with fisheye visualizations.
A pioneer of latent semantic analysis
, Professor Furnas is also considered a pioneer in the concept of MoRAS (Mosaic of Responsive Adaptive Systems).
Furnas was elected into the CHI Academy
, an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction, in 2004 for his work in the field.
The body of Furnas' research, and its primacy in the field, is aptly précised by the delineation of his work in his SIGCHI
bio:
University of Michigan School of Information
The School of Information or iSchool at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is a graduate school offering both a Master of Science in Information and a Doctor of Information ....
of the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
. Prior to his position at the University of Michigan, Furnas worked at Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...
for 15 years where he was a distinguished member of technical staff, and then became Director of Computer Graphics and Interactive Media research. During his time at Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...
he earned the moniker "Fisheye Furnas" while working with fisheye visualizations.
A pioneer of latent semantic analysis
Latent semantic analysis
Latent semantic analysis is a technique in natural language processing, in particular in vectorial semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms. LSA assumes that words that are close...
, Professor Furnas is also considered a pioneer in the concept of MoRAS (Mosaic of Responsive Adaptive Systems).
Furnas was elected into the CHI Academy
CHI Academy
The CHI Academy is a group of researchers honored by SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group in Computer–Human Interaction of the Association for Computing Machinery. Each year, 5–7 new members are elected for having made a significant, cumulative contributions to the development of thefield of...
, an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction, in 2004 for his work in the field.
The body of Furnas' research, and its primacy in the field, is aptly précised by the delineation of his work in his SIGCHI
SIGCHI
SIGCHI is the Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction, one of the Association for Computing Machinery's special interest groups....
bio:
A principal focus of his research is in advanced information access and visualization. His early role in the analysis of the "Vocabulary Disagreement" problem lead to his co-invention of Latent Semantic Analysis for indexing and text processing. His classic "Generalized Fisheye Views" paper inspired a sea of focus+context research in information visualization. George's BITPICT graphical rewrite system is well known novel contribution to diagrammatic reasoningDiagrammatic reasoningDiagrammatic reasoning is reasoning by means of visual representations. The study of diagrammatic reasoning is about the understanding of concepts and ideas, visualized with the use of diagrams and imagery instead of by linguistic or algebraic means....
, visual languages and visual programming communities. George was also an early researcher in the areas of collaborative filtering,and graph visualization. His "Space-Scale Diagrams in the Pad++ Zoomable User Interface" advanced the analysis of zoomable user interfaces, and View Navigation theory has helped motivate much subsequent research in Information Scent. Recently he has been working on consolidating theories of design and use at multiple levels of aggregation.