Ben Bederson
Benjamin B. Bederson is an emeritus professor of computer science and a past director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab and the College of Information Studies (iSchool).
Bederson's research focuses on human computation, mobile device interfaces, interaction strategies, digital libraries and children's education. He is also co-founder and chief scientist of Zumobi, a premium mobile app network.
Bederson is well-known for his work on Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs) since the mid-1990s, including the Pad++ and Piccolo toolkits for zoomable and structured 2-D graphics. That work led to his well-known applications around personal photo management (PhotoMesa), calendaring (DateLens), and hierarchical data visualization (SpaceTree). ZUIs have since become well-established in a wide range of domains, including maps and mobile phones.
He is also known for his work around children's educational technologies, including his notable International Children's Digital Library in collaboration with Ann Weeks and UMIACS member Allison Druin. Its website contains the largest freely available collection of children's books from around the world. It also represents the outcome of a range of research efforts, including computer-vision based applications for text readability, as well as work in translation and mobile access.
Additionally, Bederson has established himself in the area of human computation, an approach to combine human with computational effort to solve problems at a scale and quality that neither could accomplish alone. One important example of this work is his National Science Foundation and Google supported work on MonoTrans, a system that enables monolingual human speakers to collaboratively translate text.
He received his doctorate in computer science from New York University in 1992.
Publications
1999
1999. Does animation help users build mental maps of spatial information? Information Visualization, 1999.(Info Vis' 99) Proceedings. 1999 IEEE Symposium on. :28-35.
1998
1998. When Two Hands Are Better Than One: Enhancing Collaboration Using Single Display Groupware. CHI’98. Extended Abstracts. :287-288.
1998. Implementing a zooming User Interface: experience building Pad++. Software: Practice and Experience. 28(10):1101-1135.
1997
1997. KidPad: a design collaboration between children, technologists, and educators. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. :463-470.
1997. A zooming web browser. Human Factors in Web Development.
1996
1996. Local tools: an alternative to tool palettes. Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology. :169-170.
1995
1995. A miniaturized space-variant active vision system: Cortex-I. Machine Vision and applications. 8(2):101-109.
1995. Space-scale diagrams: understanding multiscale interfaces. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. :234-241.
1994
1994. Space variant image processing. International Journal of Computer Vision. 13(1):71-90.
1994. A miniature pan-tilt actuator: the spherical pointing motor. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation. 10(3):298-308.
1993
1993. Control and design of the spherical pointing motor. , 1993 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 1993. Proceedings. :630-636vol.2-630-636vol.2.
1992
1992. Two miniature pan-tilt devices. Robotics and Automation, 1992. Proceedings., 1992 IEEE International Conference on. :658-663.
1992. Voice-bandwidth visual communication through logmaps: the Telecortex. Applications of Computer Vision, Proceedings, 1992., IEEE Workshop on. :4-10.