George William Furnas (born 1954) is an American academic, Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Strategy at the
School of Information of the
University of Michigan
, mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth"
, former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821)
, budget = $10.3 billion (2021)
, endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
, known for his work on semantic analysis and on human-system communication.
Biography
Furnas obtained his AB in Psychology in 1974 from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
, and his PhD in Psychology in 1980 from
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
.
[CURRICULUM VITAE George W. Furnas](_blank)
at furnas.people.si.umich.edu. Accessed 14-04-2015.
Furnas started his academic career as graduate student teaching assistant at Stanford University in 1975. After his graduation in 1980 he started at
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...
, where he was a distinguished member of technical staff for 15 years. In the last two years he was Director of Computer Graphics and Interactive Media research. In 1995 he moved to the University of Michigan, where he was appointed Professor of Psychology, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, and Professor at the School of Information. From 2002 to 2008 he was also Associate Dean for Academic Strategy, School of Information.
Furnas was elected into the
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, 5–8 new members are elected for having made a significant, cumulative co ...
, 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. In 2011 he was inducted as a Fellow of the
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...
.
Work
During his time at
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...
he earned the moniker "Fisheye Furnas" while working with fisheye visualizations. A pioneer of
latent semantic analysis
Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the do ...
, Furnas is also considered a pioneer in the concept of MoRAS (Mosaic of Responsive Adaptive Systems).
The body of Furnas' research, and its primacy in the field, is aptly précised by the delineation of his work in his
SIGCHI
The Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction (SIGCHI) is one of the Association for Computing Machinery's special interest groups which is focused on human–computer interactions (HCI).
It hosts the flagship annual international HC ...
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 Furnas](_blank)
at www.sigchi.org/about/awards/awards-2004.
And furthermore
George's BITPICT graphical rewrite system is well known novel contribution to diagrammatic reasoning, 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++ Zooming User Interface
In computing, a zooming user interface or zoomable user interface (ZUI, pronounced zoo-ee) is a graphical environment where users can change the scale of the viewed area in order to see more detail or less, and browse through different document ...
" 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.
Selected publications
* Furnas, George W. ''Objects and their features,'' 1980
Articles, a selection:
* Furnas, George W.
Generalized fisheye views" in ''Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI ‘86 Conference Proceedings, 16-23. 1986.''
* Furnas, George W., et al. "The vocabulary problem in human-system communication." Communications of the ACM 30.11 (1987): 964-971.
* Deerwester, Scott C., et al.
Indexing by latent semantic analysis" ''JAsIs'' 41.6 (1990): 391-407.
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Furnas, George
1954 births
Living people
American psychologists
American cognitive scientists
Human–computer interaction researchers
Harvard College alumni
Stanford University alumni
Stanford University faculty
University of Michigan faculty