Shaping Science 2.0 for Web-based Interdisciplinary Problem Solving:
1% Inspiration, 99% Collaboration

Ben Shneiderman
Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Maryland

The traditional sciences of the natural world (let’s call them Science 1.0) have brought astonishing advances during the past 400 years. Science 1.0 will continue to be important, but many modern interdisciplinary problems such as emergency/ disaster response, environmental protection, healthcare, energy sustainability, and international development are resistant to traditional reductionist thinking.

Science 2.0 focuses on the human-designed or made world in which the dynamics of trust, privacy, responsibility, and empathy are determinants of success. Science 2.0 is in harmony with technology-centered progressive efforts on web science, creativity support tools, socially networked communities, universal usability, etc.  Advancing Science 2.0 will require a shift in priorities to promote intense collaboration, integrative thinking, teamwork-based education/training, and case study ethnographic research methods. Science 2.0 will reduce the gulf between basic and applied research, while bringing theory and practice closer together. This talk lays out an ambitious vision that will impact research funding, educational practices, and democratic principles.

BEN SHNEIDERMAN (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/) at the University of Maryland. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

Ben is the author of Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (1980) and Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (4th ed. 2004) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/ . He pioneered the highlighted textual link in 1983, and it became part of Hyperties, a precursor to the web. His move into information visualization helped spawn the successful company Spotfire http://www.spotfire.com/ . He is a technical advisor for the HiveGroup and ILOG. With S Card and J. Mackinlay, he co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999). His books include Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (MIT Press), which won the IEEE Distinguished Literary Contribution award in 2004.