Derek L. Hansen is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Studies. He is currently working on a project to help online support communities create patient-centric knowledge repositories using wiki technology (see http://www.medshelf.org). This is an extension of his work exploring how technical support communities have effectively coupled threaded conversation (e.g., email lists and bulletin boards) with collaboratively authored websites (i.e., wikis). He has also done work exploring how adolescents (teens) search for health information on the Internet. He is currently working on a follow-up study of the effect of internet filters (i.e., pornography blocking software) on access to content in libraries - a subject that he has written and presented on in the past.
Ben Shneiderman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (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. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He pioneered the highlighted textual link in 1983, and it became part of Hyperties, a precursor to the web. His move into information visualization spawned Spotfire, known for pharmaceutical drug discovery and genomic data analysis. He is a technical advisor for the treemap visualization producer, The Hive Group. 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 (5th ed., 2010, with C. Plaisant). He co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999) with S. Card and J. Mackinlay. His book, Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (MIT Press), won the IEEE Award for Distinguished Literary Contribution in 2004. His most recent book, Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World (2011), was co-authored with D. Hansen and M. A. Smith.
Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. He founded and managed the Community Technologies Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington and led the development of social media reporting and analysis tools for Telligent Systems. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. He is a co-founder of the Social Media Research Foundation which is dedicated to Open Tools, Open Data, and Open Scholarship related to social media.
Smith is the co-editor with Peter Kollock of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups. Smith contributes to the open and free NodeXL project (http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl) from the Social Media Research Foundation that adds social network analysis features to the familiar Excel spreadsheet. A tutorial (http://casci.umd.edu/NodeXL_Teaching) on social network analysis has evolved into a book. Along with Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman, Smith is the co-author and editor of Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, a guide to mapping connections created through computer-mediated interactions (released in 2010 from Morgan-Kaufmann).
