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, known for his work on semantic analysis[1] and on human-system communication.
[3][4] 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, where he was a distinguished member of technical staff for 15 years.
The body of Furnas' research, and its primacy in the field, is aptly précised by the delineation of his work in his SIGCHI bio:
His classic "Generalized Fisheye Views" paper inspired a sea of focus+context research in information visualization.