Academic Bio

dr mc schraefel (lower case deliberate, and if we're on a first name basis, "mc" is truly preferred as the appellation).
I'm a Reader in the Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia Group (IAM), part of Electronics and Computer Science, Southampton.

My main area is Human Computer Interaction (HCI) / Human Factors. My main area of research is interaction and information systems design to support knowledge building in desktop, mobile and increasingly pervasive environments. In other words, i'm interested in looking at how we can design tools to help connect information on massive information repositories like the Web so that we can make better use of the information that's out there. That is, design ways of accessing, representing and manipulating this info to find out what we want to know, learn what we want to learn, more effectively so as to increase knowledge, delight, discovery, quality of life

Right now, the most powerful tool we have to explore the mass of data on the web is a single box: the keyword search box of the search engine. Awesomely elegant and powerful. If what you want to do is find one thing: what is this business's phone number; what is cholesterol; when did napolean get sent to that Island and what was it called?

Questions like what are the trends in breast cancer research and how do they compare with trends in other research areas - not so much. Unless there's been a report done on that topic, we would have to coble together lots of data from many sources across many (tedious) searches to put this picture together. Can't we do better than that? enable someone to ask this question and explore not only those trends, but look at what a particular area means or where criticisms or support of a new treatment emerging from this work is starting, and by the way who locally performs a sentinel node biopsy?

The area of designing, delivering and evaluating (do they work?) tools to support these more-than/other-than keyword search queries is increasingly being called Exploratory Search (where a few of us co-edited a Communications of the ACM special issue on the topic. Great piece there by Gary Marchionininini) or Information Seeking Strategies (Ryen White and Gary lead a recent NSF workshop on this topic. There's a reference to one of the grand challenges on my research page).

Some Examples of Research

Self-Directed Knowledge Building (mSpace) A big passion driving my work has been to design and deliver tools that can help people build their own knowledge: to be able to start with what we know, at whatever level we're at, and get to where we want to get. The Web as repository of all kinds of information, connected with powerful search engines, has become a fantastic starting place for this kind of DIY knowledge building. But it's only one way. Here's an Exploratory Search grand challenge i offered at a recent National Science Foundation workshop, called the Single Mom Challenge: how can we design to help someone with little time and fewer resources and lots of responsibilities, someone like a single mom, be able to come to her computer and say "i want a better job; i want a better future." Put that into Google and see how helpful the reply is. Chances are the information is out there, but how help coordinate it, deliver it, so that it's useful and usable?

Early work in this space was focusing on being able to provide self-directed access to and exploration of information, particularly for people who have an area of interest but not sufficient knowledge to articulate a keyword query. An early example of this work, CSAKTive Space (paper) won the Semantic Web Challenge at the International Semantic Web Conference, 2003. The formalism of this work into the mSpace interaction model (mspace.fm) was recognized with a best paper nomination and won ACM SigWeb's Recognition Award for Excellence in Communication of Theoretical Concepts at Hypertext 2004. Within this context we've also been exploring best strategies for effective data entry on mobile devices and effects of mobility on on-the-go information building (see mspaceMobile). Pleased to say the students who worked on this project as undergrads placed third in the UK Imagine Cup Software Engineering competition, and all of whom have gone on to do PhD or research work.

Sometimes before we can design a tool to support a task we need to design new methods to help us model that task so we can then design to support it.

Design Methods; e-Science Tools One of the early projects lead from southampton in CombeChem was smarttea. This project resulted in both a new tool for capturing synthetic chemistry experiments in the lab and in a new method for design elicitation and validation, called Making Tea. The method is used for understanding and modeling what can be conceptualized as highly expert, idiosyncratic, longitudinal tasks. That is, tasks for discovery and learning may follow some pattern but be carried out in highly expert and individual way. What we were looking for was a way for geeks who know nothing about chemistry or biology to be able to connect with experts who know very little about geeks, but who have a common goal to design new tools that will support their practices.

The smarttea work lead to two additional EPSRC projects, myTea (www.mytea.org.uk) where we were asked to take what we'd learned with designing for synthetic chemists and see what would happen applying the methods for bioinformaticians. The follow on project from this, named appropriately, More Tea, is in conjunction with Jeremy Frey in Chemistry and Matthew Addis and Stuart Middleton in IT Innovation where we're robustizing the prototypes we developed to enable them to be deployed as real, effective tools.

Additional Projects

So since coming to the UK, i've been a co-investigator and principal investigator on a number of Semantic Web, eScience and Interaction research projects, including beyond the one's sited above, EPSRC's Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT), PI on the JCSR-JISC project "mSpace, ePrints and eScience" and JISC's RichTags for semantically gathering open repository resources in the UK. JISC Newsfilm Online GUI project (online Aug.1, 2008) to provide self-directed exploration of multimedia resources and associated information for students and researchers.

We're also doing a very interesting cross-disciplinary project called musicSpace with the School of Music, the AHRC and the private sector to bring together a variety of music databased for musicologists under one UI to ask the question will this help accelerate the path to innovation and discovery? and if so exactly how so we can formalize and replicate these features.

More about Research projects and current Hair On Fire questions over on the Research Page.

Affiliations & Professional Service

My affiliations/service includes being the founding and ongoing co-chair of the Semantic Web User Interaction workshop series. I'm a past member of the ACM Web Services Committee, ACM CHI Program Committee Support team, the EPSRC Usability Task Force for the EPSRC eScience Program. I'm on the EPSRC Peer Review College. I serve or have served as an associate chair for CHI, UIST and UBICOMP program committees, among others in HCI, hypermedia and semantic web areas. I'm currently an associate editor for the International Journal of Human Computer Studies and for the Journal of Web Semantics. I'm also currently chair of our School Ethics Review board.

Prehistory

Prior to joining IAM at ECS, i was an Assistant Professor in the DGP Group Computer Science at the University of Toronto and am an Adjunct Associate Professor there. I came to UofT following on from a post doc in the Gregg Vesonder's Online Platforms Research Group, part of Ron Brachman's team at AT&T Research Labs, Florham Park, New Jersey. I am also currently a Research Associate at MIT.

More Recent History

In 2006-2007, via a Global Research Award from the Royal Academy of Engineering and an EPSRC travel grant, and as the first Web Science Research Initiative Fellow, i spent a year working with Ben Shneiderman at the HCIL Lab and with Jim Hendler at the Mind Lab, Computer Science, University of Maryland, just before Prof Hendler moved to RPI. From there i visited at MIT working with Tim Berners-Lee and Danny Weitzner of the DIG Group, CSAIL, and with David Karger's Haystack Group, CSAIL, with David and his students Max Van Kleek and Michael Bernstein. The work with DIG has focused on how interaction research and semantic web technology research may blend to support new models for exploring web-scale information, metadata and provenance/policy information around that data. The Haystack collaborations have focused more on new paradigms to support information capture and rediscovery. A blog post i did there riffing on thoughts on what the Semantic Web might look like in terms of interaction, got worked into a paper that won the ACM Englebart Best Paper award. The collaboration with both DIG and Haystack is ongoing, and has resulted in a number of projects to make capture and reuse of our information better, easier, faster, swifter, stronger.

Current

More recently i've been awarded a Senior Research Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering to focus on how we can design better tools to support quality of life for scientists and enhance/accelerate the path to creativity, discovery and innovation, and thereby enhance everyone's quality of life.

other

Practical Quality of Life As part of my interest in designing systems to support & enhance Quality of Life, i've been exploring how to encourage 20-something grad student desk bound geeks to think about health and fitness. Hence the IAMGeekFit site, and my various certifications. I'm pleased to say my pull up count is above 1.

Favorite Computer Tool Besides all things Web and of course flying toasters, spell checkers. Computers can help us communicate. Spell checkers prove it.

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Thanks Many thanks to Joe Lambert who framed up the CSS to support this design. Joe is the lead RA on RichTags, mSpaceNFO and musicSpace. These projects are all on the mspace.fm site. Thanks as well to Chris Guttheridge for the cool links to eprints and related.