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).