Mark van Harmelen Honorary Research Fellow

I am an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science as well as having professional roles outside the school.

My previous and lengthy association with the School of Computer Science is as a Lecturer (1980-1985), Research Fellow (1985-1991) and Honorary Research Fellow (1991-present).

Research Interests

I'm centrally concerned with the empowerment of communities, particularly for the purposes of self-directed and peer-assisted life-long learning.

In this context we find ourselves at an interesting juncture in technological development: An increased maturity in the use of web has allowed the development of social software. This development co-occurs with the beginning of a period of massive media convergence and the start of a merger between traditional broadcast media and user generated content. Together, these offer tremendous transformational opportunity for how we go about the practice of learning.

My current research activities are in part centered around the design, implementation and use of the Manchester PLE; a social software system to support learning activities by communities-of-interest.

I have further, less developed interests in exploiting converging media systems to support communities and community learning.

I also have interest outside of the above, particularly in resource discovery and, more recently, in the semantic web.

Past Research

I self-supervised my PhD (University of Manchester, 1986). It was concerned with ring-structured parallel hardware and accompanying software architectures for knowledge manipulation, computer graphics and image manipulation.

Subsequent activities have encompassed interactive systems in general, particularly in respect of human-computer interaction, usability engineering, software engineering, and design methods for interactive systems. Some of my research work included formulating the theoretical basis for the nexus of these areas. Concomitantly, I encouraged the growth of an international community that contributed to a monograph I edited on oohci methods (see left). I describe the antecedents and history of, and methodological framework for oohci methods in chapter 10 of this monograph (here in a slightly modified form, and also in a short set of slides). I remain interested in oohci methods as part of my practice as a working computer scientist. Particularly, I use a participatory oohci design method in interactive system design activities.

Teaching

I have taught both undergraduate and post-graduate courses in the School, and have also made significant contributions to the design of two MSc programmes. For several years, ending in 2009, I taught a very popular module on Interactive System as part of the Advanced Computer Science (ACS) MSc Programme.

I now lead the teaching team that provides a software engineering overview for the same module. In that module we concentrate on three topics, methods to record and provide a medium for the discussion of the structure of systems, agile techniques for the construction of systems, and, because software construction is most often a team effort, methods to enable productive work in teams.