Research

I am currently involved in 2 main areas of research: Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Community Informatics (CI).
In the HCI field, I am investigating: methodologies for interface design and evaluation; and the usability of Health Information systems.
In the CI field, I am researching: the impact that CI has on social capital in regional communities; and the sustainability of Community Websites/Portals.  My research in these areas has been funded by the University of Wollongong and the ARC, respectively.

I am also involved in a number of other projects with my colleagues in the School of IT and Computer Science (SITACS). These projects include developing modelling techniques and early phase requirements elicitation tools; and developing an e-Commerce portal for regional SMEs.  

My current research flows, in part, from my PhD project,  "Supporting the Retrieval and Analysis of External Statistical Data by Casual and Novice Users". This project concerned the use  of statistical data provided by external sources such as national statistical organisations, government departments etc by casual users. I developed a prototype of a multi-dimensional database system (MDDB)  with online analytical processing capabilities (OLAP). I believe this meets the needs of casual users better than most current systems. A study of casual users and their interaction with the prototype has helped to understand casual users and the way they interact with MDDB and OLAP. I also used a theoretically based taxonomy of human error to analyse some of the errors observed in testing the prototype. This in turn led to suggested improvements in the taxonomy of human errors. My PhD researh forms the basis of my interest in HCI and sytem evaluation. 

Since completing my PhD in 2001, I have done research in several related areas. For a short time, I continued my research on OLAP,  using intelligent agents to augment the abilities of OLAP tools and to improve user interfaces.This reinforced my interest in HCI.

I worked for two years on a project with NSW Police - examining  the process they are using in to develop their knowledge portal. This led to an interst in portal technologies and their use by communities of special interest. The end of this project coincided with the release by AuDA of domain names for geographical communities - names like wollongong.nsw.au. I saw this as a great opportunity to observe and assist regional or geographical communities to form websites to improve the quality of life in their community.  I have been working on this Community Informatics project for the last two years. 

PhD research                         Decision Systems Laboratory (DSL)                 Recent publications