Since its creation in the early 1990s the Web has held the promise of allowing near-instantaneous communication, participation and sharing of resources and ideas between users across the globe. However up until fairly recently, the Web was predominantly a large collection of static documents providing no real scope for such interaction. The past decade has seen the arrival and rapid growth of the so called "Web 2.0"€� movement where sites have become increasingly more social with users able to share information with others.
This work explores two avenues of this new social web: social tagging and ratings-based collaborative filtering and introduces a family of novel latent variable Bayesian models designed for this data. A series of experiments carried out on real-world data sets show that these models can overcome the inherent difficulties and provide significant improvements in performance over state of the art systems. Furthermore it is shown that the output of these models is more readily interpretable than from competing models and can therefore be utilised to gain a more complete understanding of the complex social and topical dynamics of such systems.

Most relevant publication (more):

Harvey, M.
Bayesian Latent Variable Models for the Collaborative Web
PhD Thesis, Strathcyde University. Glasgow, Scotland. (May 2011)
Thesis (PDF)

Despite Email being the most popular communication medium currently in use and the fact that people have been shown to regularly re-use messages, very little is known about how people actually search within email clients. In this work we present a detailed analysis of email search behaviour and uncover a number of behavioral patterns that contrast with those previously observed in web search. From these findings, we describe ways in which email search could be improved in future.

Most relevant publications (more):

Harvey, M., Elsweiler, D.
Exploring Query Patterns in Email Search
In Proceedings Advances in Information Retrieval, 34th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2012. Barcelona, Spain. (April 2012, acceptance rate: 21%)
Conference web site

Elsweiler, D., Harvey, M., Hacker, M.
Understanding Re-finding Behaviour in Naturalistic Email Interaction Logs
Proceedings of the 34th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference. Beijing, China. (July 2011, acceptance rate: 19.8%) **honourable mention**
Conference web site

The main aims of the VAMOS project is to expand the supply and service opportunities in healthcare in the home through the use of the latest assistive technologies and continue to simultaneously measure the achieved quality. Related work involves the automatic recommendation of meal plans to users that will suit both their tastes and nutritional needs.

In order to achieve these goals it is neccesary to take a number of incremental steps:

accurately measure the activity levels of users and then use these measurements to model nutritive requirements

build models which can accurately learn user food preferences

finally, using both of these sources of knowledge, automatically generate meals plans that optimally fit both a user's nutritional requirements and his/her tastes

Most relevant publications (more):

Harvey, M., Elsweiler, D., Ludwig, B.
You are what you eat: learning user tastes for rating prediction
20th String Processing and Information Retrieval Symposium (SPIRE). Jerusalem, Israel. (October 2013)
Conference web site

Müller, M., Harvey, M., Elsweiler, D., Mika, S.
Ingredient Matching to Determine the Nutritional Properties of Internet-Sourced Recipes
In Proceedings Pervasive Health 2012, San Diego, California. (May 2012, acceptance rate: 34%)
Conference web site

In this project we seek to investigate how people can be assisted when out and about visiting multiple events over a fixed amount of time. We seek to both recommend events of interest to people and also to automatically generate tours allowing them to visit as many interesting events as possible. Through analysis of log files, surveys and questionnaires we learn how people search in casual leisure settings where they are not searching to meet a particular information need but rather of entertainment purposes.

I am serving as an organiser for an up-coming workshop on Casual Leisure Search called "Search 4 Fun" which will be co-located with ECIR2012 in Barcelona. For more information please visit the workshop web site.

Most relevant publications (more):

Schaller, R., Harvey, M., Elsweiler, D.
Entertainment on the Go: Finding Things to Do and See while Visiting Distributed Events
In Proceedings Fourth Information Interaction in Context Symposium (IIiX 2012), Nijmegen, the Netherlands. (August 2012)
Conference web site

Schaller, R., Harvey, M., Elsweiler, D.
Out and About on Museums Night: Investigating Mobile Search Behaviour for Leisure Events
In Proceedings Searching4Fun Workshop (S4F 2012), ECIR 2012 Barcelona, Spain. (April 2012)
Conference web site