Talk Details:

Rethinking ‘Advanced Search’: Interaction Design and the Query Builder Paradigm

Progress in science relies on the recognition and exploitation of prior work. In life sciences in particular, it is vital to consider all relevant evidence when developing policy, guidance, and interventions. Systematic literature reviews play a key role in synthesizing the complex, incomplete, and at times conflicting findings of scientific research into actionable insights for decision-making. However, these reviews often take years to complete, leaving them at risk of being outdated by new research. Compounding this challenge, search strategies—the foundation of systematic reviews—frequently contain errors, and their validation, review, and translation are fragmented across non-interoperable platforms.

This talk explores how advances in interaction design can address these issues by rethinking the outdated procedural paradigm of command-line query builders, commonly offered by proprietary database vendors. We present a declarative approach in which users express concepts as objects on a visual canvas, enabling them to articulate relationships through direct manipulation. This approach reduces errors, enhances query transparency, and fosters collaboration and knowledge sharing. By examining the intersection of academic research and industry practice, we explore how interaction design can transform workflows, support systematic review processes, and offer new ways to share search strategies and best practices.

Bio:

Tony Russell-Rose is Professor of UX Engineering at City St. George’s, University of London. He began his career with a BEng in Production Engineering focusing on human factors, and a PhD investigating the use of language modelling to improve the accuracy of handwriting recognition systems. He was then awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship at HP Labs working on speech user interfaces and a further fellowship at BT Labs working on intelligent agents for information retrieval. He subsequently joined Canon Research Centre Europe as Senior Research Scientist and then joined Reuters as Leader of Language Technology, where he established a global centre of excellence for NLP. After a period heading up software development at the Advanced Computation Lab of Cancer Research UK, he was approached by Oracle to lead their European UX practice. He returned to academia in 2019 as Reader in Cognitive Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also Director of UXLabs Ltd and Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor at Essex University.