Mike Travers

I've been programming and designing software for over 25 years. My chief interest is in systems that allow end-users to visualize and manipulate complex systems. I've designed and built many systems that involve both complex user interfaces and an AI/KR component (such as a visual knowledge entry for medical expert systems, and a spatial visualizer for the Cyc knowledge base). I've also built many systems that involve end-user programming, for many different types of users including both children and scientists. My approach: the goal is to make software that lets people be smarter (Augmenting Human Intellect). http://hyperphor.com/ammdi https://www.linkedin.com/in/mdtravers/

Currently works at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy

• Enflame is a visual query builder for a scientific graph knowledge base (knowledge graph), using a Scratch-like blocks user interface. Developed by me under the auspices of the Parker Institute. Parts of this have been released as the open-source library Blockoid (A thin Clojurescript wrapping of Blockly, a library for building Scratch-like interfaces in the browser.).
• Vaguely is a tool/hack for exploratory data visualization, based on Vega-Lite, "a high-level grammar of interactive graphics". Vaguely is a partial translation of that grammar into a Scratch-like blocks interface, making it easier to experiment with different visualizations.

I was at the Media Lab from 1987 to 1997 as a graduate student and research associate. http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~mt/ http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~mt/childs-play-pp.html

For part of my thesis work, I designed and built a graphic programming environment called LiveWorld. It features a hierarchical object model and direct manipulation interface. http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~mt/thesis/mt-thesis-1.1.html