Michael B. Spring
Michael
Spring is an Associate Professor of Information Science at the University
of Pittsburgh. His research involves the application of technology to the
workplace with particular attention large scale electronic document processing
and visualization, intelligent agents, and interface design.
He received his Bachelor's in Psychology from the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, and his Ph.D. from the School of Education, University of Pittsburgh. For more than a decade prior to joining the Department of Information Science, Dr. Spring served as Associate Director and then Director of the University External Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh.
Spring has authored numerous articles and book chapters in the areas of office automation, text and document processing, information technology standardization, and educational technology. He is the author of two books Electronic Printing and Publishing: The Document Processing Revolution and Hands on PostScript.
He has led research projects in the areas of on-demand publishing, intelligent text conversion, and document database publishing. In 1984-1985, he led the Planet Earth Telecourse project which produced custom textbooks on demand using a database to compose and print complete 700+ page textbooks in less than two hours. Funded by the Annenberg Foundation, the project represented one of the earliest large scale custom publishing efforts. The telecourse was the first one to be endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences.
From 1986-1989, he led a team that developed a virtual machine for the intelligent conversion of electronic documents. The project involved the conversion of procedurally copymarked documents into structural copymarks such as SGML. This and other work on electronic publishing was funded by the Xerox corporation.
From 1994-1999, with support from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, he has developed a research testbed for exploring issues related to collaborative authoring of network based documents. Current research efforts include models for docubases and computer based augmentation of collaborative authoring, intelligent agents and augmented interfaces, models and principles for design of human-computer interaction, and visualization and virtual information spaces.
Over the last two decades he has worked on a series of projects looking at the use of the web to deliver a variety of content and services. These range from theoretical research on e-service architectures to operational systems focused on social networks and delivery of health services via the web. The health care projects include a number of systems serving both clients and caregivers in the areas of schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, depression, anxiety, brain cancer, ovarian cancer, and liver cancer.
He has consulted with corporations and non-profit institutions on related topics ranging from office automation, to document processing, to information technology trends.
For a more formal listing of work, see the appropriate section of his CV: