Marian Petre

Marian is interested in what makes expert software designers expert, how people reason and communicate about design and problem solving, and how they use representations in their reasoning. There are two sides to this coin: understanding expertise, and exploiting what we can learn from expertise for non-experts. What Marian does is study expert designers doing real tasks in genuine environments, so that she can identify and articulate their strategies, in order to derive a theory of expertise. She is particularly interested in generalist experts, problem-solvers who can reason across the whole range of things they know about. In software design, generalist experts emerge as system architects, the "super-designers" who can encompass large, complex designs and hold them 'in their heads' - and still understand implications of particular detailed design decisions.