Dr. Max Van Kleek
Max Van Kleek, PhD is an Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, a Governing Body Fellow and LGBTQ+ Fellow at Kellogg College, and a Research Fellow at the Oxford Martin School. He has over two decades of experience in human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and personal information management.
Max is known for his research on technologies for human empowerment at the intersection of HCI, AI, privacy, IoT, and distributed Web technologies, with a particular emphasis on fair, ethical, and explainable AI and information architectures. His research spans multiple topics, including making AI and machine learning systems usable, helping people make better decisions in unfamiliar situations, and helping people control their personal information to support their privacy preferences.
Max serves as Oxford’s lead Co-Investigator for PETRAS, the UK’s National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity. He is also the Principal Investigator of the PETRAS project RETCON: Red Teaming the Connected Internet of Things, which explores how AI systems can make everyday non-experts more resilient to sophisticated cybersecurity attacks.
Max leads the EPSRC PETRAS-funded project Respectful Things in Private Spaces (ReTIPS), focused on helping people understand and control how IoT devices in the most private parts of their lives perceive and share data about them. In 2022, he was Project Lead on RED-AID, which utilizes AI technology to help individuals with impaired autonomy, particularly older adults with dementia, who are especially vulnerable to voice-based social engineering attacks such as phone fraud. Read Max Van Kleek secures PETRAS funding for RED-AID project.
Max teaches on the Software Engineering Programme at Oxford, delivering courses on Interaction Design, Secure System Design, Data Science, Classical Machine Learning, Semantic Technologies, Ethics and Responsible Innovation, and Law and Computing. He is a Senior Fellow of the Oxford Martin Programme on Ethical Web and Data Architectures. Between July 2023 and June 2025, Max was Chief Technology Officer of Veer Technologies Ltd, an Oxford University Innovations spin-out from the Department of Computer Science. Veer was cofounded by Sir Nigel Shadbolt and Sue Douglas to build AI-powered tools helping jobseekers learn about and explore the job market using neural NLP and foundation models.
Until 2017, Max was the interaction research theme leader for the EPSRC Project SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines, a five-year research programme between Southampton, Oxford, and Edinburgh Universities investigating how social machines evolve and what factors influence their success.
During Project SOCIAM, he led several projects at the intersection of personal and social data systems and architectures, designing new Web architectures to help people regain control of information held about them in the cloud, from fitness to medical records. Read 7 billion home telescopes: observing social machines through personal data stores.
Max’s research has been cited over 8,600 times according to Google Scholar. His notable publications include Trouble in Paradise? Understanding Mastodon Admin’s Motivations, Experiences, and Challenges Running Decentralised Social Media. “You are you and the app. There’s nobody else.”: Building Worker-Designed Data Institutions within Platform Hegemony, I Want My App That Way: Reclaiming Sovereignty Over Personal Devices, Third Party Tracking in the Mobile Ecosystem, Fairness and Accountability Design Needs for Algorithmic Support in High-Stakes Public Sector Decision-Making, and ‘It’s Reducing a Human Being to a Percentage’; Perceptions of Justice in Algorithmic Decisions. Read The Future of Social Is Personal: The Potential of the Personal Data Store.
Max earned his PhD in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2011, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction, and a minor in Computational Cognitive Science. His dissertation, Effort, Memory, Attention and Time: Paths to More Effective Personal Information Management, summarised a ten-year investigation into technology-enhanced personal information management conducted in the Haystack Group under Professor David R. Karger.
He earned his Master of Engineering in Computer Science from MIT in 2003 with his thesis on the Ki/o Intelligent Kiosk Platform, supervised by Howard E. Shrobe, which received the William A. Martin Memorial Thesis Prize for the best master’s thesis in computer science. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from MIT in 2001 with a perfect 5.0/5.0 GPA.
In 2007, Max received the MIT EECS Department Head Special Recognition Award. Before joining Oxford, Max was a Senior Research Fellow in the Web and Internet Science Group at the University of Southampton from January 2010 to August 2015, where he led research on Open Data and data-exploration interfaces, taught Data Visualization, and published papers at CHI, CSCW, and WWW. He continued as Visiting Research Fellow at Southampton from August 2015 to August 2023, supervising PhD students and leading work on challenges of introducing quantified self data into clinical practice.
Before Southampton, Max was a Graduate Research Assistant at MIT CSAIL from January 2001 to December 2010, where he led field studies in personal information management and designed several tools for studying PIM practices, including List-It, Poyozo, and Atomate. Read Atomate it! End-user context-sensitive automation using heterogeneous information sources on the web.
He was a Research Intern at PARC from June to October 2006, where he designed OPF, the Objé Perception Framework, a stream-based activity recognition framework for ubiquitous computing environments. Max has also worked at IBM Research, Nokia Research, Sun Microsystems Labs, and the MIT Media Lab, where he did interaction design under Professor John Maeda and the Aesthetics and Computation Group.
Between 2016 and 2020, he served on the Operations Committee of ACM SIGCHI, making decisions affecting all SIGCHI-affiliated conferences. He has been a member of ACM since 2001 and continues to serve on the ACM SIGCHI Conference Management Committee.
Max enjoys collaborating with social scientists, cognitive psychologists, public policy researchers, machine learning researchers, industry R&D teams, and entrepreneurs to solve essential problems that help people live better computer-supported lives.
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