I expect my students to be self-motivated, have some imagination and basic competences. In return for such skills, you get to do an interesting project that has an element of research in it as well as providing you with commercially desirable skills at the end. I will not interfere too much with your progress, but you can expect guidance, support, and assistance on the complex aspects or the ones that require discussion, imagination and thought.
I will consider any other projects in related fields, especially mobile, embedded and internet ones.
Mobile phone blogging/diary
Nokia have given us a few mobile phones to play with: we want to develop a blogging system for them that allows us to run further experiments. This will be in cooperation with Antii Syvannen, a visitor to the school from Helsinki, Finland, and you'll be working with him as the 'customer' for the finished system, which will then be deployed in a large project in Finland. The chance to build a mobile app and make a difference!
Synaesthesia and music
MP3's have changed the way we listen to music, and we want a decent way of tagging them. An early experiment shows that people find they can associate colour with music - this project explores this phenomena in more detail, running a series of psycholohical experiments to assess the constancy of this effect.
Location-based systems
Wireless networks can be used to locate users with a certain degree of accuracy. We want to improve this using more advanced algorithms and combinations of algorithms. A system has been developed that does all the interfacing: all that is needed now is someone to implement a number of stochastic and other algorithms and do some modelling and experimentatino to determine good combinations of them. Programmers with an interest in machine learning, probability and experimentation will enjoy this project.
Ambient art
A large projector shines some abstract modern art onto the foyer floor. You notice as you cross the floor that the image alters. You walk forwards, and one of the blue squares gets bigger. You stop, and it stops growing. You walk backwards, and it shrinks. Then a group of people cross the foyer, and the background changes too.
The project is to create modern art that will interact with its environment, getting information on the temperature, network activity and so on, and will also interact with users, translating motion from digital camers into effects that change the arts appearance. There is the chance to create a truly stunning and highly interactive display that can be seen and used by many visitors to the school.
We are particularly interested in the phenomena of 'information without attention' - how we can convey information to people without them being aware of it.
There are a number of facets of the work that are particularly relevant to Natural Computation: how to evolve acceptable art, for example, or how to put intelligence into the system so that it can respond more appropriately to the viewers. For the Advanced MSc, there are interesting issues about context and ambience that need to be addressed, coupled with trying to develop a thoery of artistic appreciation that allows us to drive the changes in an appropriate direction. More information here...
Personality in interaction
As we interact with more and more pervasive and mobile systems, we tend to have longer and more detailed experiences of them. This project will look at devising next generation interfaces with personality and emotion. You will either build a bespoke system which acts in certain ways, and evaluate users experience of it, or adapt an existing system e.g. an instant messenger application, or a search engine, or similar, to add personality to it.
Better browsing
Adding intelligence into an internet browser would allow us to gain so much more from the internet that we currently do. Annotating links to show how relevant they are before you go there, pre-fetching web pages, removing adverts, automatically retrieving sites each day - there are lots of ways to improve the basic web browser - you can think of many more. This project is to design and implement such a browser, either by extending an existing one with DHTML, plugins or java code, or writing a new one from scratch.
This will also be of great use for mobile devices, and doing this and evaluating it as a mobile application would be very interesting.
Shared Space
Project is to build and evaluate an application that works with the wireless network to provide a shared space for all wirelessly connected people to communicate in - to see who's there, to talk to them, to leave messages to each other, to share pictures etc. We'll project this space up onto the wall, so that everyone can interact with a really large version. People should be able to access this through both laptops with wireless cards in, and via Java-enabled mobile phones.
Web clipping
The intention is to create an application that will allow you to grab small bits of others peoples web pages and display just those, creating a collage of information that is of interest to you. It will use Java and some DHTML.
Calculating context
With GPS we can get location information; if we ask the user questions we can get information on what they're up to - what's really interesting is getting the system to use the information it can get from transducers and then intelligently processing this to infer as much as possible about what people are up to. For example, the GPS may say that the user is near the library - however, it also shows them moving towards it and not slowing down, and it's 6:30pm - they are more likely to be heading to the bar, so giving them info on what books they want is not relevant now. This project will use an existing framework (which does a lot of the hard work for you) to develop intelligent context processing systems, and possibly context-aware applications to sit on top of them. For example, one system might be an intelligent guide for people in this building.
Mobile scrapbook
We now have camera-enabled phones and PDAs, we create lots of text wherever we go - there must be a decent way to dump all that back to your home and have it come up on the web for others to look at and share the experience..... This project is to build a clever mobile blogging system that builds a decent blog up from the different media resources you dump onto it, without you having to do much to create it.
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