Intelligent internet software, guiding you to what is most appropriate given your current context.
Active integration of components gave powerful agent-oriented architecture - the best way to understand it is to download and install the software and play with it - or read the demo and tutorial
Software download | demo and tutorial | onCue - how it works | activeSpace underlying architecture | website home
aQtive was a spinout company: we raised £600k of venture capital from 3i and I ran it successfully for a couple of years. Over half a million downloads of the software - one of the first context-aware intelligent agent interface systems; underlying architecture is still developing and forms the basis for part of the Mobilearn EU architecture.
Pan-European co-buying internet retailer - one of the major dot com boom companies.
Responsible for user experience on the website - won awards for best e-commerce site and workflow processes.
Introduced improved buying processes, new models of e-shopping, and supportive front-end interaction and back-end software systems. Developed the underlying, highly dynamic site and optimised it for performance.
Managed interdisciplinary teams in the UK, Sweden, and Germany, for both research & development and commercial activities.
Haiku
Data mining is all about looking through data to extract interesting information. But what is interesting? One day it is the cluster of things, the next it's the outliers.....
Humans are great at processing visual scenes, to extract general information. Machines are good at providing complex descriptons of data. It would be best if we could utilise the visual perceptions of people to indicate areas of interest, and then use machine learning to describe those regions, especially if we could tailor the descriptions to be human-readable. Haiki provides a way of doing this. Symbolic genetic algorithms are used in symbiosis with high-dimensional visualisations giving a novel data mining system (unclassified information available, and more information on rule-data interaction and visual representation of data clustering)
Glori-B
Using sidescan sonar, you can bounce sound waves down to the ocean floor and pick up the strength of their reflections to build up a picture of what's beneath. However, you can't tell how deep it is.
We took the existing GLORIA system and added phase processing, to detect the phase shifts in the returned waves, from which we can calculate the depth of the floor across the swath. This produced a world-first - deep sea bathymetric sidescan sonar - and a very useful tool for oceanographic exploration.
ASSIST (Active System for Serving Information, Service and Training)
Led project to put Birmingham City Council online - one of the first UK councils to have an Internet presence. R&D, user studies - precursor to current site.
The world's leading undergraduate textbook for HCI - now in its 3rd edition. We first wrote this in 1993 and have updated it ever since, and it is extensively used in the UK, Europe and the US.
Study for Lottery Commission - interactive mobile lottery game. Loosely based on poker, the player has to choose cards one at a time, and if they match the computer's choice they continue in the game.
Designed to allow players to join at any time during the week (the later you join, the less you win), the statistics were done to ensure roughly the correct number of winners of the jackpot.
We are all used to sharing information with close family on our fridge door - messages, photos, comments and magnetic poems are common features in most people's kitchens. So it's a good metaphor to use for information sharing on the internet. We span vFridge out of aQtive, and gained another £200,000 of ventrue capital money, and whilst it developed into quite a nice websharing system, it didn't succeed commercially. At least, not yet.
One of the projects I have had rather less to do with: I worked with a company that had developed some of these algorithms, and when they went bust was responsible for extracting the right people and IPR, and introdcing them to other colleagues to form a decent management team - and for the past 18 months, the rest has been down to them.
example active projects
Ambient art
Art that responds to the presence (or absence) or people, reflecting characteristics of the real world in which it inhabits. The aim is to build a modular system that uses intelligent sensors, networked communications on top of a consistent architecture, and a variety of proecessing and display technologies to create interesting, challenging and entertaining artworks. One of the uses for ambient art is to investigate the role of informal, intuitive interfaces in communicating complex multidimesional data. (pdf)
Earlier work on computational creativity saw us develop a complex system to generate novel solutions to complex engineering problems, using a combination of modelling, neural networks, genetic algorithms and simulated annealing to effectively explore the design space. A project funded by DERA.
Intelligent agents
Agent-based systems will only work when we can ask them to do things and let them get on with it - and they may be working for us over a long period of time. So how should they interact with us - what should they tell us, and how? We are using Myers-Briggs personality typing to provide different interaction styles based on a profile of the user. We are investigating what characterisitcs of abstract representations we can manipulate to give the desired effects
Mobilearn
EU project on mobile learning: provide multi-platform context aware information to support informal learning. Responsible for leading architectural design of system (service-oriented architecture) and closely involved with context awareness subsystems.
Networked spaces
Public shared workspace: A generic information space in which uses of PDAs, mobile phones and laptops can post messages into. We have designed and built the relevant technology, and are extending the project to see how such a space affects the people that use it, and what they use it for.
Door messaging system: a messaging system that provides staff and students with an interactive door-mounted system for leaving and sending messages, to facilitate meetings and communication. Staff can send web-based or phone-based messages to the system for instant display, whilst students can leave messages for staff on the device and the system will route that message to the member of staff by the most appropriate method, depending whether the person is in the building or not.
Technological enhancements to paper-based impariement systems
The police are interested in developing easy to administer roadside tests for assessing impairment (for drink, drugs, fatigue and so on). PDA based systems are expensive, unfamiliar to officers and drivers alike, and so we are looking at ways of using more conventional approaches based on paper and pens and augmenting it with a variety of technologies to produce reliable, easy to use and accurate tests. The project will investigate both the technologies and the psychometric testing techniques that work most effectively.
A protptype system for children who suffer from cyctic fibrosis. They have great problems with social isolation, and medically are not able to get together for group sessions. For this online community we analysed the social protocols and nuances of the group sessions that used to occur, and devised a site that offers many of the types of social interaction found useful before, Built using conventional bulletin board technologies (phpBB) and only requiring slight modification, the trick has been to get the structure and social issues right.
Other medical projects have included early forays into groupware (1994) and handheld prescribing and note-taking.
Mobile environments
Yacht displays
Developing novel and interesting ways of displaying the complex information that exists on board a racing yacht, with a particular focus on the graphical representation of certain forms of data for more effective presentation.
Intro (pdf) | PPT presentation
Learning autopilot
Autopilots are used to steer yachts in varying wind and wave conditions. Basic autopilots take compass or wind data and simply adjust the yachts heading to keep the desired value constant - this project is to build a neural network-based learning autopilot that can learn to steer the boat according to the characteristics of either a model response or a particular helmsperson.
Intelligent information access
Mitsikeru - system that undertakes implicit user modelling and intelligent look-ahead, coupled with subtle annotation of incoming web pages, to provide an enhanced browsing experience. This builds upon the theoretical work on understanding how users interact with the internet and the categories of Searching, Browsing, and Monitoring.
Earlier projects in this vein included:
- New
Zealand Digital Library
Querying a digital library brings back a lot of information - refining that is tricky, as subtly different queries bring back some different information and some that is the same. This system adapted the 3-d self-organising visualisation system and applied it to querying systems, allowing you to see the effects of different queries by visualising the relationships between the documents returned. (pdf)
- Web
browsing with visualisation
a similar approach has been used to provide interactive, dynamic, self-organising 3-d representations of a users browsing activity on the web.
Russell
Beale