Projects

Ambient intelligence: putting intelligence into the environment

Projects:

(i) wireless location accuracy – location is possible using a wireless network, with a number of algorithms used to determine position. This project will implement two algorithms, plus a combination of both, and test the system to see whether increased accuracy can be obtained with a combination of approaches

(ii) public information displays – projected displays or large screens offer the opportunity to share photos, comments and information with others – this project will design and implement a system to achieve this, hopefully deploying it in the foyer once done

(iii) video art: using computational approaches to manipulate video to create networked connections between different parts of the building, and time delays to create interesting interactions with people across time

Non-attentive interaction

(i) experiments to determine how much information can be presented to people in a subtle, non-intrusive manner – changing a few pixels on a display, changing the colour of a panel, etc. What causes things to be noticed, what information do people absorb without realising it, etc?

Emotion in interaction:

(i) comparing the effect of emotion on users, by comparing video-based images of a person (with and without emotion) with an animated agent (with and without emotion)

(ii) Comparing abstract representations of emotion (e.g. colour – red=anger) with more concrete ones (video or animated agent)

(iii) Emotional input – using galvanic skin resistance (pads on the skin) to measure emotional response, and adapting the behaviour of the system (either an agent, or a game) according to the response

Personality in interaction:

(i) experiments to see how personality is perceived in abstract systems (colour, font, etc) and how it can be used

(ii) experiments to see if carefully phrased questions on web pages can be used as a subtle questionnaire to determine users personality

HCI design patterns

(i) working with UML to define design patterns for HCI, then extending an existing tool to represent these in Eclipse

Specialised search

(i) devising and implementing new search algorithms for searching blogs, or Flickr sites, or other specialised internet resource. Such sites use words in different ways to standard web pages (e.g. blogs refer to other blogs and pages a lot) and need to devise an approach to searching that reflects this properly