The blog shows my interests well... or look at the digital portfolio

A brief outline of the projects and areas I'm working in follow. More information on these will become available over time as they develop their own pages. Student projects are detailed here.

Call it what you will, having appropriate information and assistance in almost any situation is useful. My interests in this area fall into a number of areas.

Intelligence within such systems allows for a more appropriate response, whether it's maximising limited resources or matching more effectively to perceived user requirements. Designing systems to use intelligence is a challenge in itself, as is developing and applying the most suitable AI approaches.

Update: I have recently returned to academia after spending some years working entrepreneurially and commercially in the technology and new media spaces. I am currently rebuilding my academic project portfolio.

In 1998 I founded aQtive, which used an intelligent agent architecture we developed as the basis for appropriately intelligent internet assistants, and as an integrative enterprise-wide 'glue' for disparate systems.

vFridge was spun out of aQtive in 2000, which concentrates on graphical shared workspaces on the net.

I worked for LetsBuyIt.com as their creative technical director, responsible for the site and its development. Once the largest pan-European internet retailer, it too crashed in the dot com fall. I moved on to work with Red Hot Chilli as Chief Technical Officer, running the research and development teams and advising clients on a variety of projects.

In 2002 I co-founded BeCrypt, which specialises in handheld and mobile security products. Most recently I've been working within NFW, my consultancy company, on a broad span of projects for telecoms, media, technology and computing clients.

Ambient art is art that responds to both its environment and the people near it, offering an abstract but interactive view of the world. I am co-investigator on the EPSRC network on Nature-Inspired Creative Design.

One specific project is looking at using solid state PCs and alternative displays in marine situations to process high levels of environmental information, including looking at the information requirements of users and devising the most effective ways to present highly abstract, temporal information. We are also developing embedded systems for paediatric care, and investigating the use of mobile devices for e-learning, and mobile blogging.

We are particularly interested in context, and its role in mobility.

Intelligent Interaction

Intelligent Agents

Currently ressurecting this work, we have a coherent architecture that allows the rapid development and integration of intelligent and autonomous agents. Architectures for agent systems (cameo, aQtiveSpace) and intelligent agents (onCue) were developed here and commercialised through aQtive.

The use of AI in interactive systems has also been the focus of our work in, for example, Data Mining and particularly the Haiku system, which also utilised the work on autonomous self-organising high dimensional visualisations.

We're also doing work on the theoretical comparison of search algorithms (GAs, neural nets, simulated annealing, etc.). This also ties in with an ongoing interest in these algorithms themselves, which results in occasional forays into some detailed aspect - see also the EEBIC group.

Another project is looking at data processing with adaptive algorithms, focussing on using prior knowledge to produce higher-quality data. Earlier work was on data processing and image creation for oceanography.

Visualisation
An application of the intelligent agents, we're also looking at visualisation for search, user understanding, and information display. The approach taken is to create interaction between elements of the visualisation according to some characteristics of the data, and allow the pictures to evolve.

How can technology support people? That's the fundamental question at the heart of these initiatives.

We are at the centre of the Kaleidoscope project: the future of learning with digital technologies.

The Centre of Excellence in Advanced Telematics is the result of a joint initiative between the European Regional Development Fund, Sun MicroSystems and The University of Birmingham. One of the larger projects, it has a strong outreach and commercial orientation, offering a full development and consultancy service to SMEs in the West Midlands. It also runs a Seminar and Workshop Series aimed at staff in local businesses with the knowledge and expertise necessary to exploit advances in new technologies in today's competitive marketplace.

The ASSIST project gave Birmingham City Council an internet presence: the first significant online site, it was the precursor of their current presence.

I'm also working with the Educational Technology Group in Electrical Engineering on a number of projects in this space, including the Mobilearn project.