General Project Information

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.

AMSc project suggestions here, though you're welcome to browse this list too.....

• non-attentive displays: how much do people take in when they are not lreally looking at a display? This project will design and run experiments to determine how much peple can understand from displays that they are not really paying full attention too. You need an appreciation of psychology to do this project.
• Ambient art: an earlier project parsed the BBC news site and collected suitable images from Flikr to illustrate the news - you will take this concept and create a large-scale mosaic of images based on the news and other sources and evaluate its impact on the spaces in which it is show, and the people who interact with it.
• Shared spaces: Project is to build an application that works with the wireless network/SMS/GPRS/bluetooth 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 try and 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.
• information tracking on the internet. The rise of blogging has led to a whole new source of information: if I want to know what people I respect are thinking, I look at their blogs. Is there a good way we can track and use this information effectively, to enhance our knowledge or refine our searches? The project will study blogging, the systems that analyse blogs, and look at ways to develop new programs that solve particular issues. Skills developed: XML, search strategies etc
• Active staff directory: Provide a widescreen display of staff pictures and locations, and add in interactive services to allow their location to be determined, to leave them messages, to see their free/busy times. To design this for both internet access and tangible interface scenarios (projected onto a wall), and evaluate the differences. Integrate webcams into the feeds.

  

Intelligent mobile interaction

These projects focus on applications of a.i. or clever design to improve mobile computing

• intelligent browsing for mobile devices. This project develops an idea of guided browsing, in which we build an intelligent proxy which monitors what web pages the user is interested in and then annotates pages to give them guidance as to where to go next. Skills developed: simple a.i., internet programming, user-centered design
• Determining context through audio cues: some recent work has looked at using visual input to determine a user's location, but this requires a camera equipped device and the user has to take a snap. Is there a way of detecting audio cues that will let us infer where a user with a mobile device might be? (Eg, on the train, in a lecture, in the pub etc), without the user having to do anything? This would require some programming of mobile devices, eg iPaq or mobile phone, collation of relevant audio cues mapped to different contexts, and some user testing of a prototype.

Novel interaction and intelligent interaction projects

These projects look at the next generation of interfaces.....

• 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 similar to add personality to it.
• 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.
• Virtual pinball/football: using a projected surface, the aim is to use video capture and processing to allow people to become active participants in a pinball or football game, where the games surfaceis projected onto the floor, along with a virtual 'ball', and image capture and processing allow users to interact with it.
• impairment testing - the Anoto digital pen allows people to work with pen and paper and us to get accurate digital results. We want to build upon a protoype system by devising and testing appropriate tests and algorithms to determine whether people are impaired through drink or drugs, or not. A number of user trails will be carried out.
• temporal issues in interaction - research topic. Time is getting increasingly noticed in HCI, and this project is to understand more about how we can usefully model it. In particular, it will look at the notion of ownership of triggers (i.e. who forces who to do something) and how this can be used to improve the design of messaging and other systems
• supporting users in high tension situations. The game Halo can be played in multi-player mode, requiring cooperation to defeat the monsters. We will try to understand what is happening to the players and how we can offer additional support to them in such stressful situations: the lessons from this can be carried forwards into other high-tension situations.
• enhancing web-based memory systems. Tools such as wiki's are becoming increasingly used to store and manipulate information and act as a connected memory web. We will try to extend their usage by incorporating memory mapping tools, transferrence between different formats (e.g. interconected HTML to linear document) and research tools (automatic querying of reaserch databases etc) with the aim of producing a flexible research support environment to aid learning.
• clever searching. Decent search is still the holy grail of the internet: using semantics as well as syntax is a promising approach, and this project will look at ways to understand the meaning of queries before reformulating them and presenting them to the search engines. A variety of approaches will be looked at, from the semantic web through to the abstraction of search terms.
• symbolic GAs - evolving understandable rules allows us to interpret the output of evolutionary systems more easily: this project will review the state of the art and work on approaches to create flexible systems that can act as components of a data mining or AI system. Ideally, the project will also develop the rest of the data mining system by integrating existing components with the GA.

Design

• HCI design patterns are ways of expressing good approaches to solving interactive design issues: this project will collate numerous patterns and express them in UML or a similar modelling language, and then extend a tool to recognise and suggest appropriate patterns given a certain scenario. This is harder than it seems.....
• Slanty design. Investigate a newly-emerging design methodology, in which user-centered design meets the (sometimes different) needs of the organisation. Requires a lot of reading and research and awareness of design approaches.

For reference: 2004-5 projects , 2005-6 projects)