Academic Work

The project that currently funds me is LinkMe, which is an EPSRC funded project with Imperial College as partners and Ordnance Survey as industrial collaborators. The original aim of the project is to investigate the use of the DLS in mobile and distributed environments with particular attention to the architecture and configuration of the system. The focus of the project has moved onto more map-related activities. Imperial College are interested in the delivery of media and data to mobile devices with a frame work of media transcoding to provide Quality of Service. Here at Southampton, we're looking at how map data can be used as linkbases as well as using maps as a media type.

A related project is Equator, a multi-institutional project looking at the the interface between physical and virtual worlds. The relevance to LinkMe is that we are looking at linking between physical and virtual worlds, and maps.

An important aspect of LinkMe is the notion of Pervasive Computing. Trends in technology suggest that computing devices will become smaller and more portable, better connected and ubiquitous. This leads to new and challenging computing environment which is massively distributed. Ontop of this layer, we're interested in the information level. What support is needed to provide pervasive information systems? How do we provide rich open hypermedia systems in such an environment? This activity comes under umbrella term "Pervasive Information Fabric", coined by Dave De Roure, Mark Thompson and myself.

Generally, I'm interested in Distributed Systems. The previous project I was involved with looked at using clusters of PCs both from a system tools point of view, as well as applications. This was, in part, a follow-on from my PhD work, which looked at applying distributed computing techniques to a specific area of statistics commonly used in Social Statistics. The technique, called Exact Tests, can yield some massive computation which map naturally to distributed processing. The activity with Social Statistics is ongoing, working with Mac MacDonald.