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Lines of Investigation
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Ambient
Behavioural
Semantics
Transcoding / Triage
Ambient (Line)
At it's simplest Ambient Computing (also known as ubiquitous or pervasive computing) has the goal of activating the world by providing hundreds of wireless computing devices of all scales everywhere. While the concept of generalised computational devices invisible but situated through an environment is relatively recent the technology to enable the concept is not. Ambient systems work by using infrared, radio, and inductive or electrostatic technologies to transmit information between devices carried by the user and a device fixed within the environment. When the user moves into range either the beacon - within the environment - or the user device can give feedback. Beacons are often placed at strategic points - say on a platform or railway concourse - to augment implicit waypoints or create additional explicit ones, and the pools of mobility information around them are known as 'information islands'. Ambient systems stem from the belief that people live through their practices and tacit knowledge so that the most powerful things are those that are effectively invisible in use. Therefore, the aim is to make as many of these devices as possible `invisible' to the user, where applicable. In effect making a system `invisible' really necessitates the device being highly imbedded and fitted so completely into its surroundings that it is used without even thinking about the interaction.
Behavioural (Line)
Sensory and cognitive impairments are both about perception. This means that if we can design our software with a perception agnostic ethos then we may be able to support users with a disability more easily. This is however important for everyone. At some point in the new world of moving communications and increasingly complex tasks, users will need to be supported as they will find themselves perception-ally disadvantaged by the technology they are using, or being forced to use. The behavioural research line is my answer to these theories. The research perspective is focused on assisting the cognitive needs of users as they move through information. This now includes the real world were we are bombarded with information giving appliances (both implicitly and explicitly). This is focused along two avenues, firstly, formative evaluations to analyse user preference on various questions associated with cognition of information; secondly, the cognition of new and novel input paradigms to assist users where they may be handicapped by either disability of technology.
Semantics (Line)
The Semantic Web vision, as articulated by Tim Berners-Lee, is of a Web in which resources are accessible not only to humans, but also to automated processes, e.g., automated 'agents' roaming the web performing useful tasks such as improved search (in terms of precision) and resource discovery, information brokering and information filtering. The automation of tasks depends on elevating the status of the web from machine-readable to something we might call machine-understandable. The key idea is to have data on the web defined and linked in such a way that its meaning is explicitly interpretable by software processes rather than just being implicitly interpretable by humans.
To realise this vision, it will be necessary to annotate web resources with metadata (i.e., data describing their content/functionality). Such annotations will be of limited value to automated processes unless they share a common understanding as to their meaning. Ontologies can help to meet this requirement by providing collections of shared terms that can be communicated across people and applications. If definitions of terms are given in a formal language (such as the recently standardised OWL), that information is then amenable to automated reasoning. Briefly put, OWL allows the definition of classes of objects in terms of the properties those objects have, along with assertions about the characteristics of particular objects or instances. A reasoner can then make inferences about the relationships between classes (for example calculating subsumption hierarchies) and support queries over collections of instances. It is this provision of well-behaved and well-specified inference procedures that provides the machine understandability of the Semantic Web.
Transcoding / Triage (Line)
Simply, transcoding is technology used to adapt Web content so that it can be viewed on any of the increasingly diverse devices on the market. It has been used for a number of years in the context of making incomplete or badly written hypertext accessible to visually impaired users and their accessibility technologies. Transcoding in this context normally involves: Syntactic changes like shrinking or removing images; Semantic rearrangements and fragmentation of pages based on the meaning of a section; Annotation of the page created by a reader; and Generated annotations created by the content management system.
There are a number of different ways that transcoding can take place. For example, the original material (an HTML document, for example) is analysed by a program that creates a separate version containing annotations. The annotations include information that will instruct the reformatting process, and inaccessible elements will be removed or altered. Systems are often based along similar lines and address set problems, some are annotation based, others generate text only versions, some filter the content, and others are specifically used for small scale device interaction. Whatever system is used it invariably does not transform all inaccessible elements but just a subset leaving holes in the accessibility of their transcode.