About Me
I’m a Ph.D. researcher in the Advanced Interaction Group at Birmingham University, UK.
The Advanced Interaction Group
The group exists to promote leading-edge research and development in theories, designs, methodologies, and systems to support people in whatever they want to achieve.
The group acts as a focal point for research, development and expertise in anything that has the user at the core. This includes: -
- mobile computing: laptops, handhelds, tablets, phones
- internet-based systems: e-commerce, web design, shared spaces, communities
- new media and new technologies
- ambient computing: ad-hoc interaction with the environment, other users, other systems
- intelligent agents: entities acting for or on behalf of the user
- usability and design: theories and methodologies to promote effective, usable, enjoyable systems
- visualisation, virtual and augmented realities: the representation of complex information in effective ways
- gaming, edutainment
- interaction technologies: speech, gesture, vision
The group is an interdisciplinary grouping of researchers who bring a range of backgrounds and perspectives to bear on research problems.
For more information, visit the Advanced Interaction Group page on the University of Birmingham’s website.
My Research
My research broadly covers the new media, locative systems, social presence and awareness systems. Communications technology enables people to keep in touch over a distance, but current systems promote hyper-awareness and hyper-connectedness. Teenagers are pressurised into using instant messenger systems by offering involvement in social groups; millions are jumping on the social networking bandwagon, updating themselves many times a day of their social surroundings; avatars and one-liner status descriptions are used to communicate presence. All of these methods are adopted into the natural lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
The utility of these systems are dependent on internet connectivity. That is, if you’re not on the internet you cannot gain these status and social cues. Furthermore, the update frequency of the information is relied upon which also impacts usefulness.
In my research, I take a step back and say to myself what are the fundamental needs of these systems? How can we develop a more automated system that provides much of the same information of these “rich” systems? How do we leverage existing communication means such as SMS, email and phone calls?
The research area is vast, and I chose to look into communicating one’s current status using automatic context-awareness sensing; specifically by using location sensors (chosen technology: GPS) combined with accelerometer data passed through to a postural classification algorithm. All of this can be shown in a mobile user interface.
Issues I am looking at are privacy control of location and activity disclosure; how to evaluate and measure the utility and extent of social presence transferred between individuals using the system; how to effectively visualise the systems in the first place that leverage social information through ambiguity rather than being as detailed as possible.
My criteria to evaluate the success of the research, and a literature review together with a detailed plan can be found in my regular progress report (RSMG 3) [pdf]. A rough systematic diagram can be found below.
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