KMi Seminars
Issues in social mobile computing
This event took place on Friday 23 September 2005 at 13:30

 
Ian Smith Intel Research Laboratory, Seattle, USA

What is social mobile computing? This is a talk in two parts. In the first part, I'll outline what Intel Research Seattle is doing in the area of Social Mobile Computing. This is a new research area, focused on interactions between people that occur outside the traditional "work" settings and where the communications are conducted via mobile devices. In the second part of the talk I'll go walk through the mobile interaction design challenges of one project we are working on and--with any luck--get the audience to solve some our problems for us! The domain of this project is to allow people to more easily "meet-up" or "rendezvous."

Biography: Ian Smith is a senior researcher at the Intel Research Seattle lab in Seattle, Washington. His work focuses on having a big bowl of ubicomp technology, social science, and some software engineering. Stir vigorously and don't forget to drizzle on some privacy. He previously stirred the pot at the Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, California. He was granted a Ph.D. and a chef's hat from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1998.

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KMi Seminars
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.