KMi Seminars
Context Computing Based on Wireless Features
This event took place on Wednesday 04 July 2012 at 11:30

 
Dr. Stephan Sigg National Institute of Informatics


We are surrounded by sensing and actuating wireless devices. This environment is characterised by a high number of devices which can be reportedly explored as atypical ubiquitous sensing devices such as the power supply system, light bulbs or electromagnetic noise. A further ubiquitous sensing source,   incorporated by nearly all electronic devices, and presumably present in all devices that will constitute the Internet of Things, is the RF-interface. The RF-interface is a rich communication medium but also a rich sensing device. Its physical layer capabilities for the description of information and as a fingerprint of environmental situation are only partially explored currently. Environmental changes and situations alter the propagation path of electromagnetic waves and therefore channel characteristics at an RF-receiver, which can, in turn, be utilised for ubiquitous applications. Although this rich context source can support applications in a multitude of ways, its potential is seldom fully exploited. We explore the RF-channel for 1/ the detection of actions and environmental situations from RF features 2/ the reduction of computational load in a distributed context computation 3/ spontaneous, unattended secure device interaction.



 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.