Marc Eisenstadt's profile document
Description for Marc Eisenstadt
Marc Eisenstadt
Marc Eisenstadt
Marc
Eisenstadt
Emeritus Professor; KMi Co-Founder and Chief Scientist
meisenstadt
CURRENT ACTIVITY: Tamper-proof COVID-19 Vaccination & Test Result Certification. PAST ACTIVITY: I co-founded KMi in 1994, served as KMi Director until 2000 and became Chief Scientist until my retirement in 2007. Building upon my long-term interests and background in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and novice programming environments, my research focus included very large scale presence via messaging and gaming; social software; knowledge technologies as mediating tools for human interaction; internet mapping and visualization. My KMi colleagues and I created a variety of widely-used software environments, tools, and projects including Lyceum, KMi Stadium, BuddySpace, CitiTag and Meetomatic. Recently I have been working with the Blockchain Group, in particular on COVID-19 Test and Vaccination Certification (see the 24 April 2020 news story and IEEE publication below for additional info and links). For my music and other activities, see my LinkedIn profile via the link at left.
991a1c019f6db1c30045705928455f22abd76e49
The Open University account for Marc Eisenstadt
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Marc Eisenstadt's membership at KMi
Marc Eisenstadt on LinkedIn
Marc Eisenstadt on SlideShare
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in Lyceum
Lyceum
Lyceum
Voice conferencing internet groupware
Lyceum, prototyped in KMi and then further developed by LTS, is voice conferencing internet groupware. It enables students and tutors (with a normal PC and modem connection) to talk over the internet whilst sharing and annotating visual material. Lyceum is currently being used by students on a variety of courses, e.g. to practise fluency skills in foreign languages.
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in Meet-O-Matic
Meet-O-Matic
Meet-O-Matic
The World's Simplest Meeting Scheduler
Have you ever tried to schedule a meeting involving participants who don't use your official authorized scheduling tool? In fact, even if your participants did use that tool, would it really help solve your routine scheduling requirements? With Meet-O-Matic, you can propose and schedule meetings online and invite
participants using your own email system, then monitor responses to your meeting invitation as they arrive and are displayed in Meet-O-Matic's intuitive visual constraint table.
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in FlashMeeting Technology
FlashMeeting Technology
FlashMeeting Technology
2003-07-04
The lightest possible video-conferencing software application
Hook-up your web cam, plug in your microphone, go to a web page ...
and the Centre for New Media's FM Technology you to make an instant meeting - any time, any place, any platform! FM technology comes from the prize-winning FlashMeeing Project. It provides a host of features packed into a small applet direct in a web page. As the applet is implemented in using Adobe's Flash, the most widely available and most compatible of browser plugins, it is incredibly lightweight, efficient, good looking, and you probably will not have to download anything extra at all for it to work!
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in BuddySpace
BuddySpace
BuddySpace
Enhanced Presence Management for Collaboration, Messaging, and Gaming
BuddySpace aims to provide enhanced capabilities for users to manage and visualise the presence of colleagues and friends in collaborative working, gaming, messaging, and other contexts. Of particular interest is the role of graphical metaphors for presence, including maps, logical layouts such as building schematics and project timelines and abstract artistic layouts such as graffiti walls. We are also studying the semantics of presence, in order to move beyond simple flags such as 'online' and 'busy' to include rich contextual and spatio-temporal information more appropriate to one's focus of activity.
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in climateprediction.net
climateprediction.net
climateprediction.net
State-of-the-art simulation of the climate system
The climateprediction.net [http://climateprediction.net] is a state-of-the-art simulation of the climate system which runs on PCs. Project participants will be able to download and run different parametrizations of a climate simulation program, thus providing data for studying climate change. The collaborators in this large-scale e-Science project are The Open University, the universities of Oxford and Reading, Rutherford Appleton Labs, and The MetOffice.
KMi's role in the project is to develop a robust semantic web portal for the estimated 2 million participants. A mixture of technologies will be used, including integrated discussion forums, a web-based news service, conferencing services and social areas using the latest instant messaging programs. This portal will also use state-of-the-art semantic web technology (developed in KMi) to provide fully customisable 'semantic filters' that can be placed over any web-based document (whether local or remote), and provide the user with the context of identified 'concepts-of-interests'.
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in Magpie
Magpie
Magpie
The semantic filter
Magpie adds an ontology based semantic layer onto web pages on-the-fly as they are browsed. Magpie automatically highlights key
items of interest, and for each highlighted
term it provides a set of 'services' (e.g. contact details, current projects, related people) when you right-click on the item.
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in Xtreme Webcasting
Xtreme Webcasting
Xtreme Webcasting
2002-08-09
Taking webcasting to the xtreme
A combination of technologies can allow people all over the world to witness extrordinary events.
The Matterhorn, August 2002. A mountaineer takes a leading-edge mobile phone on his ascent of the famous Swiss landmark and sends images and voice messages to the KMi lab in Milton Keynes, UK. Using Macromedia's FlashCom technologies provided "out of the box" in the latest version of Flash MX we have assembled a dynamic, multimedia website for this event. Viewers from around the globe can tune in to the event and even interact via a text chat facility.
Everest, May 2006. The same mountaineer makes a transmission via satellite phone from the summit of Everest - made available in seconds to his many friends, relatives and followers around the world - as part of his challenge to conquor the highest mountain on each of the seven continents of the world.
Spain, August 2007. Students on the OU second level course L204 used our technology for less extreme podcasting, posting images and recordings as they explored the historic town of Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. The website was built using the same technology we had developed for the 7 Summits website.
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in Cititag
Cititag
Cititag
Research in social location-based play for large groups in city environments
CitiTag is an innovative wireless location-based multiplayer game. These are boundaries we are exploring : what kind of engaging social experiences can emerge in the real world based on the awareness of individuals participating in a parallel virtual experience? Does virtual presence penetrate physical presence in any way? How do group behaviours emerge?"
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in MKSchools.net
MKSchools.net
MKSchools.net
1997-05-05
Milton Keynes Educational Portal
Wired/wireless: whatever it takes, we are excited by the prospect of helping schools achieve ubiquitous Internet access in order to facilitate creative learning, particularly through original content creation by children. We initiated MKSchools.Net to help local schools attain wireless broadband access, along with suitable filtering and mentoring, in order to kick-start their activities. MKSchools.Net is now a fully managed service delivering broadband wireless and wireline Internet to over 25,000 children in 90 schols in Milton Keynes
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in CoAKTinG
CoAKTinG
CoAKTinG
2002-01-01
2004-05-31
Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid
Scientists located in different geographical regions are increasingly working closer with each other and relying on each other to accomplish their tasks and achieve common goals. Technologies such as the Access Grid and VRVS provide a suitable communication platform for these collaborations. However, as the tasks become more ambitious and complex, the need grows for additional structured support. The Advanced Knowledge Technologies Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (AKT IRC) project has developed useful knowledge management technologies that provide a good foundation for distributed knowledge sharing that is to be used to assist scientists' day to day work alongside current Grid collaboration tools such as the Access Grid and VRVS. CoAKTinG draws on and integrates AKT technologies to provide a set of complementary tools to provide this structured support.
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in ELeGI
ELeGI
ELeGI
2004-02-01
2008-01-31
European Learning Grid Infrastructure
The European Learning Grid Infrastructure (ELeGI) project has the ambitious goal to develop software technologies for effective human learning. With the ELeGI project we will promote and support a learning paradigm shift. A new paradigm focused on knowledge construction using experiential based and collaborative learning approaches in a contextualised, personalised and ubiquitous way will replace the current information transfer paradigm focused on content and on the key authoritative figure of the teacher who provides information.
We have chosen a synergic approach, sometimes called human centred design, to replace the classical, applicative approach to learning. With consideration of humans at the centre, learning is clearly a social, constructive phenomenon. It occurs as a side effect of interactions, conversations and enhanced presence in dynamic Virtual Communities: experimental research concepts integrating new powerful developments of services in the Semantic GRID, the leading edge of currently available and future ICT technologies, with highly innovative and powerfully significant scenarios of human learning.
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in Semantic Blogging
Semantic Blogging
Semantic Blogging
2004-10-01
Link blog entries with meaningful relations (such as 'agree', 'disagree') instead of just plain link
We are investigating Web Logs ('blogs') as a new paradigm for distributed knowledge construction and sensemaking, whether for Open University students, or communities of interest of any sort. Our interest in Semantic Blogging flows from ongoing research themes in KMi on hypermedia discourse and social software.
Semantic Blogging is for us an intruiging convergence of practices and tools which could help us address long-standing challenges and themes in Knowledge Media:
How can we support distributed sensemaking and argumentation with tools that are both intuitive enough to be quickly learnt, flexible enough for widespread adoption in everyday work, but provide enough semantics for computational support?
How can human-generated narrative co-exist and synergise with computational-semantics to create hybrid layers of meaning?
How do people adopt, break, customize and share metadata schemes?
How can we provide summaries and filters over complex networks of interweaving commentary and inter-document connection?
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in The Bookshelf Project
The Bookshelf Project
The Bookshelf Project
Find out who has which books using ISBN and web service lookup
Lending and borrowing books is common amongst groups of people who share similar interests. In such a community there is a fairly high chance that if you need to borrow a particular book, then another member will have a copy. The difficulty is finding out which member of the community has it, without having to bother all of them with the question. The Bookshelf Project was originally conceived to solve this problem for staff working at the Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University in the UK.
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in MSG
MSG
MSG
2006-03-01
The World's Simplest Messenger
MSG a web application that allows you to use the basic functionality of the earlier BuddySpace Instant Messaging system within a standard web browser. This makes it ideal for use in environments where software can not be installed, or on networks where Internet access is restricted by firewalls and proxy servers, or where performing the installation is just cumbersome for the users.
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in Open Sensemaking Communities
Open Sensemaking Communities
Open Sensemaking Communities
2006-04-01
Helping e-learners construct interpretations of open content courseware
The Open Content movement is concerned with enabling students and educators to access material, in order to then learn from it, and reuse it either in one?s studies or one's own courses. The core efforts to date has focused on enabling access, e.g. building the organizational/political will to release and license content, and in developing open infrastructures for educators to then publish and reassemble it. The key challenge in the next phase of the open content movement is to improve the support for prospective students to engage with and learn from the material, and with each other though peer learning support, in the absence of formally imposed study timetables and assessment deadlines. KMi is now engaged in developing the next generation of tools for e-learning and collaborative sensemaking for open content learning support.
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in BuddyFinder-CORDER
BuddyFinder-CORDER
BuddyFinder-CORDER
2005-09-01
Find the right people with the right knowledge in the right place at the right time
Online social networking tools are extremely popular, but can miss potential discoveries latent in the social 'fabric'. Matchmaking services can do naive profile matching with old database technology, and modern ontological markup, though powerful, can be onerous at data-input time. BuddyFinder-CORDER can automatically produce a ranked list of buddies to match a user's search requirements specified in a term-based query, even in the absence of stored user-profiles. We integrate an online social networking search tool called BuddyFinder with a text mining method called CORDER to rank a list of online users based on 'inferred profiles' of these users in the form of scavenged Web pages.
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in SimLink
SimLink
SimLink
2005-04-01
Shared control of virtual experiments via Instant Messaging
SimLink is a system for deployment and use of Java based downloadable plugins within the BuddySpace instant messaging system. It also supports a mechanism to 'share state' in the group chat environment of BuddySpace. This means that we can design a plugin whose current state is synchronized in all participants of a group chat session. For example, one of sample plugins provided, allows participants to play a networked game of Chess, and additionally progress of the game can be viewed by participants not involved in the game. In practice, SimLink allows multiple users to share control of simulations and other software at much lower bandwidth penalty than 'raw' screen-sharing would entail.
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in Vague Query Responder
Vague Query Responder
Vague Query Responder
2006-02-01
Bookshop owners can outperform Amazon and Google when the queries are vague - so can our software
Although today's web search engines are very powerful, they still fail to provide intuitively relevant results for many types of queries, especially ones that are vaguely-formed in the user's own mind. We argue that associations between terms in a search query can reveal the underlying information needs in the users' mind and should be taken into account in search. Our initial experimental results on a corpus of 500 books from Amazon shows that our approach can find the right books for users given authentic vague queries, even in those cases where Google and Amazon's own book search fail.
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in Open Blockchain
Open Blockchain
Open Blockchain
Investigating The Potential Of Blockchains
A blockchain is a publicly shared immutable ledger � an append only log of transactions which uses crypto-currency techniques to minimise any security risk. Transactions are contained in blocks which are linked together through a series of hash pointers. Any tampering of a block can be detected since the hash pointer to it would no longer be valid. As a ledger system it is very open. In addition to the source code being openly available a key feature of blockchains is that in principle every user has their own copy of the entire blockchain. In fact, there is no central or master copy simply the multiple copies held by the volunteers in the user community. Volunteers are rewarded for their effort through a number of algorithmic processes which can result in payment. Small payments can be attached to individual transactions. Consensus on what types of blocks and transactions can be part of the blockchain is automatically reached according to whether the majority of blockchain holders accept newly proposed blocks. This attribute leads to a system where consensus is hardwired into the software. Without the need for any central control or mediator blockchains allow for leaderless democracy - a new way of governing human behaviour online through "one computer one vote". In this way, a blockchain can act as a provenance protocol for sharing data across disparate semi-trusting organizations.
Marc Eisenstadt's participation in COVID-19 Research
COVID-19 Research
COVID-19 Research
2020-03-20
A view of our labs response to the pandemic
Within KMi we have been shocked and saddened by the devastating impact the global pandemic is having and like many wish to do what we can to help. To this end we have mobilised our knowledge and media research and innovation expertise, to support the Open University's collective response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Our academics are, for example, tracking the extent of false information about the virus so that it can be brought to the attention of policymakers and have developed the world's first privacy-preserving verifiable digital COVID-19 vaccination/antibody test certificate.<br /><br /><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rcGVY-XcHWo" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>