I fund my research myself through my main career as an information technology consultant. After a three year break to concentrate solely on research, I am once again applying leading edge IR and network technologies in commercial environments both in the UK and abroad. This page is research-oriented and is not intended to represent the commercial aspects of my interests and activities. So, if you want more info on that, contact me.
If you're looking specifically for the telecom/datacom billing-software company in which I am a partner (Hoberg & Vestrheim AS), go to www.billing.no.
Contacting me
address:
Computing Science
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ
SCOTLAND
Research interest: Modelling information space browsing using Ostension and Probability.
The idea is to develop and demonstrate a new model for browsing in large collections of information-objects, in particular multimedia objects. The model I have developed is both independent of the types of the objects being browsed, and of the retrieval models being used to structure the space.
The work has involved the formalisation of a model for the space in which the browsing takes place, the development of a suitable model of users' searching/browsing behaviour, the extension of the relevance feedback mechanism of the probabilistic retrieval model, the implementation of a highly efficient IR engine, and a graphical user-interface presenting a sphere-like browsing surface.
The work centres around the reduction of the procedural aspects of interaction with a system and a corresponding concentration upon the functional aspects. Queries are dropped completely from the approach. They are replaced by ostensive probabilistic evidence gathering and combination techniques. An important aspect of those techniques is the discounting of evidential weight with respect to age. This has resulted in, amongst other things, a formal manner by which varying degrees or relevance can be incorporated into probabilistic relevance feedback mechanisms.
Publications that have already been produced by this work are here. The project has progressed substantially since those papers. For more up-to-date information, contact me directly.
Orbital Technologies - A cool company with whom I've worked over the last few years (as their "Senior Technology Consultant"). They're developing a new information mediation and knowledge capture system called Organik.
Ino - Ino are building a wireless broadband infrastructure across the west coast of Norway. Exploiting the telecoms/broadband billing system we developed at my company, Hoberg & Vestrheim, we are building the billing, CRM, and network management system for the Ino service.
Hoberg & Vestrheim - This is the company of which I am part. We develop telecom and datacom billing software exploiting the latest technology so that it provides a level of functionality and reliability that easily matches the major competition in the field, but at a fraction of their rip-off prices.
