When: Wednesday 20 March 10am until whenever

Where: Gilmorehill Centre (Theatre, Film & TV Studies) room 217A (Holds 35-40; I've booked it.)

Who: As per the table below.

What: Short (~15 minute talks) explaining what everyone is doing.

Then, discussions about how we might

• form links within the Dept
• possibly create a new research grouping (not necessarily a new research group in Muffy's sense, but something that is officially acknowledged, maybe like MIG, but cutting across research group boundaries).
• form links outside the Dept (perhaps with Paddy Nixon's crowd), Grenoble, Cambridge). Philippe Palanque is putting together a proposal for a Framework 6 Network of Exellence. The acronym and theme is: SYNERGISTIC Scientific International and Interdisciplinary Network of Excellence for Research on Generalised Interactive Systems based on Theory of Interaction and Context. We've been invited to join, so clearly this should go into our discussion on the 20th as well. I've already told Phil that we want to be involved and will send him some initial data.

Attendees

Timetable & Agenda

• 10.00 Introduction (Phil)
• Talks 1
  • 10.10 Phil
  • 10.20 Steve B
  • 10.30 Matthew
  • 10.40 Peter
  • 10.50 Ian M
  • 11.00Areti
• 11.10 -Coffee (Gilmorehill cafe)
• Talks 2
  • 11.30 Manu
  • 11.40 Gregory
  • 11.50 Kevin
  • 12.00 Rebecca Randell
  • 12.10 Rod
  • 12.20 Murray
  • 12.30 Steve D
• 12.40 Lunch (Gilmorehill cafe)
• 1.30 Intro to Afternoon
• 1.45 - 2.45 Breakout Groups
• 2.45 - 3.45 Report Back
• 3.45 - 4.00 Tea (Gilmorehill cafe)
• 4.00 - 5.00 Plenary

There are two aims for the day:

• to become familiar with each other's work in this area and
• to consider how we might coordinate/organise/advance our collective efforts.

The morning session is devoted to the first aim and the afternoon session addresses the second. In order to get all the talks in, I've had to be fairly ruthless about time. 10 minutes each. If you aren't going to use your timeslot, please let me know!

The afternoon is organised around a breakout/report back/plenary pattern, to get as many viewpoints expressed as possible, especially those of RAs and students. The objective is to come up with some answers to the following questions:

Should we organise GUCSD's research activity related to context-sensitive/context-aware systems? Why or why not?

If so,

• what should be call ourselves?
• what characterises the research we do? what makes us distinctive? where are the research links in what we do?
• what kind of beast should we propose to be (research group like GIST? research grouping like MIG? something else?)
• what would be the role of this organisation? (informal communication, lightweight coordination, Departmental lobbying organisation, ...)
• how might be make ourselves known (web presence, mailing list)?

There are a number of other issues that relate to the above:

• how should we approach our relationship to the rest of the Dept? should we try to get the Dept to view context-related work as important to Dept'al strategy, perhaps by allocating new staff appointments?
• how should we approach our relationship to external developments? this might include the national eScience Centre, SYNERGISTIC (the proposed Network of Excellence), Paddy Nixon's group at Strathclyde, the rest of Equator...?

And, of course, there'll be other issues that I ahven't thought of that will be uncovered on Wednesday.