At present...

I am currently working on the research and development of an open source environment to construct information services for children, as part of the EU PuppyIR Project, within the Information Retrieval Group at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. The purpose of PuppyIR is to provide a suite of components that can be used by system designers to tailor IR systems for their specific needs. PuppyIR will develop new interaction paradigms that allow children to express their information needs simply and have results presented in an intuitive way. It will develop Information Services that can summarise content for children, moderate information for children, help children safely build social networks and intelligently aggregate for presentation to children. PuppyIR will also contribute to the evaluation of children’s IR systems by the development of child-centered evaluation methods.

PhD

Location-aware computing is complicated by the wide variety of physical environments in which it may be employed (indoor/outdoor, mobile/static, ad-hoc/fixed devices). My thesis (supervised by Dr Ian Ferguson at the University of Strathclyde) investigated the challenge of providing a unified approach to modelling and managing location information across multiple environments. The work produced a flexible location model and a decentralised, scalable and reliable middleware that was environment agnostic and autonomously adapted to the current situation by making the best use of available resources.

Other Research Projects

I have been actively involved in the following completed projects:

Research Interests

Reviewing Activity

I have participated on the review panels for the following workshops:

Past Affiliations

Previously, I have been a member of the Software Systems Group (led by Dr Marc Roper) and also the Pervasive and Global Computing Group (led by Prof Paddy Nixon) within the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.