The students in my group have been publishing a number of a new papers of late.

Ross Shannon has had two papers accepted in recent months, one on collecting and reasoning about context data from sensors in the environment and another on visualising communications in ad-hoc networks. “Towards Scatterbox: a Context-Aware Message Forwarding Platform”, to be presented at MRC 07 at Context 07, presents ongoing work from our group in designing reasoning frameworks that can collate and reason about large amounts of context data gleaned from a wide range of sensors in a smart environment. In this case we have designed a system that decides to forward only relevant emails to a user’s mobile device, where their attention should only be drawn to important messages.

The second paper, “Visualising Network Communications to Evaluate a Data Dissemination Method for Ubiquitous Systems” presents a novel visualisation application useful for designers of ubiquitous systems to be presented at Ubiquitous Systems Evaluation 2007 in September. As these systems will generally be designed to use ad-hoc networks of heterogeneous devices, many of which will join and leave the network
constantly, the stability of the data within the network is crucially important. The visualisation depicts an evolving network topology, which draws attention to nodes which have not passed their data to
other nodes in the system, thus making them more at risk of data loss if they leave the network before passing on this information. The visualisation can thus be used as an aid to the designer of the
communication protocol to view the emergent behaviours of their data dissemination algorithm.