Category Archives: research

Mar 2009 New Pervasive and Autonomic Research Papers

Congrats to my postgraduate student Ross Shannon and postdoctoral colleague Emil Vassev on their recent success with 3 new papers from our group.

Ross is coming towards the end of his doctoral studies. His emerging interest in pervasive advertising [ 1,2 ] stems from his desire to explore novel methods in the commercialisation of his research after his PhD.

In this regard Ross, along with some of his peers, are taking part in a Campus Company Development Programme this year around “pervasive advertising”. The NovaUCD Campus Company Development Programme (CCDP) is a part-time enterprise support initiative designed to suit the timetable of busy researchers and academics. It comprises a mix of practical training and consultancy support including 12 half-day workshops, one-to-one advice and consultancy meetings, and a series of networking events.

Ross will already be in Japan along with myself and others from the SRG in UCD as we have a full paper in the main conference [ 5 ]. Ross is already an accomplished entrepreneur with some of his web endeavours having thousands of visitors per week [ 3 ].

Emil joined us here in UCD late last year and is already making his presence felt with numerous new collaborations and many research papers submitted. Emil will be going to the NASA Ames Conference Center, Moffett Field, California, USA to present [ 4 ] our paper related to his research in Autonomic Computing with Lero.

Mar 2009 Pervasive Advertising. “A sin by any name”?

Myself and my co-chairs Jörg Müller, Albrecht Schmidt and Bo Begole are currently busy reviewing the submissions to our Workshop on Pervasive Advertising in conjunction with Pervasive 2009 to be held on May 11, 2009 in Nara, Japan.

I’ve been amused by one of the negative reactions the idea for this workshop has already generated. The aim of this workshop is to allow people to come together to “build a community to forecast and create the upcoming era of advertising in pervasive information environments.”

This community will allow for the full and frank discussion of all aspects of advertising both positive and negative which will be possible as further advancements in pervasive information environments come to pass. As people knew Spam would come with email, banner/blinking/adwords with the web we can clearly predict advertising, in some form will come hand in hand with the wide-spread deployment of devices, displays, services which form the edifice of future pervasive computing environments. Ignoring this fact won’t make it go away, discussing it to ensure appropriate measures to allow us to opt-in or out, government regulation, self-directed policy etc. is the responsibility of our research community.

The trend toward such infrastructure is already taking place. This article drew my interest as it states that “The market for Digital Signage is set to grow rapidly over the next few years. A recent report by MultiMedia Intelligence predicts that the digital signage market will more than double in size by 2012 to consume 2.3 million displays, having grown by 34% from 2007 to 2008 to 1.1 million displays.” [1] “Digital Signage” is a clear example of the ubiquitous infrastructure required to realise many of the pervasive computing scenarios we envisage for the future. However, without a discussion aorund their use, first and foremost in advertising we cannot hope to understand how they might be used in alternate contexts.

If this topic is of interest to you I encourage you to submit by May 1, 2009 one-page submission to allow you to join the workshop as a participant.

  1. IBC points the way in digital signage

March 2009 Cloud Computing

As part of our applied research project Dviz I’ve been building up an understanding and appreciation of the incredibly over-hyped area of cloud computing. However, for Dviz it is important as it allows us to develop a scaleable approach to the delivery of the infrastructure. Dviz is a collaborative digital technology research project between Twelve Horses, IADT and UCD, and is funded by the NDRC. This project brings together a diverse skill set from both its commercial partner and university research teams to realise an innovative visualisation platform with strong commercial potential.

Cloud computing refers to a style of computing in which resources are provided as a service over the Internet to users who need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure. The canonical example is Google Docs, a functional word processing office app delivered entirely via one’s web browser [1]. The level of interest in Cloud Computing as an accessible service for the realisation of new web based applications has been growing over the past year with both academic research [6] and is also leaking into mainstream discussion [5]. Discussion on how the cloud will impact high performance computing [4] and other areas such as its use in Green IT are also ongoing.

Quote: “Cloud Computing, the long-held dream of computing as a utility, has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry, making software even more attractive as a service and shaping the way IT hardware is designed and purchased. Developers with innovative ideas for new Internet services no longer require the large capital outlays in hardware to deploy their service or the human expense to operate it. They need not be concerned about overprovisioning for a service whose popularity does not meet their predictions, thus wasting costly resources, or underprovisioning for one that becomes wildly popular, thus missing potential customers and revenue. Moreover, companies with large batch-oriented tasks can get results as quickly as their programs can scale, since using 1000 servers for one hour costs no more than using one server for 1000 hours. This elasticity of resources, without paying a premium for large scale, is unprecedented in the history of IT.” [4]

Some of the different application areas where cloud computing might make an impact include [2]:

  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service
  • Storage-as-a-Service
  • Data-as-a-Service
  • Platform-as-a-Service
  • Software-as-a-Service

UCSB & IBM T.J. Watson Research five-layer grouping.

Discussions on cloud ontologies have come to light that provide a great starting point for taxonomy discussions [3].

References:

  1. Cloud computing: Threat or Menace?
  2. A crack in the madness of clouds
  3. A better way to understand cloud computing
  4. Berkeley Releases Cloud Computing Study Detailed Report [ PDF ]
  5. Cloud computing ascends the mainstream
  6. Tech Titans Building Boom
  7. Cloud Computing Journal

Feb 2009 – LoCA program chair meeting and decisions


Myself and Tanzeem Choudhury from Dartmouth College are the program chairs for the Fourth International Symposium on Location- and Context-Awareness to be held in Tokyo Japan from the 7-8 May 2009. LoCA 2009 is colocated with Pervasive 2009 the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing, which will be held May 11-14, 2009 in Nara, Japan.

A total of 77 abstracts and 54 papers were submitted to LoCA 2009 and after careful peer review by the program committee and discussion by the chairs, 18 papers were selected to form what we feel is a high-quality program. Best paper and presentation awards will be presented during the symposium. And all accepted papers will be contained in the symposium proceedings which will be published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series by Springer.

While we had more good papers than we could accept, those in the program will form an exciting and engaging research program for everyone who attends LoCA 2009. Some of the terms and expressions (adapted a little to preserve anonymity) used in the reviews of these accepted papers include:

  • “New Concept”, “Novel Concept”, “An interesting novel idea”
  • “…the research jumps head-on into a large open problem”
  • “…strong rigorous evaluations which are well written and well argued”
  • “…the authors offer insightful descriptions”
  • “… well written, well explained, and thoroughly evaluated research contribution that is quite relevant for …”
  • “… an interesting paper, well-presented and -evaluated and addressing an important problem.”
  • “..the paper makes good use of state-of-the art techniques to solve the problem of …”
  • “..I think this is a real problem of interest to the community”

Peer review can be a both upliftting and shocking process but the tireless efforts of all those on the LoCA PC are to be very much commended as hundreds of reviews had to be written to help select just 18 papers.

Dr.Shonozaki of Koozyt (PlaceEngine) will be a Keynote Speaker for LoCA 2009 and the early bird registration for LoCA 2009 is March 5.

I would like to thank all the members of the PC, our reviewers, general and local chairs and in particular my program co-chair Dr. Tanzeem Choudhury for a very smooth, professional and high quality peer-review process for LoCA 2009.

東京でお会い

Feb 2009 CHI Workshop and Surface User Interfaces

I just blogged about Surface User Interfaces on the “Evaluating new interactions in healthcare” blog. We have a paper [1] on “Design Patterns” at this workshop during CHI which this blog is being used to support. While I don’t think I can attend the workshop myself as I have trips to the USA, Sweden, Germany and Australia in the next two months my colleague Julie Doyle will attend. My PhD student Ross Shannon will also attend to present our paper on “Time Sequences” during the work in progress at CHI in Boston.

Figure 1: SharePic photo sharing system [3]

[1] Doyle J., Quigley A. and Nixon P., “Do Pattern Languages help us Structure Evaluations in Healthcare Technologies?” proceedings of the CHI 2009 Workshop on Evaluating New Interactions in Healthcare: Challenges and Approaches, Boston USA, April 2009.

[2] Shannon R., Quigley A. and Nixon P. (2009). Time Sequences. In CHI ’09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, Massachusetts, April 04 – 09, 2009). CHI ’09. ACM, New York, NY. (in press)

[3] Apted, T., Kay, J., and Quigley, A. 2006. Tabletop sharing of digital photographs for the elderly. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 – 27, 2006). R. Grinter, T. Rodden, P. Aoki, E. Cutrell, R. Jeffries, and G. Olson, Eds. CHI ’06. ACM, New York, NY, 781-790.

Feb 2009 Program Committee P2P 2009

I’ve been invited to join the PC for the P2P 2009 the Ninth International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Systems from the 8 – 11 September 2009 to be held in Seattle, Washington, USA. I’ve been to a number of P2P conferences over the years and also served on a number of past program committees. It’s an excellent conference series with a range of research presented, from the highly theoretical in systems demonstrated though simulation alone to clearly applied, real-world results.

“Topics that relate to Peer-to-Peer systems, Peer-to-Peer applications, Grid systems, large-scale distributed systems, and overlay networks are open for consideration. Experience with applications, and papers with the potential to open up new directions for research are especially encouraged.

Topics of interest for the conference include, but are not limited to:

* P2P applications and services
* Performance and robustness of P2P systems
* Commercial applications
* Security in P2P systems
* Self-organization in P2P systems
* P2P information retrieval
* Higher-level query support in P2P systems
* Semantic overlay networks and semantic query routing in P2P systems
* Trust, Reputation and Fairness in P2P Systems
* Cooperation and collaboration in P2P systems
* Overlay architectures and topologies
* P2P overlay interaction with underlying infrastructure
* Overlay monitoring and management
* Social networks
* P2P systems over mobile networks
* Delay-tolerant P2P systems
* P2P workload characterization and simulation
* P2P economics
* P2P grids “

[ Read More ]

Feb 2009 Open posts for Clique Research Cluster

Clique LogoI am one of the principal investigators for the Clique Research Cluster in Graph, Network Analysis and Visualisation based at University College Dublin and the National University of Ireland, Galway.

We are inviting applications for the following posts and funded PhD positions:

  • Senior postdoctoral researcher (UCD ref 003756)
  • Postdoctoral researcher in probablistic network modelling (UCD ref
    003755)
  • Postdoctoral researcher in analysis of information diffusion in social networks (NUIG-Clique-02)
  • 6-8 funded PhD studentships to address research challenges in
    • anomaly detection
    • biological network analysis
    • computational techniques in network analysis
    • information visualisation
    • models of information flow
    • probabilistic network models.

Please note, the closing date for this round of applications is 8th
March 2009. Please see the Clique Cluster vacancies page for more details.

Feb 2009 CHI 2009 Work In Progress paper

Congrats to Ross on having his work in progress paper accepted to CHI 2009 to be published as an extended abstract.

Shannon R., Quigley A. and Nixon P. (2009). Time Sequences. In CHI ’09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, Massachusetts, April 04 – 09, 2009). CHI ’09. ACM, New York, NY. (in press)

Jan 2009 Two new Journal papers published

Congrats to two of my students Umer and Ross on our two new journal papers which are soon to appear.

Shannon R., Eugene K. and Quigley A., “Using Ambient Social Reminders to Stay in Touch with Friends”, International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence, 1(2), 70-78, April-June 2009

Rashid R. and Quigley A., “Ambient Displays in Academic Settings: Avoiding their Underutilization, “International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence, 1(2), 31-38, April-June 2009

Jan 2009 VDA 2009 San Jose

VDA 2009

I presented our paper on the Visual data exploration of temporal graph data at the Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis 2009 which was Part of IS&T/SPIE’s International Symposium on Electronic Imaging 2009. This event was held on the 19-20 January 2009 in San Jose, California, USA. The paper was co-authored by Mike Farrugia and myself and is based on Mike’s masters research and his submission to the IEEE VAST 2008 contest (which he won a Cell phone Mini Challenge award).

The event itself was quite interesting due to the co-location with a number of other conferences on Graphics, Imaging and Visualisation. I also got to meet a number of interesting researchers including Katy Börner who presented a inspiring paper on “Teaching children the structure of science”. Katy is the director for the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at the School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University. I enjoyed our discussions and hearing more about the Network Workbench which will be of great interest for an upcoming project we are starting. I also enjoyed discussing research infrastructures with the highly energetic Russell Duhon. He discussed EpiC: A Computational Infrastructure for Epidemics Research with me and gave a talk on Creating Marketplaces for Science.

This is worth watching too.