ECS - Researcher Profiles

Postgraduate Researcher in the Learning Societies Lab

Photo: Clare Hooper Clare Hooper has found a way to satisfy her creative side as well as meeting engineering challenges.

As a child, Clare loved creative writing and equally enjoyed tinkering with a computer in a corner at home.

In 2002, she decided to embark on an MEng in computer science at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science.

She continued her writing in her spare time as a hobby and when it came to deciding on her final year dissertation, she developed a system called StorySpinner (storyspinner.ecs.soton.ac.uk), which generates narratives based upon symbols selected by users, allowing them to read stories and explore hypertext in a novel fashion.

The idea comes from the novel ‘The Castle of Crossed Destinies’ by Italo Calvino. In the novel, the narrator arrives at a castle inside which no-one is able to speak. To communicate their stories the other travellers use tarot cards, with the symbols on the cards representing events and characters in their tale.

StorySpinner works along similar lines, with readers generating a story by selecting tarot cards from an available set and the system generates a narrative based on a set of pre-authored nodes and possible interpretations of the particular tarot card.

Clare is very proud of her work on StorySpinner, particularly as she was asked to present it at an Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) conference.

‘To be asked to present at such a high profile conference while I was a third year undergraduate was excellent,’ she said. ‘I had all these people coming up to me saying “are you really just an undergraduate, you should definitely do a PhD”.’

Clare listened to that advice and in 2006, she went on to do an EngD, a four-year degree which involves three years of research (equivalent to a
PhD) and one year of taught modules (made up of MBA and Masters-level technical material).

‘The big advantage of this qualification is that you get doctorate-level type research experience grounded in industry,’ said Clare.

Clare’s EngD is about using pervasive technologies to facilitate social interactions in a novel way.

‘I began by looking at pervasive healthcare because I felt that very little technology existed to support people in terms of emotional wellbeing,’ she said. ‘The image that often crops up for me is the granny in her 80s living in her flat. On the whole she’s doing fine, but would benefit from more contact with her family.’

Clare looked at how systems could be put in place to help such people to stay more in touch with their family without forcing them to buy a computer or a laptop or technology that they might find daunting.

‘The solution could use something simple like a cheap mobile phone,’ said Clare. ‘The idea is to build an underlying messaging infrastructure that will translate between different outputs.’

Clare will spend two more years researching this area.

In the meantime, if time and money were no object, she would probably retire somewhere in the Lake District.

‘Or maybe not just yet, as I would get bored far too quickly if I didn’t have something to do,’ she said.

These days, she still loves tinkering with computers to see what she can do with them, and when reality gets too much, she likes to escape into her creative world where she writes stories about people, projecting them into fantasy settings and casting spells on them so they all behave exactly as she would like ...