- Date:
- 2006-
- Theme:
- Computer Science Education
- Funding:
- HEA-ICS
A short project to work in collaboration with Universities in the South of England to identify current issues in Information and Computer Science Education. The project is funded by the HEA subject centre in Information and Computer Science (HEA-ICS). It is designed to enable further collaborative working between academics across the South of England.
Primary investigator
- saw
Associated research group
- Learning Societies Lab
- Date:
- 2006-2009
- Themes:
- Semantic Web, Social Network Analysis, Web Science, Knowledge Technologies
- Funding:
- EU (EU-IST-2006-034721)
This research project is located at the interface of several fields, such as computer science, complex systems science, cognitive science, psycholinguistics and information architecture, and is likely to feed back into the design of better applications. The project will contribute to Semiotic Dynamics, a new field that studies how semiotic relations can originate, spread, and evolve over time in populations, by combining recent advances in linguistics and cognitive science with methodological and theoretical tools from complex systems and computer science.
The TAGora project aims at exploiting the unique opportunities offered by the increasing popularity of computer-mediated social interaction in a variety of contexts. Such popularity, in fact, is making available large amounts of raw data from online semiotic systems (for example, collaborative tagging systems) and these data may become the foundantion of a true scientific investigation about the behavior of human agents on the Web and the dynamics of information in online communities.
Primary investigators
- Nigel Richard Shadbolt
- ha
- kmo
Secondary investigator
- mns2
Partners
- La Sapienza University - Rome
- Sony - Paris
- University of Kassel - Germany
- University of Koblenz - Germany
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2006-2009
- Themes:
- Assessment, Mobile Learning
- Funding:
- JISC
Students of the health care professions generally undertake a number of clinical placements during their training. Whilst they are in practice a clinical practitioner will assess the studentââ¬â¢s competence against a set of learning outcomes and give ongoing feedback to the student. Due to the workload of the supervising practitioner, the assessment processes can be fragile, which in turn can impinge on the studentsââ¬â¢ learning. At the same time students in practice are away from their usual learning environment, and it can be difficult for them to access their learning resources at the time that they discover the need. The principle, upon which this project is based, is that practice based learning and in particular the mentoring process, would be improved if the student and mentor had access to tools which allowed on the spot on-line entry of results of assessments, such that feedback would be immediate, and thus followup actions could be decided instantly.
This project aims to provide a mobile learning toolkit to support practice based learning, mentoring and assessment. This toolkit will provide an interface so that course leader can specify, in a flexible manner, the learning outcomes to be met, the method of assessment (including the form of the result, how it will be recorded, and by whom), the timing of the assessment(s) and the feedback to be given in response to the results, suitable learning resources to support these learning outcomes, and the actions to be taken when assessments are not completed in a timely manner. Such a toolkit could be used on a variety of programmes, both HE and FE, and in clinical and non-clinical contexts, where work place assessment is an integral part of the course.
The toolkit will enable deployment of the mentorââ¬â¢s assessment interface on a number of platforms, ranging from PCââ¬â¢s through to PDAs and Smartphones and will also provide tools such as RSS feeds to simplify distribution of the learning resources. The project will contribute to the JISC community by adding mobile assessment tools to the E-framework.
The consortium is a well-connected group. The Computer Scientists who will provide the toolkit have previously worked together within the JISC Reference Model projects. Within both TVU and Southampton the Computer Scientists have previously worked with their Nursing and Healthcare departments. Southampton and TVU both have recently been placed in the same NHS area, and the Bournemouth and Poole College is an established FE partner for Southampton University. The following scenario, taken from Nursing, illustrates the problems and the need for such a toolkit.
Primary investigators
Secondary investigators
- Yvonne Howard
- pz2g12
Partners
- School of Nursing and Midwifery UoS
- Thames Valley University
- Bournemouth and Poole College
Associated research groups
- Web and Internet Science
- Electronic and Software Systems
- Date:
- 2006-2006
- Themes:
- ELearning, Platforms and Tools, Assessment
- Funding:
- JISC
The R2Q2 aims to produce a complete engine to render and respond to all QTIv2 question types. The engine will be wrapped in a Web service so that it can integrate easily into the JISC e-Framework.
The specific objectives are to:
- Produce a Web service that will render and respond to all QTIv2 question types as defined by the templates given in the specification.
- Report on the design and implementation
- Publish the Web Service Description (WSDL and plain English) and Code
Primary investigators
Partner
- University of Hull
Associated research groups
- Learning Societies Lab
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2006-2009
- Themes:
- Dependable Systems, e-Science, Grid and Distributed Computing
- Funding:
- European Commission (INFSO-RI-031844)
OMII-Europe is an EU project which has been established to source key software components for Grid applications and to ensure that these components can interoperate across heterogeneous Grid middleware platforms.
OMII-Europe is an Open Systems project that endorses both the use of open standards and open source. OMII-Europe has chosen particular open standards for the Grid that it believes are essential to interoperability across global resources.
The OMII-Europe vision is
to harvest open-source, Web-Services-based, Grid software components from across Europe and to supply these Grid services in a form that will enable them to interoperate across the platforms: gLite, UNICORE and Globus.
The emphasis is on the re-engineering of software components rather than on the development of new technology. OMII-Europe will develop a repository of quality-assured Grid services running on these existing major Grid infrastructures. The drivers for OMII-Europe are interoperability, quality-assurance and establishing itself as an impartial broker, giving advice on heterogeneous Grid solutions.
Primary investigator
- ph
Partners
- Eight European Partners
- Four USA Partners
- Four Chinese Partners
Associated research group
- Dependable Systems & Software Engineering
- Date:
- 2006-2009
- Themes:
- Agent Based Computing, Decentralised Information Systems, Sensor Technology, e-Defence, Disaster Management
- Funding:
- Defence Technology Centre on Data and Information Fusion
This project is addressing the need for an integrated approach that allows sensors deployed within a sensor network to manage their own local energy requirements, and where possible, harvest energy from their local environment, whilst simultaneously coordinating their activities in order to achieve system-wide aggregate goals.
It is a collaborative project across two groups within the School of Electronics and Computer Science (IAM and ESD) and seeks to demonstrate the use of agent-based coordination algorithms within sensors (based upon the Chipcon 2431 System-on-Chip) that are capable of understanding, predicting and managing their own energy use and production.
Primary investigator
- acr
Secondary investigators
- Neil White
- Nick Jennings
- Nick Harris
- wtlt
- Neil Jonathan Grabham
- asw05r
Associated research groups
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Electronic Systems and Devices Group
- Electronics and Electrical Engineering
- Agents, Interaction and Complexity
- Date:
- 2006-2009
- Themes:
- Agent Based Computing, Decentralised Information Systems, Artificial Intelligence, e-Defence
This project is concerned with investigating and developing the basic mechanisms that enable collectives of software agents to self-organise, self-repair and self-optimise in response to dynamic environments. Such autonomic behaviour is needed to ensure the agents are able to best achieve both their individual objectives and the objectives of the collective as a whole in the face of a constantly changing and highly uncertain operational environment. In such cases, the resources available (communication and computation) to the agents are in a constant state of flux and the set of agents in the system is constantly changing. In such cases, it is impossible for the a priori system design to continue to be maximally effective because many of its operational assumptions and parameters are changing. Thus, the system can gradually degrade its performance or it can endeavour to respond to such changes by reorganizing itself in order to best achieve its objectives.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- nnc
- pv
- tr
- Sebastian Stein
- rck05r
Partners
- BT
- General Dynamics
- QinetiQ
- Imperial College
- Date:
- 2006-2008
- Themes:
- Logic, Model-Based Verification
- Funding:
- EPSRC
Model-based verification is a highly successful formal method for hardware/software development. Depending on the hardware/software systems of interest, existing model-based approaches to verification use different types of mathematical models to describe abstract system behaviour, and the verification techniques they employ are tailored to these model types. However, different approaches also share certain aspects of the underlying mathematical models and of the associated verification methodologies. So far, no effort has been invested into formally relating different model-based approaches to verification. Consequently, no support is available for transferring verification methodologies between different modelling approaches, or for combining/reusing existing verification methodologies in the context of new types of models. The present project aims to address this issue, by developing the theoretical underpinnings of a modular approach to model-based verification.
Such an approach will offer several advantages, including:
(i) a unified treatment of existing modelling approaches and of their relationships,
(ii) the provision of abstraction-based verification techniques which exploit the relationships between different modelling approaches to increase the efficiency of verification,
(iii) the ability to combine/reuse existing modelling approaches/ verification methodologies when considering new classes of systems.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigator
- ms6
Associated research group
- Dependable Systems & Software Engineering
- Date:
- 2003-2006
- Themes:
- Agent Based Computing, e-Science, Grid and Distributed Computing
- Funding:
- EPSRC
The Semantic Firewall project deals with the enforcement of network security policies between trust domains in the presence of dynamically changing and unpredictable Grid communication needs.
The problem is that whilst traditional static policies allow the type of access mechanisms required by Grid applications, the same mechansims can be exploited by crackers for malicious purposes, so firewall policies cannot remain static for long. By combining conventional Grid security with semantic reasoning methods, we aim to provide dynamic, adaptive network security that allows legitimate access but still prevents unauthorised access
Primary investigators
- trp
- Mike Surridge
Secondary investigators
- Ronald Ashri
- Mariusz Jacyno
- Darren Marvin
- Steve Taylor
- E. Rowland Watkins
Partner
- SRI International
Associated research groups
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- IT Innovation Centre
- Date:
- 2006-2008
- Themes:
- Pervasive Computing and Networks, Knowledge Technologies, Grid and Distributed Computing
- Funding:
- EPSRC (EP/C010078/1)
The aim of the project is to investigate and innovate at the intersection of the Semantic Grid and the physical world, by focusing on the capture, distribution and use of semantic annotation in the context of pervasive devices. It addresses important computer science challenges that have arisen in e-Science projects by focusing on the future forms of scientific record that may emerge from the use of a pervasive e-Science infrastructure. The formation of this new form of scientific record raises research challenges in three distinct areas:
- Challenge 1:
- Recording the record requires a disparate set of information to be captured and related to each other. We need to reduce significantly the cost of capturing this additional information and develop appropriate representations for codifying this information. This will require:
-
- The development of devices and techniques that map from real world actions and activities to higher level semantic representations to provide real time information streams representing the ubiquitous computing environment.
- The investigation of semantic annotation techniques to information streams drawn from real world sensors for use in e-Research applications using multiple ontologies.
- Challenge 2:
- Sharing the record requires a careful re-examination of the relationship between the underlying architecture and the semantic annotations used to form the record of activities. Sharing this record across a distributed community requires:
-
- The development of techniques to allow the distribution and synchronisation of multiple information sources across the infrastructure in a scalable and reliable manner.
- To create a distributed annotation architecture that move beyond existing centralised services such as RDF triplestores to address the engineering challenges inherent in meeting the requirements of continuous or real-time media across a distributed infrastructure.
- Challenge 3:
- Replaying the Record requires us to consider how best to represent the record to scientists and how this might best be understood by scientists. This will require:
-
- The development of interfaces and devices that present the record to scientists through a range of different interface devices including mobile and ubiquitous computing devices.
- The development of techniques to support multiple perspectives on the underlying annotations to allow the record to be presented in an appropriate manner to those who would seek to replay it.
The Semantic Media project has been funded under the second round of the EPSRC Computer Science Challenges to Emerge from e-Science programme.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- Nicholas Gibbins
- Jeremy Frey
- Tom Rodden
- Chris Greenhalgh
- Danius Michaelides
Partner
- University of Nottingham
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group