- Date:
- 2005-2006
- Themes:
- Grid and Distributed Computing, Knowledge Technologies
- Funding:
- JISC
Context
Meetings pervade the life of almost all researchers, and increasingly, these take the form of telephone and videoconferences amongst geographically dispersed colleagues. Supporting distributed meetings that are as productive as face-to-face meetings is a primary challenge for research and development in this field. This is the motivation for this proposal.
The Access Gridâ⢠(AG) is an open collaboration and resource management architecture that already provides many of the capabilities proposed by the JISC for a Virtual Research Environment (VRE). The overall aim of the project is to extend the functionality of the AG with advanced meeting support and information management tools that were developed and validated in the recent e-Science project, CoAKTinG. The project will also deploy this environment as a prototype VRE with end-user communities in order to test, evaluate and discover further user requirements.
Our end-user partners represent a cross-section of communities interested in the potential of the proposed VRE to meet their needs. The areas represented by our partners include performance art, social science, middleware development and minority communities. These diverse users will help the project to evaluate the generic value of its capabilities. A phased deployment and evaluation process is planned, starting with the immediate project team as users, to address obvious usability and technical issues, before extending to the project partners who will subject the tools to a more formal evaluation.
Aims and Objectives
The specific objectives are to:- Extend the AG's VRE infrastructure with new collaboration functionalities from the CoAKTinG project
- Provide a set of extensions to CoAKTinG tools to make their installation and administration simpler in both an AG and non-AG context
- Observe the use of and evaluate the improved VRE with end-user communities.
Primary investigators
- Michael Daw
- David De Roure
- Simon Buckingham Shum
- Rob Procter
Secondary investigators
- Tim Chown
- Danius Michaelides
- bpj00r
- Andrew Rowley
- Michelle Bachler
Partners
- University of Manchester
- University of Edinburgh
- Open University
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2004-2005
- Themes:
- Grid and Distributed Computing, e-Science
- Funding:
- OMII
A Grimoire is a magician's manual for invoking demons (Oxford English Dictionary). Likewise, the Grimoires registry hosts descriptions of services and workflows, which a scientist can use for forming their complex scientific experiments. However, service and workflow interfaces are sometimes underspecified and therefore difficult to use in an automated manner; hence, the myGrid registry augments their interfaces with metadata such as functionality, semantic information about their inputs and outputs, or various metrics (e.g. perceived quality of service, trust).
Primary investigator
- lavm
Secondary investigator
- wf
Partner
- University of Manchester
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2003-2006
- Themes:
- Agent Based Computing, Grid and Distributed Computing, Trust and Provenance
- Funding:
- Welsh e-science centre
Conoise-G seeks to support robust and resilient virtual organisation formation and operation. It aims to provide mechanisms to assure effective operation of VOs in the face of disruptive and potentially malicious entities in dynamic, open and competitive environments.
Primary investigators
- Nick Jennings
- mml
Secondary investigators
- jp03r
- wtlt
Partners
- University of Aberdeen
- University of Cardiff
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2002-2005
- Themes:
- Knowledge Technologies, Medical Engineering
- Funding:
- EPSRC
MIAKT is a joint initiative between the AKT IRC, specialising in knowledge technologies for the management and synthesis of appropriate information and knowledge content, and the MIAS IRC, specialising in the intelligent analysis and handling of medical data. The aim of the project is to apply the capabilities of AKT and MIAS to collaborative medical problem solving using knowledge services provided via the e-Science Grid infrastructure.
Primary investigators
Secondary investigators
- dpd
- bh
Partners
- University of Oxford
- University of Sheffield
- Kings College London
- Open University
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2003-2010
- Themes:
- Human Computer Interaction, Knowledge Technologies, Web Science, e-Science, Digital Libraries
- Funding:
- EPSRC, JISC
mSpace is an interation design and engineering approach to improve discovery of and access to information to help a person build new knowledge. Its main approach is to present information in context, and to support rich exploration of the relationships exposed in those contexts. mSpace does this by offering several powerful tools for pulling together diverse information sources on the back end, and by providing powerful manipulations on that information in the front end. These approaches combined enable a person to organize an information space to suit their interests.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- das05r
- ar5
- mw1
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2004-2007
- Themes:
- Machine Learning, Chemoinformatics
- Funding:
- GlaxoSmithKline
Recently there has been great interest in applying state-of-the-art machine learning methods to problems in Bio- and Chemoinformatics. The success of kernel methods and the development of kernels which operate over discrete structures such as strings and trees opens up many possibilites for progress in these fields.
This project would focusses on using kernel methods for cheminformatic tasks, such as, in the first instance, developing predictive models which generalise well across chemical series. We are investigating among other aspects the construction of new kernels which can represent molecular structures in a more structured way than the traditional vector-of-statistics approach, which in turn would hopefully lead to greater accuracy on predictive tasks.
Primary investigator
- cjs
Secondary investigator
- aad04r
Partner
- GlaxoSmithKline
Associated research group
- Information: Signals, Images, Systems Research Group
- Date:
- 2004-2006
- Themes:
- Trust and Provenance, Grid and Distributed Computing
- Funding:
- EU
The concept of Provenance is already well understood in the study of fine art where it refers to the trusted, documented history of some work of art. Given that documented history, the object attains an authority that allows scholars to understand and appreciate its importance and context relative to other works of art. Objects that do not have a trusted, proven history may be treated with some scepticism by those that study and view them. This same concept of Provenance may also be applied to data and information generated within a computer system; particularly when the information is subject to regulatory control over an extended period of time.
Today's grid architectures suffer from limitations, such as lack of mechanisms to trace results and infrastructures to build up trusted networks. Provenance enables users to trace how a particular result has been arrived at by identifying the individual and aggregated services that produced a particular output. The overarching aim of the Provenance project is to design, conceive and implement an industrial-strength open provenance architecture for grid systems, and to deploy and evaluate it in complex grid applications, namely aerospace engineering and organ transplant management. This support includes a scalable and secure architecture, an open proposal for standardising the protocols and data structures, a set of tools for configuring and using the provenance architecture, an open source reference implementation, and a deployment and validation in industrial context.
The impact of this project is to provide mechanisms that allow information generated and managed within a grid infrastructure to be proven and trusted. By this we mean that the information's history, including the processes that created and modified it, are documented in a way that can be inspected, validated and reasoned about by authorised users that need to ensure information controls have not been altered, abused or tampered with.
Primary investigator
- lavm
Secondary investigators
- fx
- lc
- vhkt
- sj
Partners
- IBM Hursley
- Cardiff University
- UPC, Barcelona
- DLR, Germany
- SZTAKi, Budapest
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2004-2016
- Themes:
- ELearning, Platforms and Tools, Pervasive Computing and Networks
- Funding:
- Department
As part of the IBM Linux Laptop Challenge, a team of undergraduates has set up a TV service over part of the School's wireless network using the latest IPv6 infrastructure. The multichannel TV service (which will eventually be extended to cover the whole University) has already begun test broadcasts consisting of ECS lectures (both live and repeated) and movie trailers for films currently showing at the Odeon. Further channels are expected to be added soon.
Primary investigators
- Date:
- 2004-
- Themes:
- ELearning, Platforms and Tools, Technology Enhanced Learning
- Funding:
- IBM, University of Southampton: Learning and Teaching Enhancement Fund
A programme of investigations and projects that explore the future teaching and learning technology infrastructure that will be regarded as the mainstream for higher education in 15 years time.
Laptops, wireless networks, Web resources, Smartboards and PowerPoint presentations are becoming a normal part of the learning experience for children who are now beginning their primary education. The ECS 2020 Vision is an exploration of the kinds of learning experiences that these children will be having when they graduate from University.
The following projects are part of the ECS 2020 Vision :
Primary investigators
Secondary investigator
- dct05r
Partner
- IBM
Associated research groups
- Learning Societies Lab
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
Business transactions involve hierarchies of activities whose execution needs to be orchestrated. In standard atomic transactions rollback mechanisms are used to protect against faults by providing all or nothing atomicity for transactions. In so-called long running business transactions rollback is not always possible because parts of a transaction will have been committed or because parts of a transaction (e.g., communications with external agents)are inherently impossible to undo. In such cases compensation can be used as a way of dealing with faults.
We are developing formal approaches to modelling and analysis of compensating transactions.