- Date:
- 2000-2006
- Themes:
- Knowledge Technologies, Web Science, Decentralised Information Systems, Multimedia, Pervasive Computing and Networks, Human Computer Interaction
- Funding:
- EPSRC (GR/N15986/01)
The central goal of the Equator IRC is to promote the integration of the physical with the digital. In particular, we are concerned with uncovering and supporting the variety of possible relationships between physical and digital worlds. Our objective in doing this is to improve the quality of everyday life by building and adapting technologies for a range of user groups and application domains. Examples include:
- combining physical and digital cities to promote people's understanding of the world within which they live, and to enhance wayfinding and access to physical and digital artefacts, information and people.
- creating new forms of play, performance and entertainment that combine the physical and digital so as to promote learning, participation and creativity.
- exploring how new technologies that merge the physical and the digital can support activities outside of the workplace, including maintaining family and social relationships in the home, and supporting work in the open air.
Primary investigators
Secondary investigators
Partners
- University of Lancaster
- The University of Nottingham
- The University of Glasgow
- The Royal College of Art
- University of Bristol
- University of Sussex
- University College London
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 1999-2001
- Themes:
- Decentralised Information Systems, Knowledge Technologies
- Funding:
- EPSRC (GR/M75419/01)
The aim of this project is to research into methods to improve significantly the quality, consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents). It plans to produce a COHSE (Conceptual Open Hypermedia Services Environment) using three leading-edge technologies:
- an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships;
- a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion;
- the integration of the ontology service and the open hypermedia link service to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents;
The result of the integration will be evaluated and refined with two real case study applications drawn from commercial collaborators.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- Wendy Hall
- David De Roure
- tmb
- Simon Kampa
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 1999-2000
- Themes:
- Decentralised Information Systems, Digital Libraries, Perception, Cognition and Language
- Funding:
- JISC
CogPrints is an electronic archive for papers in any area of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, and many areas of Computer Science (e.g., artificial intelligence, robotics, vison, learning, speech, neural networks), Philosophy (e.g., mind, language, knowledge, science, logic), Biology (e.g., ethology, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, behaviour genetics, evolutionary theory), Medicine (e.g., Psychiatry, Neurology, human genetics, Imaging), Anthropology (e.g., primatology, cognitive ethnology, archeology, paleontology), as well as any other portions of the physical, social and mathematical sciences that are pertinent to the study of cognition.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigator
- rht96r
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 1997-1999
- Themes:
- Web Science, Decentralised Information Systems
- Funding:
- JISC
AIMS (Academic Information Management System) is designed to store and make available on the Web documents that are to be printed or published without the author having to convert the document to HTML. The system is designed to provide a service to a University Department or Faculty for storing and displaying on the Web finished versions of published material. The design of the system is based upon causing the minimum of impact to existing working practices.
Distinguishing features include:
- the system automatically makes the content of all documents available on the Web
- version control and document hierarchy
- full text search facilities
- will use the Distributed Link Service and Webcosm to dynamically cross reference documents
- AIMS is a Lotus Domino application
The project is funded by the JISC Technologies Application Programme (JTAP) and has been running since January 1997.
Contact: Gareth Hughes gvh@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- gvh
- Gary Wills
Associated research groups
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Learning Societies Lab
- Web and Internet Science
- Electronic and Software Systems
- Date:
- 2001-2003
- Themes:
- Agent Based Computing, E-Business Technologies
- Funding:
- BTexaCT
Coalition formation in multi-agent systems (MAS) is becoming increasingly important as it increases the ability of agents to execute tasks and maximize their payoffs. This is especially true in virtual enterprises, where dynamic coalitions of small, agile enterprises can provide more services and make more profits than an individual can. Moreover, such coalitions can disband when they are no longer effective. Thus the automation of coalition formation will not only save considerable labour time, but also may be more effective at finding beneficial coalitions than human in complex settings.
Coalition formation has been addressed in game theory for some time. However, game theoric approaches are typically centralized and computationally infeasible. MAS researchers, using game theory concepts, have developed algorithms for coalition formation in MAS environments. However, many of them suffer from a number of important drawbacks, for example:
- They are only applicable for small number of agents.
- They only consider super-additive environments. Super-additive means that for any pair of coalitions, it is always beneficial for them to form one big coalition. Thus, in super-additive environments, all agents are best off by forming the grand coalition, i.e. the coalition contains all the agents. While this assumption simplifies the analysis, it also limits the scope of the application.
Thus, our research will do a thorough literature review of existing coalition formation algorithms, and evaluate them both theoretically and empirically. Based on our findings, we will develop a more efficient algorithm for coalition formation, applicable for virtual enterprises environment.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigator
- vdd
Associated research groups
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Agents, Interaction and Complexity
- Date:
- 1997-2002
- Theme:
- Digital Libraries
- Funding:
- Thompson Publishing
The Winston Churchill archive consists of over a million documents, ranging from handwritten letters to typed political documents. The digitisation of the archive presents a number of problems which this project aims to tackle using multimedia and hypermedia tools and technologies.
Some of the issues dealt with by this research project include :-
- Providing a user friendly interface to a large information repository. Design of adapatable user interfaces to cater for a wide variety of user needs and abilities.
- Storage mechanisms for large multimedia archives.
- Integration of database search engines to promote fast retrieval.
- Integration of hypermedia navigation to improve browsing within the archive.
- Development and use of content based information retrieval tools on both text and non-text based media.
- Presentation of facsimile images in formats suitable for a variety of end uses.
- Scanning and digitisation technologies.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
Partner
- Thompson Publishing
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2000-2006
- Theme:
- Knowledge Technologies
- Funding:
- EPSRC (GR/N15764/01)
The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) fund the AKT project. It is one of their Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations (IRC). AKT brings together a strong set of universities and complementary disciplines to tackle fundamental problems associated with the management of knowledge. AKT is a multi-million pound, six-year collaboration between internationally recognised research groups at the Universities of Southampton, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Sheffield and the Open University.
Professor Nigel Shadbolt will be the Director of the AKT project whose aim is to develop and extend a range of technologies to provide integrated methods and services for the capture, modelling, publishing, reuse and management of knowledge. The IRC will undertake fundamental research in particular knowledge technologies and it will also bring together relevant work and produce practical results. It has attracted significant and enthusiastic industrial support. We believe it provides an exciting focus for research into knowledge technology.
It is a commonly held belief that we live in a world where there has been an explosion of data, information and knowledge. But knowledge is only of value when it can be used effectively and efficiently. The management of knowledge is increasingly being recognised as a key element in extracting its value. We need to understand how best to take knowledge through a series of stages from its creation to its use. It needs to be acquired, modelled and represented, stored and retrieved, used and reused, published and maintained.
The AKT project is intended to address all these closely related issues in an integrated approach. There are six challenges that any complete approach to knowledge management must meet. We see these as fundamental bottlenecks that need to be overcome and around which AKT's research agenda is focused.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- Wendy Hall
- David De Roure
- Les Carr
- Srinandan Dasmahapatra
- Hugh Glaser
- monica schraefel
- kmo
- ha
- Nicholas Gibbins
- Stephen Harris
- yk1
- Ian Charles Millard
- Mischa Tuffield
- yl504r
Partners
- The University of Aberdeen
- The University of Edinburgh
- The University of Sheffield
- Open University
Associated research groups
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Web and Internet Science
- Date:
- 2001-2003
- Theme:
- Agent Based Computing
- Funding:
- Hewlett Packard Research Labs
This research will investigate and develop techniques by which software agents can acquire sufficient knowledge to negotiate effectively on behalf of their user in a range of electronic commerce scenarios. The research will exploit and extend work in the Knowledge Acquisition community in order to determine exactly what knowledge an agent needs to be endowed with to negotiate on behalf of its user, what techniques are appropriate for capturing this knowledge, and how the agent's performance can be evalauted against its users' expectations.
Primary investigators
Secondary investigator
- xl
Partners
- Dr Chris Preist (HP Labs)
- Dr Mike Yearworth (HP Labs)
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2000-
- Theme:
- Digital Libraries
The EPrints software (aka eprints.org software) is intended to allow people to set up all purposes archives on the web, which are OAI compliant. It is aimed at research papers but could be used for anything.
Used widely (200+ installations) in the HE sector EPrints aims to support the current best practise in repository and Web standards.
The EPrints project is a nexus for a number of research and consultancy activities within the group.
Primary investigators
Secondary investigators
- dt2
- tmb
- Christopher Gutteridge
- tdb2
- Sebastien Francois
- af05v
- Kelly Terrell
- pjw
- Patrick McSweeney
Associated research group
- Web and Internet Science
- Theme:
- Space Charge Measurement
- Funding:
- Pirelli Cables Ltd
Space charge is the term given to electrical charges that become trapped within the bulk of a dielectric and can occur as a result of, electron beam irradiation, or an electric potential applied across the insulation. Space charge trapped in high voltage insulation systems (e.g. polymeric power cables) can significantly alter the internal electric stress profile, eventually leading to its premature failure at stresses well below anticipated or design values. This project is concerned with the space charge distribution measurement in polymer insulated power cables using Pulsed Electro-Acoustic (PEA) method. Regarding to the coaxial geometry of power cable and its thick polymer insulation, which will create significant influence to the final result by diverging, attenuating and dispersing acoustic waves generate from space charge layers, a correction algorithm has been developed to cancel the aforementioned effects on the measurement of space charge profile. The main effort of the project is being focused on the investigation of space charge behaviour of XLPE cable with different modified insulating material and the treatment (degassing at elevated temperature) after insulation extrusion.
Primary investigators
- aed
- George Chen
Secondary investigator
- mf98r
Associated research groups
- Electrical Power Engineering
- Electronics and Electrical Engineering