| EPSRC Reference: |
DT/F006640/1 |
| Title: |
Instant Knowledge: Secure Autonomic Business Collaboration |
| Principal Investigator: |
Prugel-Bennett, Professor A |
| Other Investigators: |
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| Project Partners: |
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| Department: |
Electronics and Computer Science |
| Organisation: |
University of Southampton |
| Scheme: |
Technology Programme |
| Starts: |
01 May 2008 |
Ends: |
31 October 2011 |
Value (£): |
222,953
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| EPSRC Research Topic Classifications: |
| Mobile Computing |
Networks & Distributed Systems |
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| EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications: |
| Communications |
Financial Services |
| Information Technologies |
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Summary on Grant Application Form |
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For anyone working within a business enterprise, keeping track of relevant information regarding contacts (internal and external), including people's expertise is a difficult task. Internal personal directories tend to be out of date, and even good company intranets only contain very limited information. With the increasing availability of the internet on mobile devices, and the realisation of the personal distributed environment where you conduct your affairs on one or more (possibly mobile) devices (such as a mobile phone, laptop and desktop), one might expect more from the technology than it currently delivers. For example, many people have experienced the scenario of sitting in a business meeting where a file would like to be shared among the group. Although the technology does exist to create an ad-hoc network between a group of laptops and share files, it is often difficult for the user or simply too insecure a proposal to actually achieve it. Surely, it would be beneficial to know that from your calendar, your contacts and your geographical location that right now you are in a meeting with people you trust (at least to share simple word documents) and the network should be set up automically and securely, just for the duration of the meeting, to enable such file sharing. Also, whilst in a meeting, you want to keep track of other attendees, or you might be interested to know that you share a common contact with someone who is not there; or that a colleague is searching for an expert on a particular topic and there happens to be someone at the table with the correct background. This type of information should be collected automatically and presented to the user in a timely fashion (for example as you enter a meeting, relevant information about other participants could be displayed). Exploiting this kind of knowledge would enable the most useful (and lucrative) business collaborations to be constructed and maintianed very efficiently. Enabling the gathering of this information, mining it for data, and learning how to present it, are the aspects which researchers at Southampton will work on. The work carried out by the researchers at Southampton in this project will focus on gathering this information and developing machine learning algorithms to learn what context information is relevant, how a network of contacts will be constructed and how this information can be efficiently shared and used within an organisation. Furthermore, learning algorithms have to be developed which learn the particular aspects of how someone uses the system. Gathering the relevant information is a difficult task in itself (automatically storing the right sort of context information and using it is not straightforward), however even if this is successful it will not be used if the user is constantly presented with irrelevant information or the correct items in an untimely fashion. Therefore the system must learn from the user what information they consider to be relevant and when they would like it to be presented for them, and the system must do this as quickly as possible with minimal input from the user. These two topics, gathering and exploiting relevant context information, and online learning which adapts to a particular users preferences requires the development of new algorithms, and these are the two main areas which the Southampton researchers in this project will focus on.
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Key Findings |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Potential use in non-academic contexts |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Impacts |
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| Description |
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk |
| Summary |
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| Date Materialised |
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Sectors submitted by the Researcher |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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| Project URL: |
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| Further Information: |
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| Organisation Website: |
http://www.soton.ac.uk |