Description:Current day users own multiple devices, e.g. PC, Phone, PDA etc. and frequently collaborate with colleagues or friends which includes exchanging, accessing, and sharing of data in multi-user and multi-device scenarios. Sometimes collaboration can even occur with people who are not trusted or known a priori to user thus demanding enhanced privacy and security requirements. In Exoticus, We aim to propose a middleware to minimize user effort in collaborating with other users and also providing seamless access to user data across different networks and devices. The middleware will help users overcome the device or network specific limitations thus facilitating user collaboration and making seamless access to data possible. My work is concentrated towards privacy and security requirements.

Description: Developers of ubiquitous computing applications have to rely on low-fidelity prototyping measures to develop the applications because often the existing infrastructure is not available at the time of development. Similarly evaluation of such applications is difficult and time-consuming because their testing is to be done in real world. We designed and developed a high-fidelity prototyping tool to assist development and evaluation of ubiquitous computing applications. We use videos of real environment, taken with a wide view angle (typically between 140-360 degrees) using multiple cameras, and augment them with real sensor values, such as GPS, Bluetooth, or IR to create a realistic simulation of environment. Sensor abstraction layer hide the application from simulation environment and application behaves the same way it would in real world while the videos provide a good visual and aural impression. We used immersive video to prototype two real-world applications - developed for Ask-IT project and Future Traveller Information System project.

Description: Today, different regional organisations, e.g. public works, water, electricity board, have their own databases which they use for operation purposes. However, often cooperation is required to achieve their aims, for example a street work needs to have information about electricity cables that pass underneath. In NERVE, we aim to provide a platform to share data of participating organisations and ability to visualise it in real-time in 2D or 3D on PC as well as mobile devices. The data can come from water, gas, or electricity companies as well as services like fire, police and emergency medical services. I developed a 3D visualisation client for mobile devices to help visualise the data in 3D. The client fetches data and other real-time feeds, such as GPS, using web service from server and presents it to user. At the same time, user could receive notifications and updates on his/her wearable display. In future, NERVE can be also be integrated with sensor network deployed at the site and can provide real-time information about different sensor feed such as hazardous gases, high temperature etc.

Description: Future Traveller Information System (FTIS) was in collaboration with Transport Operations Research Group of Newcastle University. The aim of FTIS is to provider users with real-time information about public transports on their mobile devices to encourage them to use public transportation rather than private vehicles to help reduce congestion/pollution on roads. I developed a mobile prototype application to display real-time information about public transports (timing and details of bus and metro services) with maps of current location of user and suggesting routea to destination. In future, FTIS can also integrate with transport sensor network and can provide real-time information for authorities about pollution etc. A striped-down version of FTIS was also developed for wearable displays and both of the approaches were compared. We also used FTIS as a test case for “Immersive Video” and conducted evaluation studies in both real and prototype environment.

Description: I developed a prototype of context-aware museum mobile guide for Ask-IT project which has an aim of providing navigational help to mobility-impaired people. The museum mobile guide, running on PDA, used to detect current location of user using GPS and other proximity technologies such as bluetooth or Infrared sensing and suggest easiest route to a museum and help user navigate in the museum and download information about the artifacts. Users also received context-aware notifications such as special offers from a near-by restaurant during lunch time. Apart from displaying map for navigation, we also experimented with providing user panoramic images (360 degree) of the surroundings from his current location.

Description: Objective methods are needed to evaluate quality of video films obtained by mobile phone cameras. Such methods should help in evaluating camera characteristics, such as sharpness, noise, colour saturation etc., without human intervention and should be combined to give a single metric of quality to facilitate easy and rapid evaluation of overall video quality. I used commercial software, Imatest and Genista, to evaluate various characteristics of video quality and combined them into a single metric which helped us comparing the quality of video from different mobile phones. I also developed a part of H.263 parser to compute frame drops.

Description: Mobile learning has two particular advantages over class-room learning: availability of application (i.e. pervasiveness) and scope of adaptation according to the learner’s needs. MAC is aimed to help Japanese-English speakers in perceptually distinguishing the non-native /r/ vs. /l/ English phonemic contrast with a view to improving their own English pronunciation. MAC is implemented in Java (J2ME). This allows the application to be used anywhere and anytime, on devices that learners would commonly already own. The MAC software adapts according to the learner’s responses and presents to the learner a contrast of the type on which they will most need further practice on.

Description: Veritas Volume Manager requires special mechanisms to store data in RAID environment to conserve memory space. My work was related to developing a persistent mechanism to keep track of ongoing requests to a persistent storage while maintaining atomicity of operations.