more here...
My research interests all centre on the development of information systems for WWW and multimedia data. I endeavour to create innovative systems to solve real-world problems. I summarise my research interests under a number of key areas:
Personal Digital Data & Personal Digital Memories (10 publications)
I have a keen interest in developing information systems for Human Digital Memories. I actively research methods of collection, storing, understanding, searching, filtering, recommending and providing ubiquitous access to personal digital memories and personal multimedia collections. I have a passion for advancing research in this area and am ideally poised to be a leading academic researcher in this area. I have been working with personal digital data for over three years, beginning with personal GPS tagged photo collections and more recently, working with passive capture of personal data. I have worked extensively on the MediAssist Digital Photo management system, developed at DCU which automatically organises a person’s digital photos and requires minimal user annotation of photo content. We, on the MediAssist project organise personal digital photo collections based on date/time and GPS location, which I believe will become a key organizational methodology over the next few years as consumer digital cameras evolve to incorporate GPS type functionality.
In addition, I currently have 20 months of personal data (almost 2 million photos) captured from a Microsoft Sensecam device, the organisation of which poses unique and new challenges. The research area of personal digital memories is in its infancy and the commercial marketplace for personal digital memory products has yet to be created. My experiences from my year of data capture (no one else has done this), my background in digital multimedia systems and my knowledge of search engines puts me in a globally unique position to be able to have international impact with my future research. The value of my forthcoming research into personal digital memories will be visible in a number of areas:
Multimedia Information Retrieval (16 publications) I have been/am involved in the development of many prototype image and video retrieval systems. Video search engines I have helped develop have performed among the very best at TRECVID workshops. I have been involved in the development of:
WWW Search (12 publications)
Large Scale Search for WWW data, being the subject of my PhD thesis, is still an area of great interest to me. My last work in this area was in analysing the structure of the WWW from very large web crawls (SPIRIT), with the aim of accurately modelling the complexities of real-world web linkage in web document collections.
HCIR
HCIR is the integration of Human Computer Interaction research with Information Retrieval research. Up until now, I have been involved in HCIR in developing FIX THIS
Mobile Access to Information (4 publications)
Mobile HCI issues greatly interest me and much of my present work is involved in the development of information systems for mobile devices that seek to learn about the user and the user interests and provide extreme precision and context sensitive content recommendation on mobile devices. The limited user input capabilities of mobile devices (such as phones) make this an essential aspect us user interaction. I have a keen interest in continuing my research in this area and extending the scope of my work in providing mobile access to large-scale information systems.
Information System Architectures (3 publications)
Working with my colleagues at the University of Tromsø, I have been developing information system architectures for distributed systems and mobile networks. Tromsø are very experienced in this area having built the world’s first wireless sensor network (Tacoma).