- Date:
- 2008-2011
- Themes:
- Dependable Systems, Software Engineering
The goal of this project is to solve the problem of systematically and reliably modifying source code that has automatically been generated from high-level models. This problem is common in model-based software development because the output of a generator is typically different from the actual requirements for code deployment. Research questions include:
- How can we build code generators that support the customization of generated code, without the need to manually change either the code generator or the generated code?
- How can we integrate generated code, either as whole or in fragments, with custom application code written in a common high-level programming language
- How can we guarantee that the integration is correct or at least safe? What sort of assurance can we achieve?
Primary investigator
Secondary investigator
- gre
Partners
- Ewen Denney, NASA Ames Research Center
- Krzysztof Czarnecki, University of Waterloo
- Eelco Visser,Technical University Delft
Associated research group
- Dependable Systems & Software Engineering
- Date:
- 2008-2010
- Themes:
- Assessment, Wireless Sensing and Sensor Networks, Semantic Web, Virtual Communities and Social Systems, Web Science
- Funding:
- NCeSS, EPSRC
For more information on the LifeGuide project please see the
Project Website
Interventions designed to influence people's behaviour ('behavioural interventions') are a fundamental part of daily life, whether in the form of personal advice, support and skills-training from professionals (e.g. educators, doctors) or general information disseminated through the media. However, personal advice and support are very costly, and it is impossible to provide everyone with 24 hour access to personal guidance on managing all their problems. General information provided through the media may not be seen as relevant to the particular problems of individuals, and provides no support to help people make desired changes to their behaviour. For the first time, the internet provides a cost-effective opportunity to provide open 24 hour access to extensive information and advice on any problem. Interactive technology means that the advice can now be specifically 'tailored' to address the particular situation, concerns, beliefs and preferences of each individual, and intensive daily support can be provided for behaviour change in the form of reminders, personalised feedback regarding progress and overcoming obstacles, help with planning, and opportunities for communication with peers.
In view of this huge potential, internet-based behavioural interventions are starting to be developed in the public and private sector. However, currently each intervention is programmed from scratch individually, with the result that the initial development costs are greater for internet-based than for traditionally delivered interventions, and once programmed they cannot easily be modified. This seriously limits the number of interventions that can be developed and evaluated, and acts as a barrier to innovation and enhancement of interventions by researchers.
The aim of this project is to develop, evaluate and disseminate an internet-based set of resources (the BI-Grid / Behavioural Intervention Grid) that will allow researchers to flexibly create and modify two fundamental dimensions of behavioural interventions: a) providing tailored advice; b) supporting sustained behaviour. The BI-Grid will eliminate the costly waste of resources involved in programming every intervention individually, and will allow researchers to easily test components of interventions and immediately modify and improve the interventions based on their findings. The BI-Grid will increase the number of researchers who can engage in this type of research, opening it up to those with limited funding (e.g. junior researchers and research students). The practical benefit will be more rapid development of better interventions, while the scientific benefit will be a much faster accumulation of knowledge about the effects of different elements of interventions than at present, which will improve our basic understanding of the influences on behaviour.
In this project social scientists and computer scientists will work closely together to develop the software needed, using extensive consultation through workshops and the internet to obtain researchers' views of how to make the BI-Grid fit for all requirements. We will test and demonstrate the value of the BI-Grid by involving a network of researchers in collaboratively applying it to two very different problems that have relevance to everyone. First, we will evaluate how effectively the BI-Grid can be used to provide people suffering from colds and 'flu with tailored advice that enables them to cope with their symptoms without consulting their GP. Second, we will evaluate how effectively the BI-Grid can provide support to increase physical activity over a sustained period. We will interview 48 users to gain insights into how their experiences of using the BI-Grid can be improved, and will use the BI-Grid to collect detailed data on the use of the interventions by over 3000 people, enabling us to carry out powerful analyses of which ingredients of each intervention work best for whom, in what circumstances.
Primary investigators
- Gary Wills
- Prof Lucy Yarley (Health Psychology)
- David De Roure
- Mark Weal
Secondary investigators
- Jonathon Stephen Hare
- Judith Joseph
- aco
- xc2
- pz2g12
Partner
- Centre for Clinical Applications of Health Psychology
Associated research group
- Electronic and Software Systems
- Date:
- 2008-2008
- Themes:
- Assessment, Interaction, Learning Technologies
- Funding:
- Multiple Sclerosis (MS) society
Fatigue is a common, distressing and disabling symptom associated with multiple sclerosis (MS). Up to 97% of people with MS experience fatigue as part of their illness. We have recently completed a 3 year randomised controlled trial using 8 sessions of manualised cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to treat fatigue in MS. The treatment appeared to be very effective. At 6 months post treatment, not only had fatigue substantially reduced, but people with MS reported levels of fatigue that were significantly lower than those of a matched healthy, non-fatigued comparison group. However, a limitation of this therapy package is that skilled CBT therapists are not available to many people with MS due to lack of available resources and difficulty of access. There is now a growing body of literature demonstrating that internet delivered CBT together with minimal therapist time (around a 100 minutes of either face-to-face, telephone or email contact) can be as effective as CBT where people meet with a therapist for weekly or fortnightly sessions. The purpose of this innovation grant is to develop and pilot an Internet based version of this CBT package, which if shown to be successful has the potential to be rolled out across the UK as an approach for people with MS to manage and treat their fatigue. The study will incorporate a collaborative approach between health and clinical psychologists, people with MS, information technologists and a health economist.
Primary investigators
- Gary Wills
- Prof Rona Moss-Morris (Health Psychology)
- Prof Lucy Yardley (Health Psychology)
Associated research groups
- Learning Societies Lab
- Electronic and Software Systems
- Date:
- 2007-2010
- Themes:
- Accessible Technologies, Learning Technologies
- Funding:
- EU
The Net4Voice project aims at promoting comprehensive schemes to assess the impact of SR technologies in education, by focusing on various learning settings and aspects related to the interaction between learners, professors/teachers and the educational environment. The SR technologies we want to adopt, transform speech in real time digital text, by generating electronic transcriptions synchronised with the audio or video. The transcriptions are saved in open and portable formats that enable to be delivered through different channels/devices, such as Braille text only, audio only, accessible HTML interface with audio synchronised with text, and so on. More concretely, the project aims at raising awareness and deepening knowledge about the impact of the SR technology in school, higher and adult education classrooms promoting testing and evaluation measures in various settings. In particular, it considers the impact of SR technology in classes held in three of the main European languages such as Italian, English and German. In addition, testing and impact evaluation will be conducted in classes attended also by people with disabilities that could specifically benefit from the adoption of learning methodologies based on multiple and accessible ICT tools. Finally, the project aims at evaluating the scalability of the SR testing results and at defining a strategy for transferring them to other EU partners.
Primary investigator
Partners
- University of Bologna
- University of Ulm
- Totton College
- Cesena High School I. Versari
Associated research group
- Learning Societies Lab
- Date:
- 2008-2010
- Themes:
- Machine Learning, Image Processing
- Funding:
- EU
The EU funded framework 7 research project entitled ââ¬ËPersonal Information Navigator Adapting Through Viewing (PinView)' aims to develop new principles, methods, and prototypes for the next generation of interfaces to data; which will specifically include the use of eye-tracking equipment on computer monitors.
The project will develop a variety of methods for dealing with implicit feedback from eye movement data and exploring the development of on-line and feature extraction algorithms for ranking search results.
Primary investigators
- cjs
- Steve Gunn
Secondary investigators
- kp2
- ss03v
- im
- Sasan Mahmoodi
Partners
- Xerox Research Centre Europe
- Helsinki University of Technology
- Univesity of Leoben
- University College London
- Celum GmbH
Associated research group
- Information: Signals, Images, Systems Research Group
- Date:
- 2008-2011
- Themes:
- Machine Learning, Security & Trust, Agent Based Computing
- Funding:
- The Virtual Centre of Excellence in Mobile and Personal Communications, Technology Strategy Board
The 'Instant Knowledge' research project is jointly funded by MobileVCE, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and the EPSRC, carrying out research into the field of machine learning and intelligent agents. The project itself centres around the notion of a personal distributed environment involving mobile devices (such as phones, PDA's, laptops etc.) and using context-sensitive information to extract and share knowledge in a useful way; whilst simultaneously addressing any security and privacy issues.
This is a multi-disciplinary project lead by the MobileVCE organisation, whose membership consists of several industrial members, including many mobile phone operators. The University of Strathclyde and Royal Holloway, University of London are the two other academic partners involved in the project.
The role of Southampton in the project is to provide machine learning and agent expertise in order to collate context features in an intelligent way so that information between agents can be shared either via ad-hoc meetings (e.g. over bluetooth or short-range wireless) or via a central repository (for example a central store on a corporate network.
Primary investigator
- cjs
Partners
- Mobile VCE
- Royal Holloway, University of London
- University of Strathclyde
Associated research group
- Information: Signals, Images, Systems Research Group
- Date:
- 2008-2009
- Themes:
- Accessible Technologies, Learning Technologies
- Funding:
- JISC
Multimedia has become technically easier to create (e.g. recording lectures) but while users can bookmark , search, link to, or tag a COMPLETE podcast or video available on the web, they cannot bookmark, search, link to, or tag A PARTICULAR SECTION WITHIN that podcast or video. Users cannot, for example, easily find or return to a particular point in a recording or associate their notes or resources with a specific section of a recording. As an analogy, users would clearly find a text book difficult to use if it had no contents page, index or page numbers. Therefore the growing amount of knowledge available in multimedia format has yet to achieve the level of interconnection and manipulation achieved for text documents via the World Wide Web and so realize the exciting opportunities for learning that can occur in ââ¬ËWeb 2.0ââ¬â¢ and ââ¬Ësocial softwareââ¬â¢ environments.
The MACFOB project aims to develop a web-based multimedia annotation tool that will meet the important and pervasive user need of making multimedia web resources (e.g. podcasts) easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for students, teachers and other users through developing and deploying technologies that support the creation of synchronised notes, bookmarks, tags, images and text captions.
User needs requirements for MACFOB have been established through user studies which have shown how teachers and students benefit from making annotations to help search and manipulate recordings of lectures or classes to find and make use of information. Consultations with user groups have confirmed the user needs requirements for both teaching and administration and interest in involvement in the project. We will work with a number of interested users throughout the project, in order to build a generalised Multimedia Annotation tool that is simple enough for teachers and learners to appropriate for their own use.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- sk07v
- Gary Wills
- Lester Gilbert
- David Millard
- jk2
Associated research groups
- Learning Societies Lab
- Electronic and Software Systems
- Web and Internet Science
- Date:
- 2006-2011
- Themes:
- e-Defence, Semantic Web, Knowledge Technologies
- Funding:
- Ministry of Defence, U.S. Army Research Laboratory
The International Technology Alliance (ITA) is a consortium of academic of industrial partners that seeks to investigate issues relating to future coalition capabilities, particularly those affecting US and UK forces. The ITA comprises 4 technical areas: network theory (TA1), security within a system of systems (TA2), sensor information processing and delivery (TA3), and distributed coalition planning and decision-making (TA4). Within these technical areas, the research undertaken by the School of Electronics and Computer Science falls within a number of focus areas. These include: semantically-mediated data fusion, semantic integration and interoperability, user interfaces for the Semantic Web, and collaborative planning and plan enrichment.
Semantically-Mediated Data Fusion
The future battlespace will feature a range of sophisticated sensor systems that promise to increase the level of battlespace resolution afforded to commanders at all levels of the command chain. In order to make best use of available sensor resources, coalition forces will benefit from data fusion processes that are able to exploit semantically-enriched representations of domain-relevant information. Semantic representations could benefit data fusion in two ways. Firstly, they may facilitate the exploitation of external, contextual information in ways that biases the analysis of low-level feature vectors. Secondly, semantic representations may facilitate the exploitation of fusion-related outcomes by providing a set of stable, symbolic atoms that align themselves with the conceptual infrastructure of the domain of discourse. The ITA Semantically-Mediated Data Fusion initiative aims to evaluate the contribution of semantic technologies to data fusion using a combination of real-world datasets, pattern recognition techniques and domain ontologies.
Semantic Integration and Interoperability
Semantic integration and interoperability are important capabilities for coalition forces. Coalition operations will typically involve the exploitation and exchange of semantically heterogeneous information, especially when the operational context demands close cooperation with non-military agencies (e.g. diplomatic, humanitarian and civil authorities). The concern is that even in situations where the physical transfer of information is supported by network infrastructures; the meaning of information content may be lost or distorted as it traverses organizational, national and cultural boundaries. The focus of our research in respect of the ITA Semantic Integration and Interoperability initiative is to investigate approaches to information exchange that maximally exploit the potential of the Semantic Web to provide a framework for the consensual interpretations of entities, events and actions across force elements and between coalition partners. The ultimate aim is to provide a foundation for coalition inter-operability, enabling semantic integration with respect to both digital datalink networks and unstructured, non-military information sources.
Collaborative Planning and Plan Representation
The aim of the Collaborative Planning and Plan Enrichment initiative is to investigate a number of representational issues that emerge in coalition planning contexts. In particular, the project aims to understand the representational requirements of plans, especially with respect to the representation of critical information (e.g. command intent) that may influence the ability (or propensity) of agents to understand, accept and/or implement a plan. Key research issues include (but are not necessarily limited to) an analysis of the factors that may undermine shared understanding in coalition planning contexts, an analysis of the factors that influence the acceptability or usability of a coalition plan, and an analysis of optimal modes of communicating plan-relevant information in a heterogeneous agent environment.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- ps02v
- tdh
- Peter Houghton
- db06v
- dm07v
- Jim Hendler
- Cheryl Giammanco
- Ali Bahrami
- Michael Dorneich
- Jie Bao
- Katia Sycara
Partners
- IBM United Kingdom Limited
- Defence Science and Technology Laboratory [dstl]
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- U.S. Army Research Laboratory
- Honeywell
- Boeing
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Applied Research Associates
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2006-2009
- Themes:
- e-Defence, Web Science, Knowledge Technologies, Semantic Web
- Funding:
- Ministry of Defence
OntoMediate is a 2.5 year research project, funded by the UK Ministry of Defence as part of the Data and Information Fusion Defence Technology Centre (DIF DTC) initiative. The project focuses on the creation of information brokerage services that incorporate ontology mediation techniques as the basis for meaning-preserving modes of information exchange between diverse user communities. Part of the research effort associated with the project aims to explore the extent to which collaborative environments can be used to support the identification of inter-relationships between ontologies. Such an approach seeks to surmount traditional barriers to information exchange by providing a collaborative framework for the identification of ontology alignments and the active translation of information content. The ultimate goal of the project is to facilitate a common understanding of information content as a precursor to better modes of agent collaboration, communication and shared situation awareness.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- ha
- gc3
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2004-2006
- Themes:
- Knowledge Technologies, e-Defence, Semantic Web
- Funding:
- Ministry of Defence
Situation awareness is a critical success factor in military operations. Even when the operational context is not directly adversarial, as is the case in most humanitarian and peace-keeping missions, awareness of the temporal unfolding of events, the strategic displacement of military assets and the ability to anticipate the actions of other (sometimes competing) agencies, all serve to underpin the successful realization of operational objectives. The need for improved situation awareness is particularly important when one considers the increasingly sophisticated technological backdrop against which military operations are typically undertaken. The advent of network-enabled capabilities (NEC) and the growth of the internet as a medium for information dissemination, affords great opportunities for situation awareness, but it also presents some relatively new and distinct challenges. One challenge relates to the need to distinguish relevant information from background noise (the concern here is that highly relevant information may be swamped by less relevant information). Another concern relates to the rate of information dissemination in todayââ¬â¢s media-intensive environment. The concern here is that the dynamics of the situation picture may warrant rapid switching between different problem-solving goals. When goal switching is mandated by changing operational commitments then different subsets of information will need to be dynamically integrated or aggregated to support changing situation awareness concerns.
AKTiveSA is a 3 year project that forms part of the Data and Information Fusion Defence Technology Centre (DIF DTC) initiative. Its aim is to explore knowledge-based approaches to information fusion and enhanced situation awareness in military operational contexts other than war (MOOTW), specifically humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. As part of the effort to improve situation awareness, AKTiveSA exploits domain ontologies that enhance information exchange and inter-operability between diverse agencies and user communities (e.g. NGOs, UN agencies, coalition forces, government departments, etc). It also introduces the idea of semantic filters that provide filtered views of the situation picture to support task-relevant information processing. Technological components, called knowledge monitors, support situation awareness by actively monitoring the situation picture for events that impact on current plans or problem-solving goals. These components are defined in terms of semantic queries that execute as background processes, constantly monitoring the totality of the information space and alerting users to relevant changes via a variety of output formats, e.g. emails, RSS, SMS, etc. AKTiveSA also devotes considerable attention to user interface design issues and this is reflected in the development of the AKTiveSA Technical Demonstrator System (TDS), a sophisticated user interface that combines 3-D visualization components with novel ontology browsing and navigation techniques. The scientific and technological outcomes of the AKTiveSA project support other e-Defence research initiatives within the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. These include the SEMIOTIKS initiative, which focuses on information extraction, knowledge processing and information visualization; and the MIMEX initiative, which concentrates on situation awareness enhancement and information exploitation in hostile information environments.
Primary investigators
Secondary investigators
- ar5
- ps02v
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group