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Next CHAI Seminar

Pervasive Personalisation of Location Information: Personalised Context Ontology
William Niu

Wed 09 July 11:00AM

Seminar Details

edit Honours Projects - 2008

There is a broad range of Honours projects available within CHAI. If you look at the people and projects pages, you should get a sense of the things we have done and are doing now. You are also sure to enjoy reading some of our publications. To make the best of your honours year, it will be important to tailor the actual project to your skills, interests and aspirations: so it is a good idea to discuss potential projects with the potential supervisors.


Here are some examples of projects that fit the scope of the summer scholarships:

  • Customisation and Context Awareness projects will be based around the major Multi-Channel Content Delivery research project of the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre (CRC). The CRC is due to commence operation in the first quarter of 2008 and the student will be expected to work closely with the research project team. The project will explore customisation of on-line content, such as web content, using user context information. Context information can include the users geo-location (eg from GPS and/or other location sensors), the state of the channel between the content server and the user (eg latency, bandwidth), the type of user device (eg PC, PDA, mobile phone etc), and any other information that can be sensed or inferred (eg the user is currently driving a car).
  • Surface computing research looks to a future when there will be many computers and interfaces embedded in the environment. Our Cruiser framework provides a plugin architecture for creating new ways to interact and Focus explores new ways to think about filesystem interaction while Keep In Touch explores appliance computing devices in the environment. The scope of summer projects makes it possible to explore a new application, creating a new interaction primitive and/or conducting user studies to evaluate these. These projects require a strong C++ foundation.
  • Context-aware computing makes use of a person's context, including their location and current activities. Our Locator tracks people in the SIT building and beyond. Several projects are available to enhance it, for example integrating the MIT PlaceLab system, exploiting historical data to model activity and create applications. A knowledge of Python would be helpful for these projects.
  • Teaching systems are a key area of our research, both in their own right and as testbeds for purer technological research. We have projects that explore data mining on learning data, mirrors on learner models and activities explores new ways to exploit the huge amounts of learning data to improve learning and Reflect aims to support long term learning. A solid technical background is important for these and AI knowledge is helpful.
  • Another important part of our research is to create effective tools that can support all these classes of projects. For example, Personis is the foundation modelling tool, Mecureo automatically builds lightweight ontologies, ONCOR supports ontological reasoning, SIV is a visualisation framework, TadaEd is a data mining environment. Each offers possibilities for new ways to extend the tools and to create new applications using them. These require a strong technical background: Python or Java are required.

In general, CHAI research aims to create elegant theories and technical solutions to real world problems in areas such as health and education, in their broadest sense. There is also potential for industry involvement, especially with partners in the new Smart Services CRC.


If you have your own ideas of a pervasive or interface project, come and discuss how that might link with one of these.

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