ODCSSS 2006 Quote

“In previous academic areas challenges have proved trivial and in bluntness, googleable. I enjoyed working in new fields that I did not understand while creating new solutions for unique problems. I also enjoyed having a tangible project complete to demonstrate.”

-ODCSSS 2006 Student

Using social networks to build the intelligent desktop

Context-aware systems are intended to let computers make use of "incidental" information to improve the way they offer services. The best-known example is a location-aware service that might, for example, use your location to change the order of results in a search, so that when you search for "coffee shop" on your mobile phone you get back results starting with the coffee shop nearest to where you are at the moment. In the same way we can use information from sensors, from electronic sources such as diaries, e-mail messages and the like to generate a model of a user's needs and intentions, and use this to make services more responsive and personal.

Some of the best context information comes from services we use all the time: diaries and e-mail, word processors and other local applications, but also web browsers and (increasingly) social network sites such as Facebook. All these services can provide us with information about who is connected to whom, in terms of which activities. We can imagine tying all these applications together, so that (for example) having a "due date" for a group assignment in your diary automatically puts the files you need to edit and and the web sites you can refer to straight onto your desktop, and prioritises e-mails and instant messages from other people involved in the same assignment.

The goal of this project is to realise this "intelligent desktop" service using Construct, a software platform we've been developing within SRG for the past four years. We will wrap-up desktop and web applications within Construct, making users' social connections and task information available and using them to build the intelligent desktop. This will let us demonstrate the value of context-aware systems in a very visual and easily-grasped way.

The ideal student will have a knowledge of Java and an interest in user interfaces, pervasive computing and social networks.

Joëlle Coutaz, James Crowley, Simon Dobson and David Garlan. Context is key. Communications of the ACM 48(3). March 2005.

Simon Dobson, Paddy Nixon, Lorcan Coyle, Steve Neely, Graeme Stevenson and Graham Williamson. Construct: an open source pervasive systems platform. In Proceedings of the 4th IEEE Consumer Communciations and Networking Conference, pages 1203–1204. IEEE Press. Las Vegas, NV. 2007.

Lorcan Coyle, Steve Neely, Graeme Stevenson, Mark Sullivan, Simon Dobson and Paddy Nixon. Sensor fusion-based middleware for smart homes. International Journal of Assistive Robotics and Mechatronics 8(2), pages 53–60. 2007.

Supervisors and Mentors:
Dr. Simon Dobson, Systems Research Group, UCD