Marek Bell
Research Interests: Summary
I successfully passed my PhD viva in February, 2007. My PhD was an investigation into the reasons why ubicomp has failed to fulfil earlier promises to deliver context-aware, intelligent, adaptive mobile systems. Modern mobile hardware can be small, unobtrusive, powerful, and capable of sensing much of its surrounding context. Yet, despite this, the vast majority of mobile software remains blind to a large amount of context information that could potentially be gathered through sensors, or from information about the user already available on the device itself. By failing to make use of context information, mobile systems are unable to behave appropriately in the many environments they are used in, which often forces a user to alter his or her behaviour to work around the inflexible software. This often results in users feeling uncomfortable when using mobile devices in public, as their behaviour may appear strange to others. In turn, this may further hinder the uptake of mobile systems. My PhD work investigated the reasons why mobile software is not generally more context-aware and flexible, and lead to the development of a large amount of infrastructure to support the development of mobile software that does have these capabilities. By providing guidelines for the development of context-aware mobile systems, and through the implementation of supporting infrastructure, my work aims to further the development and uptake of context-aware mobile systems. |