Paul Duff
Research Interests: Summary
Paul Duff is a researcher and PhD student at the University of Bristol, currently in the late stages of writing up his PhD thesis. The subject of his thesis is the auto-calibration of ultrasonic positioning systems. As mobile and wearable technology has evolved, an increasing need for indoor positioning has arisen. In particular, the use of ultrasonic positioning systems provides a cheap way to fulfil this need. However, existing systems are often expensive and difficult to configure, involving a time-consuming manual survey of the space they are to be used in. The motivation behind research in the Wearable Computing group at Bristol is to make these systems cheaper and easier to use, and to make them more accessible to people including non-engineers. Paul’s thesis describes algorithms to compute the position of ultrasonic transmitters using easily retrieved sets of distance readings. This eases the calibration of positioning systems at the initial setup stage, and eliminates the possibility of errors in taking manual measurements. One of these algorithms was integrated with the Equator Component Toolkit (ECT), and published in collaboration with the RCA in the Ubicomp 2005 conference. Other work has been published in ISWC and the IEEE Pervasive Computing journal. Paul’s other research interests include robotics, and he is currently collaborating with the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at the University of the West of England on a located media project. Paul is also a Director of SensaGest Ltd, a company set up to research and market accessible sensor-based solutions to the healthcare industry. |