Research projects in Information Technology

Empirical studies in Information Visualisation research have become more commonplace in the past two to three decades. While formerly the research focus was primarily on utilising the power of novel technologies for presenting data and information in innovative ways, perspectives have changed over time so that evaluating the worth of visualisations (for user, for task, for context) is now considered a crucial stage of the research process.

Situation-awareness is the key to enabling intelligent IoT applications. Situation reasoning is used to aggregate multiple contextual information from physical and social sensors using reasoning methods, and convert them into useful high-level knowledge, i.e. situational intelligence. 

Recent advances in technology mean we can now reappraise the exploration of the past as a future-aligned endeavour. The definition of the ‘past’ here is broad; the reconstruction of a bygone world may derive from relatively recent written texts or photographic archives, from centuries old remains uncovered in archaeological excavations, or even far back in ‘deep time’, to the long-vanished ecologies evidenced in the fossil record.

This project will explore the use of Mixed-Reality (MR) headset technology to support people in performing maintenance tasks in complex environments, where the nature of the work involves close inspection of and interaction with mechanical devices.  Examples might include aircraft maintenance or other complex workshop environments.  We term work in such situations as "physically embedded" in that the nature of the workflow and the information and data associated with the work is closely tied to the physical machinery.  Such maintenance support requires providing the worker with timely and…

Visualisation can help unravelling the complex urban fabrics that form our cities. Yet there is a critical need to bridge the gap between the flood of urban data and the capacity of decision makers to integrate that data into effective and informed decisions.

Advanced strongly typed languages like Haskell and emerging type systems like refinement types (as implemented in Liquid Haskell) offer strong guarantees about the correctness of programs.  However, when type errors occur it can be difficult for programmers to understand their cause.  Such errors are particularly confusing for people learning the language.  The situation is not helped by the cryptic error messages often produced by compilers.

We live and work in a world of complex relationships between data, systems, knowledge, people, documents, biology, software, society, politics, commerce and so on.  We can model these relationships as networks or graphs in the hope of reasoning about them - but the tools that we have for understanding such network structured data (whether algorithmic analytics or visualisation tools) remain crude.  Emerging display and interaction devices such as augmented and virtual reality headsets offer new ways to visualise and interact with data in the world around us rather than on screens.  This…

When designing user interfaces, developers want to be able to position objects in a structured way such that controls are clear and neat.  In the past, absolute positioning and grids have been used for this purpose.  However, such rigid layout doesn’t now allow adaptive layout for interfaces that run on a variety of screen sizes or that need different control sizes due to application being internationalised into foreign languages.  For this reason, Apple introduced constraint-based GUI layout under the name Auto Layout for iOS developers.  With…

Digital versions of technical documents, like textbooks and academic papers, are usually produced as static PDF files. Research has shown that working with these on electronic devices is frustrating and inefficient, partly because people do not read such documents in a linear fashion as they do novels.