Interim report for the first year

Changes to circumstances

There have been three changes to my circumstances since I applied for the Fellowship, shortly before retiring from the University of Kent:

(1)

I have taken a two-day-a-week post as Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. The work involves pursuing my own research, most of which corresponds to my original Leverhulme application, and helping younger members of staff. This has been a boost to my research, mainly because of the closer contact with other researchers. It will also eliminate some of the costs that I specified when applying for my Fellowship, since some facilities are provided by the University. (Since this employment has been a major change, I informed Leverhulme before starting it: the Trust kindly agreed to continue the Fellowship unchanged.)

(2)

My research group at the University of Kent has dispersed: to Germany, to the Open University and, in my case, to Exeter. Therefore I have not, as previously planned, been travelling regularly back to the University of Kent.

(3)

I have been made an honorary Visiting Professor at Southampton University. My work with them has so far averaged 1-2 days per month, and has provided valuable contacts.

Overall I believe that these changes will:

(a)

improve my research productivity, since the positives outweigh the negative effect of the dispersal of the Kent group.

(b)

lead to my returning some money at the end of the Fellowship, since certain costs are less.

The research

The research is, as planned, concerned with providing information for mobile users with hand-held computers (or phones). The aim is to provide information according to the user's current context: location, weather, time-of-day, etc. My focus has moved since coming to Exeter. This is partly because of fruitful collaboration with a new colleague, Dr. Gareth Jones, and because of results from B.J. Rhodes at MIT. The work is now much more focussed to how the information is retrieved.

I have produced two joint papers with Dr. Jones, both to be published in Personal Technologies (copies attached), together with a joint poster presented at SIGIR 2000. I have also produced, jointly with authors from Xerox, MIT, University of Oslo, and Motorola, a more general paper on the future of context-aware applications. This has been submitted to Communications of the ACM.

In addition I have produced a hypertext paper in collaboration with my Southampton colleagues. This has been published (the paper was rated as joint best at the conference where it was presented), but is only indirectly related to my planned Leverhulme work; it is now being re-published in a volume of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

The Leverhulme Fellowship provides for employing a research assistant. We spent about a fifth of the money allocated on employing a summer student. The results were, I am afraid, disappointing, though the student tried hard. I am just proceeding with the employment of a much better qualified person -- indeed quite a catch it appears -- and am hoping for a lot more future fruit.

Web site

The web site giving further information about the research is: Context-aware project site

Overall

I expect you often hear this, but I will say it: my research has blossomed since I `retired'. This is largely because research is my sole focus. I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for helping make this happen.

Peter Brown, January 2001