Speaker: Dr Keith Cheverst, Lancaster University

Speaker bio:
Dr Keith Cheverst is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing,
Lancaster University. In the mid to late 90s, Keith's research focused on
the development of middleware services and graphical user interface
approaches to support the design and development of distributed groupware
applications capable of adapting to the fluctuating levels of connectivity
inherent in mobile environments. He completed my PhD thesis in 1999 on the
"Development of a Group Service to Support Collaborative Mobile Groupware".
While designing and evaluating the context-aware GUIDE system (a system
developed to support tourists using mobile technologies), he extended his
area of focus to include the issues that arise when developing interactive
systems capable of adapting to other forms of context, e.g. changes in a
user's location. He has investigated a variety of concepts relating to such
context-aware behaviour, e.g. push vs. pull, the implications of sharing
context to support social navigation and the potential of using context
history and ML based approaches to support proactive adaptation in so called
'intelligent' environments while maintaining appropriate levels of
visibility and system transparency.

He has explored these issues within a range of application domains
(including tourism, the community care domain and the office/work domain)
and using ubiquitous as well as mobile technologies. Currently, as part of
the EPSRC funded CASIDE project (www.caside.lancs.ac.uk) he is particularly
interested in developing, using user-centered development approaches,
situated display based systems to support coordination and notions of
community (in sensitive or semi-wild settings) that can be used (and
studied) 'in place' over an extended or longitudinal period of time.