Present research activities
My current research, which has been presented at major international conferences and published by internationally recognised journals, is in the areas of adaptive, intelligent hypermedia, assistive learning technologies for the deaf community and the personalisation of advanced learning technologies. Each of these areas is now briefly described.Adaptive, intelligent hypermedia, is an area of research that aims to enhance the functionality of hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web by making the user interaction process personalisable. The approach taken is to endow hypermedia systems with personalisation and machine learning adaptation features, which may be initiated by the users or, by the system itself. These features utilise knowledge provided by (or captured about) specific users to intelligently tailor the information and the links presented to users. By applying the knowledge they amass , such systems can support users in navigating to information by limiting the options for traversal to information units, suggesting relevant links to follow and providing additional information on links and information units. Adaptive, intelligent hypermedia systems are assumed to be useful in knowledge acquisition activities such as learning, where users have different information-seeking goals, histories and preferences. Research undertaken has led to the several journal publications and the first published formal model and language specification for personalisable, adaptive hypermedia.
Assistive learning technologies for the deaf community is a relatively new research area that aims to devise interactive systems and technologies to support the learning and teaching of deaf and hearing impaired students. Sign languages are combinations of hand and body movements together with facial expressions used to communicate without sound. Such languages enable deaf and hearing impaired people to communicate. In an educational context both spoken and printed information can be translated into pictorial representations to enable students to have equal access to it. Such pictorial representations of the vocabulary of sign languages are called sign writing systems and research is also conducted into the development of animated avatars and video translation systems of signers.
Increasingly technologies such as the World Wide Web, Instant Messaging, and chat systems are being used for teaching and to foster and direct communications in educational contexts. My research aims to devise interactive systems for the teaching of sign languages and writing systems for the deaf using these technologies. Research recently undertaken has led to the development of two novel interactive systems, Mak-Messenger and Finger-Chat, specifically designed to assist in the teaching of signed languages. Mak-Messenger is an Instant Messaging application designed for the teaching of the Makatron sign writing vocabulary, the most popular sign writing system un the UK, through means of interactive communication. The Finger-Chat system is an interactive system designed to support the teaching of fingerspelling alphabets. The system allows users to communicate with each other using multiple versions of pictorial representations of fingerspelling and written English. These systems were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, August 30th 2004, Joensuu, Finland.
Personalisation of advanced learning technologies is an area of research that focuses on ownership transfer via personalisation as a value-adding strategy for advanced learning technology. This research aims to enhance interactive learning systems with features that enable the personalisation of the interactions between users and electronic learning materials such as hyper-documents. Students perform many personalisation actions when interacting with paper-based learning materials including: selective reading; annotation; content insertion and deletion and book marking. Performing these actions on electronic learning materials is difficult because the student often has little or no means of claiming ownership of the material or of personalising it. Research conducted has resulted in a framework and system for the personalisation of hyper-documents being devised. This framework and associated system aims to make available to students features that allow them to interact with hyper-documents in a manner much closer to that of owners of paper-based ones, while still benefiting from the ability to traverse contextual links and to exploit the computational environment in which the material is embedded.
Previous Research Activities
My PhD dissertation entitled "A Formal Approach to Personalisable, Adaptive Hyperlink based systems" was completed in March 2000, examined in July 2000 and I graduated in September 2000. This dissertation contributed a novel abstract approach to the formal characterisation of the interaction process which takes place between the users of a hyperlink-based system and the system itself.This research addresses the issue of how hyperlink-based systems can be endowed with features that enable the personalisation and adaptation of the interaction process. This research also addresses the specific issue of how to characterise precisely the emergent properties of such systems. The approach is unique in formally modelling a rich set of abstract user-initiated actions that enable individual users to come closer to satisfying their specific, and often dynamic, information retrieval goals.