Alan Dix - research topics

mobile users and mobile interfaces

interfaces and infrastructure for mobile multimedia applications

This work was funded by EPSRC under the MNA Program. Based on previous work at both sites, in particular the MOST and GUIDE projects at Lanacaster, Alan's previous writings on mobile interfaces and his work with Devina Ramduny on CSCW architectures.

Mobility is itself quite a broad concept:

However, these can all be seen as a broader research agenda:

the design of appropriate computational environments for people: wherever they are, whoever they meet, whatever they are doing

User interface issues include:

Many of these are also issues for stand-alone or distributed systems anyway, but mobility adds extra problems or opportunities. For example, feedback becomes increasingly problematic when wireless links are unreliable. On the other hand, mobile devices - because they move with you, may have more contextual information available - where you are (GPS), perhaps who you are meeting.

The user-interface behaviour is intimately related to system architecture, especially time related aspects (feedback and feedthrough). Other architectural and programming issues are only significant when they go wrong!

Some architectural issues include:

See also Alan's research topics pages on time, web architectures and versioning in CSCW

 


Some relevant papers (incomplete)

Papers focused centrally on mobility and context

Related architectures papers (see also web architectures pages)

Papers on versioning for mobile and distributed working (see also versioning pages)

Papers about temporal feedback/feedthrough issues (see also time pages)

 


maintained by Alan Dix