Lorcan Coyle's Home on Tinterweb

My H-Index is currently 11 according to Google Scholar (as at 13th November 2008). Here is the list of my 11 highest cited papers, each of which has at least 11 citations:

35: An Assessment of Case-Based Reasoning for Spam Filtering
30: A Case-Based Technique for Tracking Concept Drift in Spam Filtering
24: Representing Similarity for CBR in XML
20: Improving Recommendation Ranking by Learning Personal Feature Weights
19: Representing Cases for CBR in XML
16: Hybridising events and knowledge as a basis for building autonomic systems
14: Construct—a decentralised context infrastructure for ubiquitous computing environments
13: Demonstrating Darwinian Evolution Using Swarm
12: FIONN: A Framework for Developing CBR Systems
12: Sensor fusion-based middleware for assisted living
12: A Case-Based Personal Travel Assistant for Elaborating User Requirements and Assessing Offers

The link behind the number gives the number's source. Due to fluctuations in the way Google Scholar arranges documents these numbers may vary slightly. For the record, my joint 12th highest cited papers are Exploiting Re-ranking Information in a Case-Based Personal Travel Assistant with 8 citations and Integrating Multiple Contexts and Ontologies in a Pervasive Computing Framework with 8 citations.

Poornima Hanumara developed the Near Dear project as her ODCSSS project in summer of 2008 under the supervision of Lorcan Coyle. The original project title was Connecting Families by Sharing the Minutiae of their Lives - it called for an ambient/pervasive/ubiquitous technology for helping family members keep in touch with each other using micro-blogging tools (e.g., using Twitter or Jaiku). Originally we looked at using Nabaztags (thanks Matt), but eventually settled on using Chumbys.

The motivation for Near Dear was that members of a family have different degrees of familiarity and comfort with using technology. While some members of the family do not have access to a computer very often and are not familiar with micro-blogging, for others Internet is the main medium for keeping-in-touch. Near Dear bridges this gap by using Chumby, which sits in an accessible place at home and makes microblogging easy and convenient for computer-novices. We completed a small user study shows that the Near Dear widget is intuitive and serves the purpose of making Twittering more convenient. The Near Dear Chumby widget was released as a beta on the Chumby Network in July 2008 and is available to install on any Chumby. The project is documented on the Near Dear website. The project is being maintained and if anyone wants to collaborate on it going forward we'd love to hear from you :-)

In the News

Before leaving Texas, Pegasus News ran an article on Poornima's success at winning a place in ODCSSS 2008 and wished her luck. During the project, one of the Dublin newspapers, the Herald, wrote an article on Near Dear at an early stage of the project's development when we were playing with Nabaztags. The project was also mentioned in a DCU news release after the mid-term review day, and in science.ie, a popular Irish science website.

Further Information

Pictured below is Poornima being presented with a Hamilton silver coin, her prize for best report in 2008 (the award was presented by one of the heads of ODCSSS, Dr. Aaron Quigley). Poornima's final report was published as a UCD technical report and is available for download here. She still maintains a blog that contains detailed progress of her project. There are more images from ODCSSS 2008 on Flickr . If you are interested in following up on this work or need further information contact Lorcan.

Lost and Found was a collaboration between Science and Art that ran two sell-out shows at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in August 2007. The goal of the project was to engage children in the potential of technology. Lost and Found followed brought its audience and participants on a journey through four magical realms. Sensor technology is used to follow the location and movements of a dancer and map these to the projected visuals and sounds, and through these a story evolves. Active audience participation was required to move the story between the different realms, and children were invited on stage individually and in groups as the show progressed.

The Technology Behind Lost and Found

Lost and found included a diverse set of technologies, including sensor systems based on pressure pads, microprocessor programming to interpret sensor readings from pressure pad sensors, processing to recognise and deal with patterns in behaviour, and flash animation to drive the display.

The Cast

• Paddy Nixon oversaw the project.
• Tara Carrigy came up with the vision and produced the show.
• Megan Kennedy was the dancer/choreographer.
• Jo Timmons directed Lost and Found.
• Lorcan Coyle headed the technology team and managed the technology interfaces.
• Emerson Loureiro worked on the interface and built the technology to react to the dancers' movements.
• Hui Zhang was responsible for the electronics behind the sensor system.

Press

Reviews of the show appeared in the Irish Times and some of UCD's internal publications. An incomplete list is here:

• The Irish Times: Science and dance move step closer at Kilkenny festival - August 8th 2007
• Silicon Republic: UCD IT scientists talk through their arts - August 14th 2007 (great title!)
• UCD Research's Press Release
• UCD's Press Release
• An Article on the show is on the back page of UCD Today in October 2007

I recently ordered 5 chumbys from www.international-orders.com. (Delivery was prompt, thanks International-Orders.com.)
The Chumby is great, it's basically a €200 alarm clock. It uses your WiFi to connect to the web and you can install all kinds of widgets for it. I'm mostly using it to read the news in bed in the morning, keep up with my google calendars, facebook status (pictured below), show visitors my facebook photo albums, subscribe to Dilbert, ICANHAZCHEEZEBURGER, PhD Comics, and watch webcams. You can even subscribe to podcasts! I might write some new widgets for it if I have the time, I'd like to see surf forecasts, more newspapers, and tv guides on it perhaps... (there's a virtual view of my Chumby here).

oh, it also serves as an alarm clock... worth every penny... maybe ;-)

Project Summary

The ReFInDer system was a final year project undertaken by Colin Smith under the supervision of Lorcan Coyle. The aim of the project was to design and implement a memory aid using RFID technology. This memory aid takes the form a lost and found application. The system records data about user's interactions with everyday objects, such as a wallet or phone, and presents the user with this data through a lost and found website.

Monkey Bread Software produce a really nice piece of freeware Mac OSX software called
CombinePDFs that allows you to merge or combine PDFs into a single document. It's easy to work with and does exactly what it says on the tin. Thanks Monkey Bread Software :-)

Simon Peyton Jones has a presentation on how to write a great research paper. He has some great suggestions, which I've summarised here

Infosthetics posted during the week about a Google vanity ring (there's a video here)... It's a little ring with an LCD display that shows how many hits the wearer gets on a Google vanity search... Is this the ultimate yuppy nerd toy? A nice spin-off that I know many academic-types would love would be a publish or perish citation count ring... ;-)

Lawrence Saul posted a great page on his minimalist blog here which describes how Jack Bauer writes academic papers. From the page: "To commemorate the Twenty Fourth Annual International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-07), the FOX Network has decided to launch a new spin-off series in prime time." (thanks P.)

Here's a really cool video made by Michael Welsh's group at Kansas State University. It's an excellently put together video and a very clear illustration of what Web 2.0 means.