Mobile and Pervasive Home

Interests and activities

In the Mobile and Pervasive Computing group we are interested in understanding, designing, implementing and evaluating truly pervasive systems. As is common practice, we use the terms Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing in our work but we prefer Pervasive as it better conveys our ultimate vision: enabling and empowering services pervading our lives, our environments and our societies.

In our research, we develop fundamental theory, principles, design tools and methods by taking into account a range of technical, social and other factors. Within the field of Human-Computer Interaction, our interests and goals include understanding, designing, building and evaluating complex interactive systems involving many people and many technologies. Within the mobile and pervasive arena we need to ask such questions as:

• How do we design for usability when the human-computer interface is dispersed and interwoven throughout our environment?
• How can we understand and account for the web of influences amongst society, environment and technology?
• How do we interact successfully with and through devices and networks with many form factors?
• How do we design these devices, networks and services, in terms of both process and product?

We are particularly focused on the relationships between mobile and pervasive technologies, the urban built environment and people. We are also interested in making pervasive systems context-aware. Here, we are developing the fundamental theory for context-aware systems and reflecting this in working architectures and applications. We also investigate how pervasive environments can enhance and support people's creativity.

We have a range of resources, including mobile and wearable equipment and a well-equipped usability lab for experimenting. We regularly publish our research in conferences and journals, we have hosted a number of international conferences and workshops, and we have edited special issues of related journals.

In the last national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2008), our Computer Science research outputs at Bath were ranked third in the UK.