My Research Interests

by Dr James Kadirire — last modified Thursday Apr 6, 2006 09:31


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My research interests are:

ATM and IP Multicasting, routing and resource scheduling
Mobile Systems/Pervasive Computing/Ad Hoc Wireless Networks
Object Oriented (OO) software systems
Data communications/networking
Multimedia and quality of service issues in networking

Since I joined Anglia Ruskin University, Ultralab in May 2002, I have worked on the m-Learning pan-European research project. The m-Learning project was aimed at encouraging disaffected youths in the age range of 16-24 years, to improve their literacy and numeracy skills via the use of mobile devices. This was a project with essentially 5 partners, i.e. The Learning and Skills Development Agency (LSDA) in England, Corsorzio Centro Di Recerca in Matematica Pura Ed Applicata (CRMPA) in Italy, Cambridge Training and Development Ltd (CTAD) in England, Lecando in Sweden and APU, Ultralab in England, scheduled to run for 3 years. My role in this was that of designing and developing the software in JAVA (JSPS, JAVA SERVLETS), ORACLE DATABASE AND HTML, on a Mac OS X 10.x.x and Windows 2000 platform, to run on a server as well as on the actual mobile devices that would be used to access this server. The devices that we used at Anglia Ruskin University, Ultralab were an O2 XDA, a Handspring TREO 270, PALM TUNGSTEN T, an Orange SPV Smartphone and a Nokia 9210 Communicator. The main focus of Ultralab and hence myself, was that of designing and developing a microportal which had functionalities like chatting, sms messaging, a user portal and links to other learning materials developed by the other partners. A microportal is a small version of a portal i.e. a web-based application that commonly provides personalisation, single-sign-on, and content aggregation from different sources, and hosts the presentation layer of information systems. I wrote a research paper on some of the aspects of this research, i.e.

Learning with mobile devices - a microportal Design Experience,
presented at the 3rd International Conference on Multimedia and Information & Communication Technologies in Education (m-ICTE2005) 7th-10th June 2005, Caceres, Spain,
published by FORMATEX, in Recent Research Developments in Learning Technologies, Volume 2, pages 792-797.

I also worked on an SMS research project called Utxt2, for sending and receiving SMS messages. With millions of mobile phones in use today, the market for services aimed at mobile users is huge and I decided to use an open source SMS/WAP gateway called kannel). The idea of SMS stickies was based on some of the work previously done in the lab, but the research was significantly different in the methods used, not least, the use of the internal open source SMS/WAP server, the Oracle database and the technology used, i.e. Java as opposed to flash. This research resulted in a research paper i.e. The short message service (SMS) for schools/conferences, which was

presented at the 3rd International Conference on Multimedia and Information & Communication Technologies in Education (m-ICTE2005), 7th-10th June 2005, Caceres, Spain, and
published by FORMATEX, in Recent Research Developments in Learning Technologies, Volume 2, pages 856-859.

SMS to EMAIL
This application allows anyone with a GSM phone to send an SMS message to any recipient with a valid email address. The format of the messages should be: em emailaddress message e.g. em james@ultralab.net Hello James ...bla bla bla This would take the sms message "Hello James ...bla bla bla" and convert it to an email which would then be sent to James' email address. This can be quite useful if one needs to email someone, but hasn't got an email capable phone. The good thing is that it only costs the price of an SMS message agreed with one's own mobile service operator. This uses the java mail API as well as java servlets.
SMS to Student's Portfolio
This allows Ultraversity student's to send themselves SMS messages which will then be saved in their student portfolio or work space, based on their student identifier.
SMS stickies
This is an application which can be used in schools for students to send SMS comments/messages to their teacher or other students or at company/university serminars or presentations or conferences for the audiences to interact with the speaker by sending sms messages. The application has been developed primarily in Java Servlets using an Oracle (9i and 10g) database on a Redhat Enterprise 3.0/4.0 Linux/Windows 2000/XP/Mac OS X platform. The idea of using SMS stickies has been used in another application previously developed in the lab, which uses Flash and an external commercial SMS service provider. The application receives the SMS(s) and stores them in the Oracle database. It then adds other formatting information to allow the sms to be displayed on the computer screen as small "posted notes" or stickies, which can be tiled or cascaded or arranged in any order. The stickies or small frames are colour coded and fade their colours from a bright yellow to gray depending on how long they have been displayed. The idea of starting as bright yellow came from the ubiquitous use of yellow posted notes in many organisations. They can be saved with state information, and when the application is started again, the position, size and colour of the stickies is preserved. This idea of saving the state information is similar to what desktop PCs or laptops/notebooks do when they go into sleep or hibernation mode when they are shut down. When being used in earnest, a data projector is connected to the computer, say a laptop, and then the stickies will be projected onto a large screen which everyone can see. This has also been developed to run as a Java Applet.
Victoria and Albert Museum Nottinghill Carnival Picture Galary
I developed a website for the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) funded by Culture Online and Channel 4, to commemorate 40 years of the Nottinghill Carnival, as part of the Every Object Tells a Story project, which was being run by another group in the lab. Basically, the V&A selected a picture for each year of the Notttinghill Carnival going back 40 years and hung them in their picture gallery. When visitors are viewing the pictures and other artifacts in the museum, they can text/sms their comments about a particular picture to a number pinned on the picture. My application uses an internal to Anglia Ruskin University, Ultralab, SMS server/gateway, which is an open source server by kannel). It accepts incoming text messages and lists them alongside the picture on the website. The visitors can then walk down the end of the hall and see their comments on the website. The application was developed in Java/JSPs/Servlets, html, using Oracle 10g as the database on a Redhat Linux Enterprise 3.0/4.0SE server. The website can be viewed at Nottinghill Pictures