Research

Research Statement

Projects

SINAIS: Sustainable Interaction with social Networks, context Awareness and Innovative Services

Sinais is a project funded by the Portuguese National Science Foundation under the framework of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program. This is a 3-year (2009-2012) research project led by Lab:USE at the University of Madeira in a consortium that involves Carnegie Mellon University, the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, the Portuguese Catholic University and several companies and government agencies.

Environmental sustainability is an increasingly important global issue. Quite simply, humans, particularly those in the western world, use resources far faster than they can be reproduced. This behavior is arguably a consequence of the seductive vision of “wellbeing” afforded, enabled and encouraged by industrialization; a vision based on personal ownership and mass consumption. A society expressing wellbeing in this way is intrinsically unsustainable and the research challenge addressed in this project is the creation and discovery of methods for people to achieve self-fulfillment sustainably. The work is situated in the multi-disciplinary field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and has three major foci: (i) use of sensors and machine learning to monitor and make sense of human behavior; (ii) application of motivational theory to intentionally influence people’s behavior; and (iii) use of a design mode of inquiry to address “wicked problems,” such as sustainability. The practical work takes place in two key areas of human activity: resource use in the home and transportation. A major theme throughout the project is the use of social networking services as an enabling technology.

WESP: Web Security and Privacy
WeSP is a three year project (2009-2012) funded by the FCT under the Carnegie Mellon - Portugal agreement, and is led by the University of Madeira. It also involves the University of Mihno, and Instituto Superior Técnico, a multi-disciplinary team from Carnegie Mellon University, and the Portuguese telecoms provider SAPO/Portugal Telecom.

1. Build tools to enable end-users to effectively control their privacy, focusing on social networking websites.
2. Create training material and automated systems to combat phishing, in the context of the web and location-based services.
3. Develop and evaluate mechanisms and design principles to help users decide whether or not they can trust different types of digital services.
4. Test automated approaches to detecting copyright breach and enforcement of copyright policies in the context of peer-to-peer networks and related services.
5. Use formal methods to validate policy languages developed in the context of online social networking.

Madeira Life
Today, most people regard the Internet as the foremost source of information in their lives. The Internet is where we make contact with both friends and organizations and where we arrange events and explore products and places. We book and reserve, buy and sell, real products and services on a daily basis. In this way, the Internet is evolving into an interface to the real world – how we manage more and more of our everyday tasks. Reflecting this trend, Madeira Life aims to develop a next generation access point and portal for Madeira. It will offer the residents of, and visitors to, Madeira a highly interactive social network delivered to mobile devices equipped with location-aware functionality and other contextual sensors. It will be a place to share photos, video, audio, and text. It will let users connect this content to where they are, where they live or where they visit, both as authors and audience members. It will let users read blogs that were written where they stand, let them hear stories told in the cafes and parks where they relax, see videos depicting the sites and attractions they explore, or shop smarter when informed by location-aware maps, advertisements and promotional offers.

Madeira Life is a three year project (2009-2012) funded through the Knowledge+ programme (+Conhecimento, part of Intervir+) that was initiated by the Vice-Presidency of the Regional Government of Madeira. This funding programme provides a research incentive for the industry in the Madeira region.

PhD Students

• Michelle Scott - 2009-onwards, SINAIS project.

Internships and visitors

• Augusto Esteves - Integrating sensing of home resource consumption with a social network (stepgreen) (UMa MSc student, 3 month summer internship, SINAIS project)
• Bernardo Reynolds - An investigation of microblogging practices (UMa MSc student, 3 month summer internship, Madeira Life project)
• Yolanda Vazquez-Alvarez - Interaction with audio gardens (3 month visit, PhD student at Unversity of Glasgow studying under Stephen Brewster)

Masters Students

• Augusto Esteves - Momentos - exploring embodied cognition for the design og tangible user interfaces (early title)
• Paulo Coelho - Sense-able Skin - a framework and toolkit for capacitative sensing applications (early title)
• Catia Sousa - Social Frabics (co-supervised with Valentina Nisi)- wearable computing for social interaction (early title)
• Hildegardo Noronha - (co-supervised with Vassilis Kostakos) - Hovercraft teleoperation - simulation and control system (early title)
• Jose Corujeira - (co-supervised with Vassilis Kostakos) - Hovercraft teleoperation - situation awareness and sensor design
• Nuno Santos - w-Contact: contact managment in the cloud (early title)

• Diego Rodridges - Social Circles: a 3D interface for a social network
• Roberto Sousa (co-supervised with Valentina Nisi) - Glaze: a visualisation framework for mobile devices
• Victor Abreu - BalanceBot: human performance of a dynamic teleoperation task (early title)