Smart Guidance

Supervisor: Dr Usman Naeem

Research group(s): Cognitive Science

In today’s fast paced environment, we are confronted with information overload, stress, and health issues. This is something that is prevalent within all walks of life, whether you are an employee in a business or a student at an academic institution. Providing some form of intelligent guidance in a user’s daily life given the recognition of contextual elements (e.g. time, location, weather) is seen as a promising solution. Smartphones are ubiquitous devices that have sensing capabilities that make it possible to extract rich contextual information. This is significant, as being aware of the user’s surroundings allows potential applications to construct a narrative about the user’s activities and needs. This can lead to the development of responsive applications that are able to adapt and provide meaningful guidance to support the user’s daily decision making. This project will develop novel techniques to construct contextual narratives given the information captured from both the physical (such as Accelerometer, GPS, Bluetooth, Gyroscope) and virtual sensors (such as application usage) of a smartphone. The project will also need to consider challenges such as user privacy.