Research

In brief:

Restricting access to shared data and services through the employment of context.

For instance, use of a service could be restricted to those within a particular building or perhaps only be available between set times and dates.

More Detail:

The proliferation of sensor equipped devices (such as the iPhone and HTC series) has increased tremendously in recent years, with recent estimates suggesting numbers well exceeding four billion worldwide. Examples of sensors in wide use today are GPS (for identifying location) and the accelerometer (which allow you to identify acceleration and direction of movement).

This growth in availability and public understanding opens the way for a variety of new applications and services, but at the same time creates new concerns over privacy and access control.

My research is concerned with designing a scalable framework for the distribution of data based on context (obtained via sensors). Examples of applications using this framework could be a time and location dependent tourist service or an application for project collaboration between a group of geographically co-located individuals.

It is hoped that this framework will allow individuals and companies to quickly and easily distribute data and provide services to friends, colleagues and customers, whilst ensuring that privacy and access control standards are maintained through the specification of powerful contextual conditions.