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Gregory O'Hare

Trinity College Dublin, School of Computer Science & Statistics, Faculty Member

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Professor Gregory O'Hare is a Professor of Computer Science at University College Dublin (UCD)
Phone: +353 1 716 2472
Address: Professor Gregory O'Hare,

Principal Investigator,
CLARITY: Centre for Sensor Web Technologies,

School of Computer Science & Informatics,
University College Dublin (UCD)
Belfield,
Dublin 4
Ireland

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Papers by Gregory O'Hare

Mote-based underwater sensor networks: opportunities, challenges, and guidelines

Telecommunication Systems, 2008

A Self-adaptive Unifying Mechanism For Autonomous Energy Management In Wireless Sensor Networks

Pedreiras, P. and Shin, I.(eds.). APRES 2012 Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Adaptive and Reconfigurable Embedded Systems Beijing, China April 16, 2012, 2012

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) deployments require the maintenance of hundreds of battery run sens... more Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) deployments require the maintenance of hundreds of battery run sensor motes which may be placed in hard to reach locations. As replacing or charging sensor batteries post deployment is both difficult and expensive, maintaining a WSN poses challenging issues. Power saving mechanisms aim to increase the life time of a WSN. This is achieved through the use of power saving techniques that aim to balance the overall usage within a network. A common approach to power saving is to cluster the ...

Dynamic Choice of Robust Strategies in Dialogue Management

An important tradeoff in error-prone dialogue is between the cost of using more robust dialogue s... more An important tradeoff in error-prone dialogue is between the cost of using more robust dialogue strategies and the cost of recovering from failed understanding without using them. A strategy has to be quantitatively planned for each dialogue state, since too robust a strategy might not have a worthwhile effect on the failure rate. A dialogue manager is described which chooses between strategies that have differing levels of robustness with a view to maximising the efficiency of the dialogue.

Ad-me: A Context-Sensitive Advertising System

Proc. of IIWAS, Austria, Sep 10, 2001

The mobile commerce sector and in particular the context sensitive advertising will represent a h... more The mobile commerce sector and in particular the context sensitive advertising will represent a high yield revenue stream. This paper introduces the Ad-me (Advertising for the Mobile E-commerce user) system. The Ad-me is a mobile tourist guide that proactively delivers advertisements to users based upon perceived individual user needs together with their location. A Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) design philosophy is adopted. In order to achieve maximum content diffusion a range of presentation formats are accommodated including HTML, WML, HDML and iMode.

EasyLife: A Location-Aware Service Oriented Mobile Information System

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Many examples of Location-aware services have been developed in recent years as the enabling tech... more Many examples of Location-aware services have been developed in recent years as the enabling technologies mature. However, these services frequently exist in isolation and address specific niche markets. The diversity of the mobile computing community suggests that enabling dynamic combinations of location-area services would be an appropriate deployment strategy. In this way, customers could subscribe to those services that address their particular needs. This paper introduces EasyLife, an agent-based architecture designed to facilitate the development of suites of location-aware services that customers can configure according to their preferences.

Encyclopedia of Genetics, Genomics, Proteomics and Informatics, 2008

This paper aims to demonstrate how behavioural realism can be achieved by situating intentional a... more This paper aims to demonstrate how behavioural realism can be achieved by situating intentional agents within an Augmented Reality (AR) framework. We contest that imbuing agents with the ability to virtually sense the world within which they are situated produces a heightened sense of behavioural realism. We introduce the reader to NeXuS, a framework for the development of AR applications that depends upon these concepts to create a rich interactive environment whereby traditional boundaries between the virtual and physical domain may be overcome.

Realising the Ambient Intelligence Vision Through the Deployment of Mobile, Intentional Agents

Ambient computing as an ideal demands levels of functional attainment that have thus far not been... more Ambient computing as an ideal demands levels of functional attainment that have thus far not been realised. Ambient applications require that the computing application be subsumed into the everyday context in an unobtrusive manner with interaction modalities that are natural, simple and appropriate to both the individual user and their associated context. Within this paper, we consider the use of mobile intentional agents as potential key enablers in the delivery of ambient intelligent services. In particular, we compare and contrast two agent-based ambient intelligence case studies.

Coordinated Sleeping for Beaconless 802.15.4-Based Multihop Networks

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2010

The last few years have seen a wide adoption of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC/PHY standard for low-power ... more The last few years have seen a wide adoption of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC/PHY standard for low-power communication between wireless sensor nodes. Within this work we study some fundamental drawbacks of the 802.15.4 specifications for multihop network deployments, which adversely affect the delivery rate and efficient node energy consumption. These issues are rectified by investigating a timezone-based scheduling, V-Route, that builds on 802.15.4 beaconless mode to enable both a synchronized sleep scheduling and a bidirectional communication between nodes in the sensor network and the PAN coordinator. The contributions of V-Route are threefold: (1) mitigate collisions, (2) enable packet routing and (3) provide energy saving in a multihop context, while maintaining the full compliancy with the 802.15.4 standard. We present a performance evaluation on energy consumption and latency with real experiments on Philips AquisGrain sensor nodes. Enhancing 802.15.4based multi-hop networks with V-Route yields energy reduction ranging from 27.3% to 85.3%, according to the required end-to-end latency.

Real-Time Recognition and Profiling of Appliances through a Single Electricity Sensor

2010 7th Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON), 2010

Sensing, monitoring and actuating systems are expected to play a key role in reducing buildings o... more Sensing, monitoring and actuating systems are expected to play a key role in reducing buildings overall energy consumption. Leveraging sensor systems to support energy efficiency in buildings poses novel research challenges in monitoring space usage, controlling devices, interfacing with smart energy meters and communicating with the energy grid. In the attempt of reducing electricity consumption in buildings, identifying individual sources of energy consumption is key to generate energy awareness and improve efficiency of available energy resources usage. Previous work studied several non-intrusive load monitoring techniques to classify appliances; however, the literature lacks of an comprehensive system that can be easily installed in existing buildings to empower users profiling, benchmarking and recognizing loads in real-time. This has been a major reason holding back the practice adoption of load monitoring techniques. In this paper we present RECAP: RECognition of electrical Appliances and Profiling in real-time. RECAP uses a single wireless energy monitoring sensor easily clipped to the main electrical unit. The energy monitoring unit transmits energy data wirelessly to a local machine for data processing and storage. The RECAP system consists of three parts: (1) Guiding the user for profiling electrical appliances within premises and generating a database of unique appliance signatures; (2) Using those signatures to train an artificial neural network that is then employed to recognize appliance activities (3) Providing a Load descriptor to allow peer appliance benchmarking. RECAP addresses the need of an integrated and intuitive tool to empower building owners with energy awareness. Enabling real-time appliance recognition is a stepping-stone towards reducing energy consumption and allowing a number of major applications including load-shifting techniques, energy expenditure breakdown per appliance, detection of power hungry and faulty appliances, and recognition of occupant activity. This paper describes the system design and performance evaluation in domestic environment.

An Energy-Efficient and Low-Latency Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

2005 Systems Communications (ICW'05, ICHSN'05, ICMCS'05, SENET'05)

Recent advances in Wireless Sensors Network (WSN) technology have made possible the manufacturing... more Recent advances in Wireless Sensors Network (WSN) technology have made possible the manufacturing of tiny low-cost, low-power sensors with wireless multi-hop communication and sensing capabilities. Energy conservation for WSNs is a primary objective that needs to be addressed at all layers of the networking protocol stack. In many applications latency is another crucial factor to be addressed. However this must be done in the context of the energy constraints imposed by the network. In this paper we present an experimental evaluation of two node scheduling regimes within MERLIN (Mac Energy efficient, Routing and Localization INtegrated), an energy-efficient low-latency integrated protocol for WSNs. In particular we contrast the X and V scheduling family schemes with respect to the following properties: network setup time, network lifetime and message latency. We conduct our experiments within the OmNet++ simulator.

The Effects of Deployment Irregularity on Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks

2005 International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing, 2005

One commonly employed method to calculate whether a wireless sensor network can adequately sense ... more One commonly employed method to calculate whether a wireless sensor network can adequately sense the entirety of a region of interest is to define the area that a sensor can monitor and ensure that the union of all these areas leaves no part of the region uncovered. This paper shows the results of a series of experiments in simulation designed to show how various degrees of deviation from intended node placement locations in a wireless sensor network affect the achievable coverage using this model. The main result is that irregular deployments are only slightly less efficient than highly regular ones but that since they have less redundancy they fail before regular cases. This is manifested by the regular patterns maintaining coverage by increasing the number of active nodes while the irregular ones fail to achieve coverage despite having activated a low proportion of the available nodes due to the remaining nodes being situated at ineffective locations.

Remote Electricity Actuation and Monitoring mote

2011 International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems and Workshops (DCOSS), 2011

This work presents the design and evaluation of the REAM (Remote Electricity Actuation and Monito... more This work presents the design and evaluation of the REAM (Remote Electricity Actuation and Monitoring) node based around the modular Tyndall Mote platform. The REAM node enables the user to remotely actuate power to a mains power extension board while sampling the current, voltage, power and power factor of the attached load. The node contains a current transformer interfaced to an Energy Metering IC which continuously samples current and voltage. These values are periodically read from the part by a PIC24 microcontroller, which calculates the RMS current and voltage, power factor and overall power. The resultant values can then be queried wirelessly employing the Tyndall 802.15.4 compliant wireless module.

Immersive human-robot interaction

Proceedings of the seventh annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-Robot Interaction - HRI '12, 2012

Anthropomorphism and the social robot

Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2003

This paper discusses the issues pertinent to the development of a meaningful social interaction b... more This paper discusses the issues pertinent to the development of a meaningful social interaction between robots and people through employing degrees of anthropomorphism in a robot's physical design and behaviour. As robots enter our social space, we will inherently project/impose our interpretation on their actions similar to the techniques we employ in rationalising for example, a pet's behaviour. This propensity to anthropomorphise is not seen as a hindrance to social robot development, but rather a useful mechanism that requires judicious examination and employment in social robot research.

Adaptive Radio Modes in Sensor Networks: How Deep to Sleep?

2008 5th Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, 2008

Energy-efficient performance is a central challenge in sensor network deployments, and the radio ... more Energy-efficient performance is a central challenge in sensor network deployments, and the radio is a major contributor to overall energy node consumption. Current energyefficient MAC protocols for sensor networks use a fixed low power radio mode for putting the radio to sleep. Fixed low power modes involve an inherent tradeoff: deep sleep modes have low current draw and high energy cost and latency for switching the radio to active mode, while light sleep modes have quick and inexpensive switching to active mode with a higher current draw. This paper proposes adaptive radio low power sleep modes based on current traffic conditions in the network, as an enhancement to our recent RFIDImpulse low power wake-up mechanism. The paper also introduces a comprehensive node energy model, that includes energy components for radio switching, transmission, reception, listening, and sleeping, as well as the often disregarded microcontroller energy component to evaluate energy performance for both MicaZ and TelosB platforms, which use different MCU's. We then use the model for comparing the energy-related performance of RFIDImpulse enhanced with adaptive low power modes with BMAC and IEEE 802.15.4 for the two node platforms under varying data rates. The comparative analysis confirms that RFIDImpulse with adaptive low power modes provides up to 20 times lower energy consumption than IEEE 802.15.4 in low traffic scenario. The evaluation also yields the optimal settings of low power modes on the basis of data rates for each node platform, and it provides guidelines for the selection of appropriate MAC protocol, low power mode, and node platform for a given set of traffic requirements of a sensor network application.

Social interaction between robots, avatars & amp; humans

ROMAN 2005. IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2005.

With the recent development of the field of social robotics and in particular the need to negotia... more With the recent development of the field of social robotics and in particular the need to negotiate explicit social interaction and behaviour between both socially capable robots and between robots and humans, this work presents the development of a framework which supports coherent social interaction between real and artificial systems. The Social Robot Architecture is implemented in conjunction with the Virtual Robotic Workbench, a cohesive framework which integrates physical robots, virtual robot avatars and humans in a shared social space.

Generating power footprints without appliance interaction: An enabler for privacy intrusion

2011 International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems and Workshops (DCOSS), 2011

Appliance load monitoring (ALM) systems are systems capable of monitoring appliances' operation w... more Appliance load monitoring (ALM) systems are systems capable of monitoring appliances' operation within a building using a single metering point. As such, they uncover information on occupants' activities of daily living and subsequently an exploitable privacy leak. Related work has shown monitoring accuracies higher than 90% achieved by ALM systems, yet requiring interaction with appliances for system calibration. In the context of external privacy intrusion, ALM systems have the following obstacles for system calibration: (1) type and model of appliances inside the monitored building are entirely unknown; (2) appliances cannot be operated to record power footprints; and (3) ground truth data is not available to finetune algorithms. Within this work, we focus on monitoring those appliances from which we can infer occupants' activities. Without appliance interaction, appliances' profiling is realised via automated capture and analysis of shapes, steady-state durations, and occurrence patterns of power loads. Such automated process produces unique power footprints, and naming is realised using heuristics and known characteristics of typical home equipment. Data recorded within a kitchen area and one home illustrates the various processing steps, from data acquisition to power footprint naming.

The LAIR: Lightweight Affordable Immersion Room

Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 2009

This paper proposes a virtual environment system called a lightweight affordable immersion room (... more This paper proposes a virtual environment system called a lightweight affordable immersion room (LAIR) that we propose for use in space and financially constrained situations. The LAIR consists of four walls arranged in a square providing a 360° degree view. By using front projection and two projectors per wall, the LAIR provides a compact environment which gives users some freedom of movement. The LAIR may be considered in terms of performance and cost as somewhere between a power wall and a CAVE—more immersive than a power wall, but less than a CAVE—and similarly moderate in terms of use of space and cost.

A Mobile Gateway for Remote Interaction With Wireless Sensor Networks

IEEE Sensors Journal, 2011

Providing social scaffolding for effective agent communities

Connection Science, 2002

This paper explores the general landscape of virtual communities and reflects upon their relevanc... more This paper explores the general landscape of virtual communities and reflects upon their relevance to their agent community counterparts. It examines several disparate virtual communities in order to identify common threads and characteristics, which underpin social cohesion. In turn we introduce social realism and reflect on the extent to which, this can form the basis of a social scaffolding for the support of effective agent communities. Thereafter we introduce the concept of agent chameleons and consider how this might influence both agent and group behavior.

Mote-based underwater sensor networks: opportunities, challenges, and guidelines

Telecommunication Systems, 2008

A Self-adaptive Unifying Mechanism For Autonomous Energy Management In Wireless Sensor Networks

Pedreiras, P. and Shin, I.(eds.). APRES 2012 Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Adaptive and Reconfigurable Embedded Systems Beijing, China April 16, 2012, 2012

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) deployments require the maintenance of hundreds of battery run sens... more Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) deployments require the maintenance of hundreds of battery run sensor motes which may be placed in hard to reach locations. As replacing or charging sensor batteries post deployment is both difficult and expensive, maintaining a WSN poses challenging issues. Power saving mechanisms aim to increase the life time of a WSN. This is achieved through the use of power saving techniques that aim to balance the overall usage within a network. A common approach to power saving is to cluster the ...

Dynamic Choice of Robust Strategies in Dialogue Management

An important tradeoff in error-prone dialogue is between the cost of using more robust dialogue s... more An important tradeoff in error-prone dialogue is between the cost of using more robust dialogue strategies and the cost of recovering from failed understanding without using them. A strategy has to be quantitatively planned for each dialogue state, since too robust a strategy might not have a worthwhile effect on the failure rate. A dialogue manager is described which chooses between strategies that have differing levels of robustness with a view to maximising the efficiency of the dialogue.

Ad-me: A Context-Sensitive Advertising System

Proc. of IIWAS, Austria, Sep 10, 2001

The mobile commerce sector and in particular the context sensitive advertising will represent a h... more The mobile commerce sector and in particular the context sensitive advertising will represent a high yield revenue stream. This paper introduces the Ad-me (Advertising for the Mobile E-commerce user) system. The Ad-me is a mobile tourist guide that proactively delivers advertisements to users based upon perceived individual user needs together with their location. A Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) design philosophy is adopted. In order to achieve maximum content diffusion a range of presentation formats are accommodated including HTML, WML, HDML and iMode.

EasyLife: A Location-Aware Service Oriented Mobile Information System

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Many examples of Location-aware services have been developed in recent years as the enabling tech... more Many examples of Location-aware services have been developed in recent years as the enabling technologies mature. However, these services frequently exist in isolation and address specific niche markets. The diversity of the mobile computing community suggests that enabling dynamic combinations of location-area services would be an appropriate deployment strategy. In this way, customers could subscribe to those services that address their particular needs. This paper introduces EasyLife, an agent-based architecture designed to facilitate the development of suites of location-aware services that customers can configure according to their preferences.

Encyclopedia of Genetics, Genomics, Proteomics and Informatics, 2008

This paper aims to demonstrate how behavioural realism can be achieved by situating intentional a... more This paper aims to demonstrate how behavioural realism can be achieved by situating intentional agents within an Augmented Reality (AR) framework. We contest that imbuing agents with the ability to virtually sense the world within which they are situated produces a heightened sense of behavioural realism. We introduce the reader to NeXuS, a framework for the development of AR applications that depends upon these concepts to create a rich interactive environment whereby traditional boundaries between the virtual and physical domain may be overcome.

Realising the Ambient Intelligence Vision Through the Deployment of Mobile, Intentional Agents

Ambient computing as an ideal demands levels of functional attainment that have thus far not been... more Ambient computing as an ideal demands levels of functional attainment that have thus far not been realised. Ambient applications require that the computing application be subsumed into the everyday context in an unobtrusive manner with interaction modalities that are natural, simple and appropriate to both the individual user and their associated context. Within this paper, we consider the use of mobile intentional agents as potential key enablers in the delivery of ambient intelligent services. In particular, we compare and contrast two agent-based ambient intelligence case studies.

Coordinated Sleeping for Beaconless 802.15.4-Based Multihop Networks

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2010

The last few years have seen a wide adoption of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC/PHY standard for low-power ... more The last few years have seen a wide adoption of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC/PHY standard for low-power communication between wireless sensor nodes. Within this work we study some fundamental drawbacks of the 802.15.4 specifications for multihop network deployments, which adversely affect the delivery rate and efficient node energy consumption. These issues are rectified by investigating a timezone-based scheduling, V-Route, that builds on 802.15.4 beaconless mode to enable both a synchronized sleep scheduling and a bidirectional communication between nodes in the sensor network and the PAN coordinator. The contributions of V-Route are threefold: (1) mitigate collisions, (2) enable packet routing and (3) provide energy saving in a multihop context, while maintaining the full compliancy with the 802.15.4 standard. We present a performance evaluation on energy consumption and latency with real experiments on Philips AquisGrain sensor nodes. Enhancing 802.15.4based multi-hop networks with V-Route yields energy reduction ranging from 27.3% to 85.3%, according to the required end-to-end latency.

Real-Time Recognition and Profiling of Appliances through a Single Electricity Sensor

2010 7th Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON), 2010

Sensing, monitoring and actuating systems are expected to play a key role in reducing buildings o... more Sensing, monitoring and actuating systems are expected to play a key role in reducing buildings overall energy consumption. Leveraging sensor systems to support energy efficiency in buildings poses novel research challenges in monitoring space usage, controlling devices, interfacing with smart energy meters and communicating with the energy grid. In the attempt of reducing electricity consumption in buildings, identifying individual sources of energy consumption is key to generate energy awareness and improve efficiency of available energy resources usage. Previous work studied several non-intrusive load monitoring techniques to classify appliances; however, the literature lacks of an comprehensive system that can be easily installed in existing buildings to empower users profiling, benchmarking and recognizing loads in real-time. This has been a major reason holding back the practice adoption of load monitoring techniques. In this paper we present RECAP: RECognition of electrical Appliances and Profiling in real-time. RECAP uses a single wireless energy monitoring sensor easily clipped to the main electrical unit. The energy monitoring unit transmits energy data wirelessly to a local machine for data processing and storage. The RECAP system consists of three parts: (1) Guiding the user for profiling electrical appliances within premises and generating a database of unique appliance signatures; (2) Using those signatures to train an artificial neural network that is then employed to recognize appliance activities (3) Providing a Load descriptor to allow peer appliance benchmarking. RECAP addresses the need of an integrated and intuitive tool to empower building owners with energy awareness. Enabling real-time appliance recognition is a stepping-stone towards reducing energy consumption and allowing a number of major applications including load-shifting techniques, energy expenditure breakdown per appliance, detection of power hungry and faulty appliances, and recognition of occupant activity. This paper describes the system design and performance evaluation in domestic environment.

An Energy-Efficient and Low-Latency Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

2005 Systems Communications (ICW'05, ICHSN'05, ICMCS'05, SENET'05)

Recent advances in Wireless Sensors Network (WSN) technology have made possible the manufacturing... more Recent advances in Wireless Sensors Network (WSN) technology have made possible the manufacturing of tiny low-cost, low-power sensors with wireless multi-hop communication and sensing capabilities. Energy conservation for WSNs is a primary objective that needs to be addressed at all layers of the networking protocol stack. In many applications latency is another crucial factor to be addressed. However this must be done in the context of the energy constraints imposed by the network. In this paper we present an experimental evaluation of two node scheduling regimes within MERLIN (Mac Energy efficient, Routing and Localization INtegrated), an energy-efficient low-latency integrated protocol for WSNs. In particular we contrast the X and V scheduling family schemes with respect to the following properties: network setup time, network lifetime and message latency. We conduct our experiments within the OmNet++ simulator.

The Effects of Deployment Irregularity on Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks

2005 International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing, 2005

One commonly employed method to calculate whether a wireless sensor network can adequately sense ... more One commonly employed method to calculate whether a wireless sensor network can adequately sense the entirety of a region of interest is to define the area that a sensor can monitor and ensure that the union of all these areas leaves no part of the region uncovered. This paper shows the results of a series of experiments in simulation designed to show how various degrees of deviation from intended node placement locations in a wireless sensor network affect the achievable coverage using this model. The main result is that irregular deployments are only slightly less efficient than highly regular ones but that since they have less redundancy they fail before regular cases. This is manifested by the regular patterns maintaining coverage by increasing the number of active nodes while the irregular ones fail to achieve coverage despite having activated a low proportion of the available nodes due to the remaining nodes being situated at ineffective locations.

Remote Electricity Actuation and Monitoring mote

2011 International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems and Workshops (DCOSS), 2011

This work presents the design and evaluation of the REAM (Remote Electricity Actuation and Monito... more This work presents the design and evaluation of the REAM (Remote Electricity Actuation and Monitoring) node based around the modular Tyndall Mote platform. The REAM node enables the user to remotely actuate power to a mains power extension board while sampling the current, voltage, power and power factor of the attached load. The node contains a current transformer interfaced to an Energy Metering IC which continuously samples current and voltage. These values are periodically read from the part by a PIC24 microcontroller, which calculates the RMS current and voltage, power factor and overall power. The resultant values can then be queried wirelessly employing the Tyndall 802.15.4 compliant wireless module.

Immersive human-robot interaction

Proceedings of the seventh annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-Robot Interaction - HRI '12, 2012

Anthropomorphism and the social robot

Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2003

This paper discusses the issues pertinent to the development of a meaningful social interaction b... more This paper discusses the issues pertinent to the development of a meaningful social interaction between robots and people through employing degrees of anthropomorphism in a robot's physical design and behaviour. As robots enter our social space, we will inherently project/impose our interpretation on their actions similar to the techniques we employ in rationalising for example, a pet's behaviour. This propensity to anthropomorphise is not seen as a hindrance to social robot development, but rather a useful mechanism that requires judicious examination and employment in social robot research.

Adaptive Radio Modes in Sensor Networks: How Deep to Sleep?

2008 5th Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, 2008

Energy-efficient performance is a central challenge in sensor network deployments, and the radio ... more Energy-efficient performance is a central challenge in sensor network deployments, and the radio is a major contributor to overall energy node consumption. Current energyefficient MAC protocols for sensor networks use a fixed low power radio mode for putting the radio to sleep. Fixed low power modes involve an inherent tradeoff: deep sleep modes have low current draw and high energy cost and latency for switching the radio to active mode, while light sleep modes have quick and inexpensive switching to active mode with a higher current draw. This paper proposes adaptive radio low power sleep modes based on current traffic conditions in the network, as an enhancement to our recent RFIDImpulse low power wake-up mechanism. The paper also introduces a comprehensive node energy model, that includes energy components for radio switching, transmission, reception, listening, and sleeping, as well as the often disregarded microcontroller energy component to evaluate energy performance for both MicaZ and TelosB platforms, which use different MCU's. We then use the model for comparing the energy-related performance of RFIDImpulse enhanced with adaptive low power modes with BMAC and IEEE 802.15.4 for the two node platforms under varying data rates. The comparative analysis confirms that RFIDImpulse with adaptive low power modes provides up to 20 times lower energy consumption than IEEE 802.15.4 in low traffic scenario. The evaluation also yields the optimal settings of low power modes on the basis of data rates for each node platform, and it provides guidelines for the selection of appropriate MAC protocol, low power mode, and node platform for a given set of traffic requirements of a sensor network application.

Social interaction between robots, avatars & amp; humans

ROMAN 2005. IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2005.

With the recent development of the field of social robotics and in particular the need to negotia... more With the recent development of the field of social robotics and in particular the need to negotiate explicit social interaction and behaviour between both socially capable robots and between robots and humans, this work presents the development of a framework which supports coherent social interaction between real and artificial systems. The Social Robot Architecture is implemented in conjunction with the Virtual Robotic Workbench, a cohesive framework which integrates physical robots, virtual robot avatars and humans in a shared social space.

Generating power footprints without appliance interaction: An enabler for privacy intrusion

2011 International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems and Workshops (DCOSS), 2011

Appliance load monitoring (ALM) systems are systems capable of monitoring appliances' operation w... more Appliance load monitoring (ALM) systems are systems capable of monitoring appliances' operation within a building using a single metering point. As such, they uncover information on occupants' activities of daily living and subsequently an exploitable privacy leak. Related work has shown monitoring accuracies higher than 90% achieved by ALM systems, yet requiring interaction with appliances for system calibration. In the context of external privacy intrusion, ALM systems have the following obstacles for system calibration: (1) type and model of appliances inside the monitored building are entirely unknown; (2) appliances cannot be operated to record power footprints; and (3) ground truth data is not available to finetune algorithms. Within this work, we focus on monitoring those appliances from which we can infer occupants' activities. Without appliance interaction, appliances' profiling is realised via automated capture and analysis of shapes, steady-state durations, and occurrence patterns of power loads. Such automated process produces unique power footprints, and naming is realised using heuristics and known characteristics of typical home equipment. Data recorded within a kitchen area and one home illustrates the various processing steps, from data acquisition to power footprint naming.

The LAIR: Lightweight Affordable Immersion Room

Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 2009

This paper proposes a virtual environment system called a lightweight affordable immersion room (... more This paper proposes a virtual environment system called a lightweight affordable immersion room (LAIR) that we propose for use in space and financially constrained situations. The LAIR consists of four walls arranged in a square providing a 360° degree view. By using front projection and two projectors per wall, the LAIR provides a compact environment which gives users some freedom of movement. The LAIR may be considered in terms of performance and cost as somewhere between a power wall and a CAVE—more immersive than a power wall, but less than a CAVE—and similarly moderate in terms of use of space and cost.

A Mobile Gateway for Remote Interaction With Wireless Sensor Networks

IEEE Sensors Journal, 2011

Providing social scaffolding for effective agent communities

Connection Science, 2002

This paper explores the general landscape of virtual communities and reflects upon their relevanc... more This paper explores the general landscape of virtual communities and reflects upon their relevance to their agent community counterparts. It examines several disparate virtual communities in order to identify common threads and characteristics, which underpin social cohesion. In turn we introduce social realism and reflect on the extent to which, this can form the basis of a social scaffolding for the support of effective agent communities. Thereafter we introduce the concept of agent chameleons and consider how this might influence both agent and group behavior.