Stephen Potter

Service robots with advanced intelligence capabilities can potentially transform servicescapes. However, limited attention has been given to how consumers experiencing vulnerabilities, particularly those with disabilities, envisage the characteristics of robots’ prospective integration into emotionally-intense servicescapes, such as long-term care...

Disabled people are often involved in robotics research as potential users of technologies which address specific needs. However, their more generalised lived expertise is not usually included when planning the overall design trajectory of robots for health and social care purposes. This risks losing valuable insight into the lived experience of di...

Implementing information and communications technology (ICT) at scale requires evaluation processes to capture the impact on users as well as the infrastructure into which it is being introduced. For older adults living with cognitive impairment, this requires evaluation that can accommodate different levels of cognitive impairment, alongside input...

BACKGROUND: Walking speed predicts important clinical outcomes in older adults and is one of the most significant indicators of frailty. OBJECTIVE: To test whether it is feasible to measure walking speed frequently and unobtrusively in the home. METHODS: A longitudinal feasibility study was conducted comprising the installation and monitoring of co...

Background: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is highly prevalent and significantly affects the daily functioning of patients. Self-management strategies, including increasing physical activity, can help people with COPD have better health and a better quality of life. Digital mobile health (mHealth) techniques have the potential to aid...

BACKGROUND Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is highly prevalent and impacts the daily functioning of those affected. Self-management strategies, including increasing physical activity, can help people with COPD have better health and a better quality of life. Digital mobile health (mHealth) techniques have the potential to aid delivery...

Background Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is highly prevalent and significantly affects the daily functioning of patients. Self-management strategies, including increasing physical activity, can help people with COPD have better health and a better quality of life. Digital mobile health (mHealth) techniques have the potential to aid t...

Background: In the last decade or so, increased computer processing and storage capabilities, along with the availability of big data sets, have stimulated the development of more elaborate inductive machine learning algorithms and architectures. These have delivered impressive results in tasks such as natural language processing and image recognit...

Background: Individuals living with long-term physical health conditions frequently experience co-occurring mental health problems. This comorbidity has a significant impact on an individual’s levels of emotional distress, health outcomes, and associated health care utilization. As health care services struggle to meet demand and care increasingly...

BACKGROUND Individuals living with long-term physical health conditions frequently experience co-occurring mental health problems. This comorbidity has a significant impact on individual’s levels of emotional distress, health outcomes and associated healthcare utilization. As healthcare services struggle to meet demand and care increasingly moves t...

Introduction Group-based cognitive stimulation is the only nonpharmacologic intervention recommended by the UK National Institute for Clinical and Health Excellence for people with dementia. The potential of technology to extend the availability of group-based cognitive stimulation has not been tested. Methods One hundred sixty-one people with dem...

In this paper, we present the European H2020 project INLIFE (INdependent LIving support Functions for the Elderly). The project brought together 20 partners from nine countries with the goal of integrating into a common ICT platform a range of technologies intended to assist community-dwelling older people with cognitive impairment. The majority of...

The use of Assistive Technology with people with profound and multiple disabilities is a specialised subfield. Drawing on its authors' experiences and observations at a UK charitable foundation that offers specialised educational, residential and therapeutic facilities, this paper describes the distinct challenges that present themselves when apply...

The use of Assistive Technology with people with profound and multiple disabilities is a specialised subfield. Drawing on its authors' experiences and observations at a UK charitable foundation that offers specialised educational, residential and therapeutic facilities, this paper describes the distinct challenges that present themselves when apply...

This chapter concerns the use of virtual worlds and web 2.0 technologies for on-line collaborative activities. The potential of this combination of technologies lies in the complementary notions of presence that these technologies offer their users. After discussing this idea, the nature of distributed collaboration and the implications this has fo...

This paper describes some of the lessons learned from the FireGrid project. It starts with a brief overview of the project. The discussion of the lessons learned that follows is intended for others attempting to develop a similar system, where sensor data is used to steer a super-real time simulation in order to generate predictions that will provi...

Effective response to emergencies depends upon the availability of accurate and focused information. The goal of the FireGrid project is to provide an architecture by which the results of computer models of physical phe-nomena can be made available to decision-makers leading the response to fire emergencies in the built environment. In this paper w...

This paper concerns the use of new media technologies, including virtual worlds and web 2.0, for on-line collaborative activities, and specifically for the provision of expert advice about the response to large-scale crises. Internet technologies in general offer rich possibilities for interactions involving remote experts; however, the diversity,...

The FireGrid project aims to harness the potential of advanced forms of computation to support the response to large-scale emergencies (with an initial focus on the response to fires in the built environment). Computational models of physical phenomena are deployed on High Performance Computing (HPC) resources to interpret live sensor data from an...

The I-Room is a virtual environment intended to support a range of collaborative activities, especially those that involve sense making, deliberation, and decision making. The I-Room case studies described in this paper all employ virtual worlds technology to provide this interaction space and show how this can be augmented with external knowledge-...

Crisis response situations require collaboration across many different organizations with different backgrounds, training, procedures and objectives. The response to the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 and the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts in 2005 emphasized the importance of effective communication and collaboration. Compounding the challenges ass...

In this paper we describe the information-gathering problem which can be characterized as transforming large amounts of data obtained from sensors into accurate, concise, timely and meaningful information that can be used by decision makers faced with a specific task and a number of options for performing that task. The approach to this information...

FireGrid is a modern concept that aims to leverage a number of modern technologies to aid fire emergency response. In this paper we provide a brief introduction to the FireGrid project. A number of different technologies such as wireless sensor networks, grid-enabled High Performance Computing (HPC) implementation of fire models, and artificial int...

The aim of the I-X research programme is to provide a general framework for performing mixed-initiative synthesis tasks, along with a set of tools that supports its use. This framework arises from and builds upon seminal work at the University of Edinburgh in the field of Artificial Intelligence planning. In this paper we describe the framework and...

In this paper we describe the approach adopted and experiences gained during a project to develop a general architecture that aims to harness advanced sensor, modelling and Grid technologies to assist emergency responders in tackling emergencies (specifically fire emergencies). Here we focus on the command and control aspects of this architecture,...

This paper describes a new agent framework that fuses an HTN planner, through its underlying conceptual model, with the mental attitudes of the BDI agent architecture, thus exploiting the strengths of each. On the one hand, the practical and proven ability to reason about actions that is the strength of HTN planning fleshes out the option generatio...

The aim of this paper is to describe I-Sim, a simulation tool that is a fully integrated part of the underlying agent framework, I-X. I-Sim controls a discrete event simulator, based on the same activity model that is shared between all I-X components, and multiple process-level simulators that model the continuous change caused by actions that are...

Making sense of the current state of an emergency and of the response to it is vital if appropriate decisions are to be made. This task involves the acquisition, interpretation and management of information. In this paper we present an integrated system that applies recent ideas and technologies from the fields of Artificial Intelligence and semant...

Making sense of the current state of an emergency and of the response to it is vital if appropriate decisions are to be made. This task involves the acquisition, interpretation and management of information. In this paper we present an integrated system that applies recent ideas and technologies from the fields of Artificial Intelligence and semant...

The aim of this paper is to describe the I-X system with its principal user interface, the I-X Process Panel, its underlying ontology, , and how this panel can be used as an intelligent to-do list that assists emergency responders in applying pre-defined standard operating procedures in different types of emergencies. In particular, multiple instan...

The aim of this paper is to describe the I-X system with its principal user interface, the I-X Process Panel, its underlying ontology, , and how this panel can be used as an intelligent to-do list that assists emergency responders in applying pre-defined standard operating procedures in different types of emergencies. In particular, multiple instan...

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking,...

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking,...

In recent years, web services have become increasingly important components of the scientific methodology of certain domains. Currently, however, the description and use of most these is purely ‘syntactic’; that is, the semantics of the services are left to the human user to infer or acquire by other means before deciding whether and how to use a s...

Phylsyst is an intelligent system that mines phylogenetic classifications. Its idea stems from the work of phylogeneticists of the Société Française de Systématique and proposes to test an innovative method for inferring phylogenetic classifications. The main idea in Phylsyst is to represent the reasoning of an expert phylogeneticist constructing a...

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for distributed e-Science. The project is integrating several knowledge based and hypertext tools into existing collaborative environments, and through use of a shared ontology to exchange structure, promotes enhanced process tracking and navigation of resour...

I-X Process Panels are used to support users who are carrying out processes and responding to events in a cooperative working environment. The panels support the tracking of personal or group issues, the planning and execution of activities and the checking of constraints. Panels can be connected to other panels, and also to a range of services, ag...

The CoAKTinG (Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid) project has developed a set of integrated tools to enhance collaboration between e-Scientists. As one of three case studies, these tools are being applied within the Combechem e-Science pilot project. Two levels of integration are being explored: straightforward deployment of...

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for distributed e-Science. The project is integrating several knowledge based and hypertext tools into existing collaborative environments, and through use of a shared ontology to exchange structure, promotes enhanced process tracking and navigation of resour...

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking,...

Conceptual design is considered to be the most difficult phase of engineering design, with success dependent to a great extent on the expertise of the designer. Automation of some aspects of this phase would be of immense practical benefit. It is suggested that the generation of design solutions can be brought about through the application of heuri...

IntroductionThe coordination of resource and activity to achieve somecommon objective is a key task within modern virtual organisations.The Semantic Web initiative promises to increase thenumber of knowledge and information resources available,presenting more (and more varied) opportunities for interaction.However, as the number and complexity of t...

In order to address problems stemming from the dynamic nature of distributed systems, there is a need to be able to express the often neglected notions of the evolution and change of the knowledge components of such systems. This need becomes more pressing when one considers the potential of the Internet for distributed knowledge-based problem solv...

Existing knowledge base resources have the potential to be valuable components of the Semantic Web and similar knowledge-based environments. However, from the perspective of these environments, these resources are often under-characterised, lacking the ontological characterisation that would enable them to be exploited fully. In this chapter we dis...

Data Mining techniques can, under favourable conditions, extract valuable knowledge from an organisation's databases. However, the precise nature of these favourable conditions is poorly articulated, and as a result organisations run the risk of instigating costly and time-consuming data mining episodes upon inappropriate or irrelevant data. In res...

In order to address problems stemming from the dynamic nature of distributed systems, there is a need to be able to express the often neglected notions of the evolution and change of the knowledge components of such systems. This need becomes more pressing when one considers the potential of the Internet for distributed knowledge-based problem solv...

A crucial early stage in the engineering design process is the conceptual design phase, during which an initial solution design is generated. The quality of this initial design has a great bearing on the quality and success of the produced artefact. Typically, the knowledge required to perform this task is only acquired through many years of experi...

Most CBR design tools utilise specific domain knowledge (in the form of actual design cases), followed by generalised knowledge (in the form of case-modification strategies, models or rules) to solve problems. This paper presents an approach to the configuration design of fluid power systems which uses generalised domain knowledge at an earlier sta...

Much progress has been made in the area of computer-aided designer support, but little has been made in that of design automation. Where progress has been made, it has been largely in the analytical aspects of the task (for example, simulation and stress analysis)—tasks for which computers are more suited than humans. Less tractable is automation o...

Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) offers a problem-solving strategy for situations in which complete knowledge of the task is not available and expertise is lacking — which is a common state of affairs for engineering design tasks. Moreover, the perceived similarity of this strategy to the manner in which humans might address certain design tasks is appea...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Bath, 2000. Includes bibliographical references. Photocopy.

The conceptual design of a fluid power circuit from a set of customer-specified requirements is difficult, traditionally requiring the expertise of proficient designers. Attempts have been made to automate this complex task, predominantly using rule-based approaches. The limitations and problems associated with these approaches have been well docum...

The engineering task of configuration design, the combination of pre-defined domain entities into a system that meets some specified requirements, is ill-defined: there is no computationally expressible algorithm available for consistently producing adequate designs. This suggests that Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques must be applied to prod...

The automation of the design process is extremely difficult; design tasks are complex and ill-defined, and generally performed by experts who have many years’ experience. Design is a typically human endeavour, and as humans offer the only example of flexible and successful design systems, any attempt to automate the process should be informed by th...

In this paper, we present a machine learning goal-based methodology for producing configuration designs of fluid power systems. The goal is to produce solution(s) that provide the functionality desired by the user. This methodology allows the construction of an automated tool for producing the designs based on machine learning techniques, specifica...

This research examines a novel application of artificial neural networks (ANN) in engineering design. A NN-based learning technique is presented for generating configuration designs from functional requirements and basic domain concepts. With functional requirements as input, an elementary neural network can learn simple domain design rules. The ou...

The aim of this paper is to describe the I-X system with its underlying representation: . The latter can be seen as a description of an agent's intentions, which can be shared and communicated amongst multiple I-X agents to coordinate activities in an emergency response scenario. In general, an object describes the product of a synthesis task. In t...

The aim of this paper is to show how the rationale behind a plan can be recorded in the plan itself. The model which underlies the I-X framework will be described in detail, focussing on annotations. It is there that a planner can record the justifications for including components into the plan. Recording rationale information of this type can be u...

We explore the concept of life cycles of knowledge-based components in knowledge-engineering environments, and particularly in distributed, agent-based settings. We provide a formal account of a knowledge life cycle based on abstract model theory, and show its relationship to channel theory—a mathematical model of semantic information flow. This le...

I-X Process Panels are used to support users who are carrying out processes and responding to events in a cooperative working environment. The panels support the tracking of personal or group issues, the planning and execution of activities and the checking of constraints. Panels can be connected to other panels, and also to a range of services, ag...

Abstract

An I-Room is an "intelligent room" which can act as a knowledge aid to support collaborative meetings and activities, especially when these involve making sense of the current situation, planning, considering options, and making decisions. The I-Room provides a generic technology platform for a wide range of potential collaborative applications and...

An I-Room is an "intelligent room" which can act as a knowledge aid to support collaborative meetings, especially those involving sense-making about the current context, planning and considering options, and decision-making. It can be used to provide an Emergency Response Virtual Collaboration Centre in a Virtual World. The I-Room will provide a ge...

Existing knowledge base resources have the potential to be valuable components of the Semantic Web and similar knowledge-based envi- ronments. However, from the perspective of these environments, these resources are often under- characterised, lacking the ontological and structural characterisation that would enable them to be ex- ploited fully. In...

The knowledge engineering world provides a rich source of software components for transforming formally ex- pressed knowledge on a large scale, such as induction systems, knowledge base refiners and ontology merging tools. Although most of these systems have been designed as stand-alone components, there is interest in making them ac- cessible on t...

The CoAKTinG (Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid) project has developed a set of integrated tools to enhance collaboration between e-Scientists. As one of three case studies, these tools are being applied within the Combechem e-Science pilot project. Two levels of integration are being explored: straightforward deployment of...

The role of the OpenKnowledge system is to support and enhance the sharing and the efiective use of information and services among difierent actors. In this document we analyze and present a set of scenarios related to emergency response upon which to test the Open- Knowledge system. In particular, we describe the general requirements of the emerge...

This paper describes a system that supports the distributed development and deployment of Standard Operating Procedures. The system is based on popular, open-source wiki software for the SOP development, and the I-X task-centric agent framework for deployment. A preliminary evaluation using an SOP for virtual collaboration is described and shows th...