Research
Educational and creative robotics, AI in safety critical systems, web technologies.
Educational and Creative Robotics
Since 2001, I have been actively involved in educational robotics research, a programme which began with anecdotal and attitudinal studies on how robotics appears to highly motivate children and encourage them to engage with scientific and technological problems. More recently, I have been focussing on the ways in which robotics activities may be used to develop science and mathematics curricula, as well as developing a model of Challenge Based Learning, which aspires to be an educational theory akin to problem-based learning.
Recently, we have launched the Creative Robotics Research Network (CRRN), an EPSRC funded research network established to promote the use of robotics, animatronics and mechatronics in the creative industries. For more information, please visit the CRRN website.
For more information on my educational robotics activities in general, please see the Open University Robotics Outreach Group webpages.
NEWSFLASH: IMA National Day Conference, Motivating Mathematics through Robotics, November 9th, 2004, Milton Keynes. Visit conference website.
AI in Safety Critical Systems
Many safety critical systems rely on the notion of redundancy to mask errors in parts of the system. In one class of safety critical systems, a voting unit decides on the 'true' value of a particular measurement or calculation on the basis of several redundant inputs which claim to be the 'true' value. This research programme is exploring the use various AI techniques in the implementation of novel voting algorithms. To date, work has concentrated on developing voters that use fuzzy logic or self-adaptive learning techniques, and has resulted in the development of several novel voting algorithms.
Web Technologies
Micro-information services area class of electronic information services that can be viewed via a WAP browser, communicated using very basic RSS feeds, or transmitted as a single SMS text messages, for example.
This area of research in particular seeks to explore the extent to which
microinfomation services can be used to support students wishing to study,
or currently studying, Higher Education courses. For more infomation, please
see the MicroInfo project
web pages OUseful Info blog.
The research is also geared towards identifying the sorts of webservices that are likely to be useful to current students in an HE environment. For more infomation, please see the OUseful Info project web pages.
