Research themes

Our core activities were centred around networking and communications, multimedia, mobility, and distributed systems. Typically our method was to prototype hardware, systems and applications for each research topic we explore. Our approach was intensely practical, and we focused on building large scale working systems, which we deployed widely both within our laboratory and within the University. Great care was taken to facilitate the sharing of technology and research results between projects, for example by the use of a common distributed systems framework.

Some of these projects live on either at companies previously spun-out, or at the The Digital Technology Group.

Publications archive 1986 -- 2002

Technical reports and publications from our research.

Some of our lab videos are available for download.

Projects continuing within the The Digital Technology Group

The Collapsed LAN project is exploring low-latency high bandwidth interconnect.

Sentient Computing provides a new kind of user interface that extends throughout space.

Projects from the recent past

	The Broadband Phone System was a radical approach to providing everyday communications for the new millennium.
	Distributed Systems using CORBA.
	The Personal Media Management project aimed to provide a coherent set of tools and storage architecture for managing archives of digital media.
	The Augmented Vehicle project looked at making car travel easier, safer, quicker and more enjoyable.
	The Consumer Broadband project worked towards a future of fibre and high speed wireless access to the home.

	The Location Systems project investigated how computers can sense what's happening in their environment.
	The Augmented Reality project used head mounted displays and PDAs to extend the users' senses.
	Virtual Network Computing, remote cross-platform access to PC or Unix desktops.
	JCN was our low-power, highly-configurable, full-featured embedded processor for mobile applications.

Projects from earlier times

	The Active Badge system continues to be important in much of our research.
	Some early ATM work resulted in a fabric of ATM switches.
	Smart ATM Modules were multimedia peripherals which complimented the ATM switches.
	Medusa was a software environment for creating multimedia applications.
	The Teleporting System was a novel approach to mobile computing.
	Our interest in networking extends to Broadband Radio ATM.
	VMR - Video Mail Retrieval using speech recognition.
	The DART project brought information retrieval to multimedia.
	AMIE - a European Commission funded project.

	The 868MHz radio module was a project to develop a low-power, 200kb/s radio module for use in future wireless projects.
	pen was our low-power, short-range radio networking system.
	Early networking research was based on slotted ring technologies.
	The Pandora System was our first major multimedia project.
	The Streams Project brought mobility to multimedia.
	The face database used for part of our face recognition project is available for download.
	Multiworks - a European Commission funded project.
	Computer Architecture

Commercial spin-offs

Virata Corporation develops semiconductors and communications software for Internet access equipment suppliers.

IPV (Internet Pro Video) is a multinational high technology company founded in 1995 as Telemedia Systems Ltd. to develop, market and license advanced technologies that empower flexibility in the storage, management, delivery, access and retrieval of digital media over any type of network.

Born out of an earlier spin-out, Adaptive Broadband Ltd, Cambridge Broadband is a supplier of carrier class point-to-multipoint broadband wireless access equipment for high-capacity multi-service networks