Over the past ten years, AT&T Labs Cambridge has developed a variety of sensor systems for use indoors, for example 'The Active Badge' and 'The Active Bat' systems. These sensor technologies have been used to observe the location of people and equipment, and so produce some interesting applications such as the VNC Teleporting system. Unfortunately, those systems are expensive and cumbersome since they require battery-operated active tags and a network of ad-hoc sensors to be installed throughout a building.

The core of my PhD research has been to produce a novel low-cost and easily deployable 3-D location technology, termed TRIP (Target Recognition using Image Processing). TRIP uses the combination of circular bar codes attached to objects and low-resolution CCD cameras to extract, through Image Processing and Computer Vision techniques, the identifier and location of sighted targets.

In parallel to my research on TRIP, I have contributed with a couple of middleware services, namely LocALE and the ECA Service, that aid programmers in the development of sentient applications. LocALE is a CORBA-based infrastructure for the on-demand activation, migration, and deactivation of user associated software services. The ECA Service factors out the event correlation needs of sentient systems by monitoring the contextual situations expressed by the programmer through the ECA language. My publications page contains papers referring to all of these contributions.