I’m going to take a little bit of time out from working on my dissertation to talk a little about my dissertation.
The research area that I’m looking at is location based information but rather than using GPS or some other type of lat/long coordinate system to provide the location I’m making use of the prevalent wifi that is in pretty much every business, home and place of learning in the country. By using this mass of radio signals it is possible to triangulate a position and then provide information relevant to it by using tags. These tags are (currently) simple strings associated with a vector created from the visible mac addresses and their signal strengths.
Then from this tag it is possible to provide the information that is relevant to it, e.g. your sat in a lecture theatre that you’ve previously tagged with “Advanced Artificial Intelligence” and “Magnus Bordewich” it will find information relevant to both of these tags, possibly lecture slides written by Magnus Bordewich on advanced artificial intelligence, with the stronger of the 2 tags giving a stronger weight to the information.
From this basis I will investigate how best to provide the user with the most relevant information and whether things such as user clustering and global tag sets have an appreciable effect on the relevance to the information they receive.
That in a nut shell is the basis of my project.