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Mark Dunlop's Research

My research focuses on improving the usability of mobile systems through new interaction techniques - in particular, I have investigated text entry methods and visualisation methods for mobiles.

My research on mobiles spans the activities of the Mobiquitous Lab, Software Systems and i-Lab groups in the department.

Publications

I have over 70 publications, primarily in the domains of mobile usability and information retrieval.

Projects

Recently I have been involved in the following projects:

  • Supporting School Children with Mobiles: Building on relationships with Alastair Wilson in Education, James Irvine in EEE and Eva Hornecker we are looking into use of participatory design, social networks and mobile support for teenagers in high schools - initially funded by Bridging the Gap and working with Springburn Academy in Glasgow
  • Adaptxt: Through on-going collaboration, I support KeyPoint Technology's development of complex new text entry methods for Symbian and Windows Mobile phones.
  • TactileEntry: A short EPSRC funded summer internship project investigating the use of tactile feedback to help text entry on mobiles. Demo Video
  • Taeneb: A Scottish Enterprise project investigation provision of tourist information on handheld devices, on which I was joint principle investigator.
  • GLOSS: an EU funded project investigating global smart spaces for mobile computing on which I was an investigator with Strathclyde (the prime contractor)
  • At Risø:
    • Cogito: EU-FP5-IST project on e-commerce with guiding agents based on personalized interaction tools, on which I was the main contact and researcher at Risø until my departure;
    • Collate: EU-FP5-IST project on collaboratory for annotation, indexing and retrieval of digitised historical archive material;
    • Gris: Royal Society Exchange project on information seeking behaviours in structured document retrieval between Risø and QMUL;
    • Diceman: EU-FP4-ACTS project on Distributed internet content exchange with mpeg-7 and agent negotiations, I led Risø's involvement as subcontracted through Teltec Ireland DCU.

Together with Stephen Brewster of Glasgow University, we have co-organised four meetings of the International Workshop Series in Mobile HCI: MobileHCI 04 at Strathclyde, Mobile HCI 01 at IHM-HCI 2001 in Lille, Mobile HCI 99 at INTERACT '99 in Edinburgh, and MobileHCI 98 in Glasgow (with Chris Johnson). I am also a member of the international steering committee overseeing MobileHCI, a founding associate editor of the journals International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction and  Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, a member of the international editorial board of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, and was an associate notes chair for CHI 2008.

Chair's Clock

Since I regularly chair talks and seminars I got fed up juggling my watch, a pen, my memory and arithmetic and wrote a bit of J2ME to help me chair talks. This simple J2ME application starts by asking for the length of a session and the length of the question time. When running, it shows "time gone", "time to questions" and "time to end of slot" and gives reminders at 10, 5, 3, 1, 0 minutes depending on length of slot.

While this will work on all modern Java phones (bar the iPhone, come on Apple!), it was designed for a Nokia S60 with 240x320 screen (various problems with J2ME reduced portability of simple implementation and I don't have time to make screen size portable). If you want download and try. Let me know if it's useful and I might bother to make it more portable...

Download Chair's Clock: JAD (for over-air download to phone) JAR (for download via a "big computer")