.: projects

The following is a list of current projects. There is scope within any of these for the definition of a PhD or MSc thesis.

VoiceYourView: Making Public Spaces Safer

http://www.voiceyourview.org

Funded by EPSRC, £855,221. http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/ViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/H007237/1, PI: Jon Whittle

Individuals experience significantly more stress from the fear of crime than from any direct experience of it. Sources such as Health Canada maintain that the physical environment (e.g. unused and empty spaces, poorly lit areas, areas obscured with trees and shrubs) contributes to these experiences. As an example, on university campuses, opportunities for attackers to hide can increase student fears. It is extremely challenging, however, to design public spaces that fully alleviate the public's concerns over their safety. This is due to a number of reasons: (i) even the best design processes cannot fully anticipate a user group's needs; (ii) usage patterns by the public are not fully known until the public space has been in use for some time; (iii) usage patterns naturally change over time as the role of the space in the community evolves. As a consequence, despite notable attempts at considering safety in the design of public environments - e.g., Vivacity 2020 - a priori design will never be able to fully satisfy the public's needs.

This proposal argues that users of a public space know the space best. It further contends that, at present, only a small proportion of users' views are taken into account during design. Design processes typically include public consultations before construction and post-occupancy evaluation surveys. However, relatively speaking, very few users provide input into these processes. On the other hand, all users have opinions about the spaces in which they live and work. As an example, a worker may mentally note that a pedestrian crossing is required at a busy intersection, but the pressures of modern life mean that s/he is unlikely ever to feed back this comment to the local council. This kind of knowledge - which people possess but may not realize its importance to others - is termed tacit knowledge. The VoiceYourView project aims to mobilise the tacit knowledge of a community to transform public spaces to be safer and more inclusive.

The VoiceYourView concept is best illustrated by example. Imagine a park in central England. Mary is 72 years old and walks her dog every day. On her route, at dusk, she hesitates as she walks past a large shrub, fearing what is behind. Judy is 26. Her jogging route takes her into areas of the park that are poorly lit and she is afraid. Paul is 43 and takes his children to the park but is concerned that the bandstand is becoming a magnet for teenage drinking parties. Today, Mary, Judy and Paul each have limited ways of communicating their tacit knowledge to the appropriate people. They would need to compose a letter - which is unlikely given the time stresses on their daily lives. The goal of VoiceYourView is to provide Mary, Judy and Paul with a way to record their feedback in real-time at the moment it occurs to them in the park rather than having to wait until it is forgotten about. In this way, VoiceYourView will collect real-time information that can then be structured, stored in an online repository, and exchanged with appropriate stakeholders: other users, local community groups, local authorities, etc. The hypothesis is that, by so doing, VoiceYourView will lead to public space designs that are more attuned to the needs of their users and, in particular, do a better job at alleviating their safety concerns.

We will design inclusive input devices for the collection of tacit knowledge in public spaces and will implement a repository that will use techniques from artificial intelligence (AI) to filter, structure and classify this knowledge. We will conduct a series of trials in key public areas - including Derry city walls and Coventry underpass - to drive and evaluate VoiceYourView research. We will undertake basic research to understand how VoiceYourView requirements are impacted by existing crime trends and how VoiceYourView fits into and influences existing design processes. VoiceYourView is a partnership between five universities and associated partners and will take place over a three year period.

Our role in VoiceYourView is to design and implement the opinion-capturing technology. Models are at the core of the implementation technology - both in how the software is being developed and in how the data collected is processed.

EA-MDE: An Empirical Assessment of the Efficacy of Model-Driven Engineering

Funded by EPSRC, £132,770. http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/ViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/H006249/1, PI: Jon Whittle

The complexity and pervasiveness of software in society is growing exponentially. It is generally agreed that the only realistic way to manage this complexity, and to continue to provide software benefits to the public at large, is to develop software using appropriate methods of abstraction. Today, the state-of-the-art in software abstraction is model-driven engineering (MDE) - that is, the systematic use of models as primary artefacts during a software engineering process. MDE includes various model-driven approaches to software development, including model-driven architecture, domain-specific modelling, and model-integrated computing.

Although MDE claims many potential benefits - chiefly, gains in productivity, portability, maintainability and interoperability - it has been developed largely without the support of empirical data to test these claims. As a result, decisions whether or not to use MDE are based mainly on expert opinion rather than hard empirical data; and these opinions often diverge. The lack of empirical results on MDE is a problem for two reasons.

Firstly, industry invests millions in the development and application of MDE tools. Without empirical evidence of the efficacy of these tools, there is a danger that resources are being wasted. Whether or not the current brand of MDE tools succeeds, the notion of abstract models is crucial to the future of software. Empirical evaluations are needed to ensure that future software tools will match the way that software developers think.

Secondly, academia also invests significantly in MDE in the form of PhD theses and research papers. This research is rarely informed by empirical evidence, which means that it is difficult for funding bodies to properly assess the usefulness of research results. One issue is that early-career researchers lack the multidisciplinary knowledge that is inherently required - that is, knowledge both of MDE and the psychological know-how of conducting experiments. Another problem is simply that empirical evaluation in MDE is hard. Rigorous evaluations ought to engage industry over lengthy periods of time, but industry is often reluctant to get involved because it cannot see immediate benefits of a novel research technique.

The proposed research will address these two problems by developing a framework for empirical evaluation of MDE that is informed by current industry practice and needs and is available to researchers to use and adapt it as necessary. The overall goal of the research is to address fundamental questions as to how empirical evaluations can best be integrated with MDE research and practice as well as to provide steps toward a scientific foundation for MDE evaluation and adoption.

This is a 12 month pilot project. This is for the following reason. The challenges of empirically evaluating MDE are fundamentally hard. Since there has been very little research in this area, a feasibility study would be beneficial before investing further resources. We will use this pilot phase to map out the MDE evaluation landscape and to develop an initial evaluation framework. We view the pilot as phase I of a two phase effort to provide a scientific foundation for MDE evaluation. We plan to use the results of the pilot to support a follow-on phase II effort that will propose: a theory of software modellers' cognitive processes; a more detailed evaluation framework; and a new generation of MDE tools.

NOTE: there is an OPEN POSITION on this project. If interested, please contact Prof. Whittle.