The mobisys seminar series had its first presentation of the (academic) year today. We decided to slightly change the format. Instead of having a single speaker present for 45 minutes, we would have short research-pitches; that way, the various old and new group members could introduce themselves and their work to each other. We were also very happy to have Birkbeck researchers present, since a lot of their work has strong overlaps with what is going on in the mobisys group.

By last night, I had about 19 speakers ready to present: way too many! So I decided to break the minute-madness presentations into two sessions. The first was today, centred around the theme of pervasive computing. The second session, broadly categorised as social computing, will be in the coming weeks.

Each speaker had 4 minutes to introduce and overview their work (and were promptly interrupted by my annoying alarm clock sound if they went over): the slides are below. The whole idea of these sessions is to highlight how many people are working on similar problems and to foster discussion (perhaps in an effort to combat “phd depression?”)- unfortunately we did not have much time for the latter today, and I hope that we will in future events.

We rounded up the session with an overview of current research projects going on in the respective departments by Steve Hailes and George Roussos.