I. Barry Crabtree

BT

Content-Centric Networks have been designed for the shift in the focus of the Internet from being a point-to-point IP network to a Content Store-and-Forward network based on naming the content, not the location. Requesting by name, rather than location allows content caching to be integrated as a fundamental part of the network infrastructure. This...

A field trial of Quality driven Video Streaming is described and shows how we can achieve approximately a 40% reduction in byte volume for adaptive constant quality delivery compared to adaptive constant bitrate delivery while maintaining the equivalent overall quality. The trials were carried out over BT's broadband network.

Instead of constant bit rate encoding and delivery with the known problems of variable quality, not fully using the network at all times, and session rejection, we describe a system in which independent video servers, by using a set of fixed quality encodings and analyzing the statistics of the encoded video they are about to deliver, vary the aggr...

Video streaming has frequently been deployed using constant bit rate video encoding and transmission as these are easily implemented and network provisioning, although requiring admission control, is straightforward. However, it is sub-optimal for both the user, who experiences time varying quality, and the network operator, who cannot fully utiliz...

Video streaming has frequently been deployed using constant bit rate video encoding and transmission as these are easily implemented and network provisioning, although requiring admission control, is straightforward. However, it is sub-optimal for both the user, who experiences time varying quality, and the network operator, who can not fully utili...

We describe an equitable quality video streaming system where the video server dynamically selects between multiple versions of video content coded at different fixed quality levels, and dynamically selects transmission rates for each video session so that the network bandwidth is divided between concurrent users such that they receive equal video...

Portable devices are becoming increasingly capable of rendering high quality music and videos providing the capability for entertainment on the move. Deploying content onto those devices is often time consuming, requiring significant amounts of user intervention and prone to failure. Streaming systems can potentially offer very large catalogues, bu...

This paper presents the results of measuring the Hurst parameter for a wide selection of video sequences encoded with H.264 compression with constant quantization index. Six techniques for measuring the Hurst parameter are compared and used on the source data. The Hurst parameter was found to have an average value of 0.9, with a minimum of about 0....

Many important and useful applications for software agents require multiple agents on a network that communicate with each other. Such agents must find each other and perform a useful joint computation without having to know about every other such agent on the network. This paper describes Yenta, a matchmaker system designed to find people with sim...

Current generation, large-scale, Internet protocol television (IPTV) systems borrow heavily from the broadcast industry, which makes a number of delivery assumptions that do not apply to IP networks. Consequently we can perceive major improvements if we better match the delivery of IPTV services with the underlying network transport. We can expect...

This paper presents a system for generating non-verbal communication behaviour suitable for characters in interactive narrative. It is possible to customise the behaviour of individual character using a system of character profiles. This allows characters to have a strong individuality and personality. These same profiles also allow the characters’...

Computer generated characters are now commonplace in television and film. In some media productions like the Matrix^TM they feature as frequently as the real cast. A visual media that is being explored by the research community is that of real-time improvisational theatre using virtual characters. This is a non-trivial problem with many research ch...

The introduction of consumer broadband makes it possible to have an emotionally much richer experience of the internet. One way of achieving this is the use of animated characters endowed with emotionally expressive behaviour. This paper describes Demeanour, a framework for generating expressive behaviour, developed collaboratively by University Co...

Computer generated characters are now commonplace in television and film. In some media productions like the Matrix^TM they feature as frequently as the real cast. A visual media that is being explored by the research community is that of real-time improvisational theatre using virtual characters. This is a non-trivial problem with many research ch...

The introduction of consumer broadband makes it possible to have an emotionally much richer experience of the Internet. One way of achieving this is the use of animated characters endowed with emotionally expressive behaviour. This paper describes Demeanour, a framework for generating expressive behaviour, developed collaboratively by University Co...

This paper gives an overview of the field of wearable computing. It covers the key differences between wearables and other portable computers, and discusses issues with the design and application for wearables. There then follows a specific example, the wearable remembrance agent --- a proactive memory aid. The paper concludes with discussion of fu...

This article introduces telempathy, a complementary form of telecommunications in which the presence and activity of remote people is presented using ambient displays. This paper focuses on the 'awareness' of people's activities as a precursor to more conventional forms of telecommunications. Initial research is described in which a framework for s...

Wearable computers provide constant access to computing and communications resources. We describe how the computing power of wearables can enhance computer mediated communications, with a focus upon collaborative working. In particular we describe the ideal of contextual communications, where contextual cues collected by the wearable computer are u...

Personalised information systems require a profile of the user in order to function effectively. Typically such systems require users to supply a set of keywords which describe their interests. The research presented in this paper derives user interest profiles automatically by monitoring user web and email habits. A clustering algorithm is employe...

Personal agents are an important advance in the management of electronic information. Accurate user profiling is critical to the personalisation of agent-based services. In this paper we describe a framework for personal agents, which provides a range of services using a common user profile. The user profile is automatically learned from observatio...

Software agents have come a long way in the last ten or so years. This paper looks at the practical challenges many software agent developers face including: interfacing to legacy systems; developing distributed systems; agent competence; and trust and privacy issues. Because it covers such a broad area, it will focus on how the problems and issues...

Agent technology is able to provide increasingly more services for individuals, groups and organisations. Services such as information finding, filtering and presentation, service/contract negotiation, and electronic commerce are now possible. User profiling is fundamental to the personalisation of this technology. This paper describes experimental...

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the development of agent technology. Agent systems have been applied to many areas, but undoubtedly the most widely publicised application area has been the Internet. The size of the Internet and the subsequent large volume of information has spawned agents which can search, filter, recommend and presen...

This paper describes the design philosophy and implementation of a system which manages the location, retrieval and processing of multimedia information for mobile customers. The system uses intelligent agents in all aspects of management and allocation of service components to perform the most appropriate translation and movement of information th...

Controlling a large telephony network requires fast response, flexibility and expertise. An expert system for performing traffic management in BT's UK telephony network is described that is both fast and flexible. The choice of the Prolog as the main implementation language allows us great flexibility in how we represent the problem and for rapid p...

An intelligent planning system is an example of a software aid which, although developed by specialists in artificial intelligence and customised for a particular application by knowledge engineers, is intended eventually to be used by non-programmers for a wide variety of tasks. The aim of the project described is to experiment with the use of Eng...

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the development of agent technology. Agent systems have been applied to many areas, but undoubtedly the most widely publicised application area has been the Internet. The size of the Internet and the subsequent large volume of information has spawned agents which can search, filter, recommend and presen...