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Research Programme Overview

The CLARITY research programme is comprised of a set of six Research Programmes (RPs) which in combination underpin a number of exemplar demonstrators described in Section 6 of this proposal. The research programmes address core basic research themes and each is sub-divided into a number of constituent work packages, as shown below.

The individual CLARITY research programmes are closely inter-related and can almost be considered as stack-like in their form and construction. Primarily RPs propagate their results to adjacent RPs reflecting the bi-direction flow of information from sensor to application through the various layers and back (see figure below). This is complemented by a series of cross RP interactions captured in the body of the RP descriptions below. The six RPs that have been identified are:

  1. RP1 - Devices and Materials. Basic research in materials science and sensing at the molecular level that will make fundamental contributions to next generation sensor devices and platforms;
  2. RP2 - Platforms. Research that ensures the instantiation of more sophisticated sensors, nodes/motes, systems software support, and the production of assemblies of devices that will feed into prototype deployments;
  3. RP3 - Autonomic Sensor Communities. Research issues arising from gathering, harmonising, filtering and disseminating data from within a heterogeneous, dynamic, failure prone and resourcebounded hierarchy of sensors;
  4. RP4 - Contextual Content Analysis. Fundamental techniques to analyse and understand only relevant content as carried by the sensed data, taking cognizance of the manner in which the required semantic information will eventually be used;
  5. RP5 - Content and Organisation and Management. Addresses significant issues in the management of sensed information including significant advances in how such information can be indexed, retrieved and accessed;
  6. RP6 - Personalization in Context. A suite of technologies in the service of serendipitous content discovery, whereby the needs, preferences, activities and context of individuals can help to drive the high-precision recommendation of relevant content to individual stakeholders and communities.

RP1, Devices and Materials, addresses fundamental issues relating to adaptive materials and the chemistry of delivering new generation chemical sensing. These technologies directly inform RP2, Platforms, which is concerned with the design, and aggregation of such technologies into sensing nodes, which are adaptive and offer some autonomic capabilities. RP3, Autonomic Sensor Communities, addresses the aggregation of individual sensing nodes investigating mechanisms and technologies for the effective filtering and aggregation of multi-modal sensory inputs as well as RP4, Contextual Content Analysis, takes the inputs of RP3 and utilizes this in the complex task of semantic knowledge extraction from sensor sources which are often noisy and of varying degrees of integrity and are possibly even possibly contradictory. RP5, Content Organisation and Management, addresses ways to manage raw captured information as well as derived information such as semantic descriptors. Finally, RP6, Personalization in Context, harnesses sensor platforms to develop rich profiles of user activities and inferred preferences and uses this information in combination with derived content and context in order to deliver personalized information services to individual stake-holders or groups.