Stuart Allen - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Stuart Allen

Research paper thumbnail of Optimisation of BFWA networks using emergent intelligence

Communications, Internet, and Information Technology, 2004

This paper presents a detailed account of a novel scheme for finding profit optimal BFWA networks... more This paper presents a detailed account of a novel scheme for finding profit optimal BFWA networks, extending an existing network optimisation tool, and using the principles of emergent, self-organising systems. We describe how populations of agents representing potential users and base sites will disseminate and react to 'local' information to optimise global objectives. The use of two distinct types of

Research paper thumbnail of Interruptibility prediction for ubiquitous systems

Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing - UbiComp '15, 2015

ABSTRACT

Research paper thumbnail of Automatic design of fixed wireless access networks

International Journal of Mobile Network Design and Innovation, Mar 20, 2015

ABSTRACT

Research paper thumbnail of Checking out checking in : observations on Foursquare usage patterns

Research paper thumbnail of Measuring Individual Regularity in Human Visiting Patterns

Proceedings of the 2012 Ase Ieee International Conference on Social Computing and 2012 Ase Ieee International Conference on Privacy Security Risk and Trust, Sep 3, 2012

ABSTRACT The ability to quantify the level of regularity in an individual's patterns of v... more ABSTRACT The ability to quantify the level of regularity in an individual's patterns of visiting a particular location provides valuable context in many areas, such as urban planning, reality mining, and opportunistic networks. However, in many cases, visit data is only available as zero-duration events, precluding the application of methods that require continuous, densely-sampled data. To address this, our approach in this paper takes inspiration from an established body of research in the neural coding community that deals with the similar problem of finding patterns in event-based data. We adapt a neural synchrony measure to develop a method of quantifying the regularity of an individual's visits to a location, where regularity is defined as the level of similarity in weekly visiting patterns. We apply this method to study regularity in three real-world datasets, specifically, a metropolitan transport system, a university campus, and an online location-sharing service. Among our findings we identify a core group of individuals in each dataset that visited at least one location with near-perfect regularity.

Research paper thumbnail of The Effect of Base Station Mast Height on Broadband Fixed Wireless Network Design and Profitability

This paper uses an automated cell planning tool to access the effect of base station mast heights... more This paper uses an automated cell planning tool to access the effect of base station mast heights on network design and profitability when planning Broadband Fixed Wireless Access (BFWA) networks (at 28 and 40 GHz). ECHO (1, 2), the tool used, was developed in the IST project EMBRACE (3) The results confirm the expected result that increasing mast height results

Research paper thumbnail of The Personality of Venues: Places and the Five-Factors ('Big Five') Model of Personality

2013 Fourth International Conference on Computing for Geospatial Research and Application, 2013

Research paper thumbnail of Interruptibility Prediction for Ubiquitous Systems: Conventions and New Directions from a Growing Field

Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, 2015

When should a machine attempt to communicate with a user? This is a historical problem that has b... more When should a machine attempt to communicate with a user? This is a historical problem that has been studied since the rise of personal computing. More recently, the emergence of pervasive technologies such as the smartphone have extended the problem to be ever-present in our daily lives, opening up new opportunities for context awareness through data collection and reasoning. Complementary to this there has been increasing interest in techniques to intelligently synchronise interruptions with human behaviour and cognition. However, it is increasingly challenging to categorise new developments, which are often scenario specific or scope a problem with particular unique features. In this paper we present a meta-analysis of this area, decomposing and comparing historical and recent works that seek to understand and predict how users will perceive and respond to interruptions. In doing so we identify research gaps, questions and opportunities that characterise this important emerging field for pervasive technology.

Research paper thumbnail of Push or Delay? Decomposing Smartphone Notification Response Behaviour

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2015

ABSTRACT

Research paper thumbnail of Retweeting: A study of message-forwarding in twitter

2011 Workshop on Mobile and Online Social Networks, 2011

... The same graph representing the effective audience size (calculated with the addition of non-... more ... The same graph representing the effective audience size (calculated with the addition of non-distinct users) represents, mostly, a continuous positive ... This is an interesting area since it enables researchers to see how fast messages propagate through the Twittersphere. ...

Research paper thumbnail of Crowdsourcing through Cognitive Opportunistic Networks

ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, 2015

ABSTRACT Until recently crowdsourcing has been primarily conceived as an online activity to harne... more ABSTRACT Until recently crowdsourcing has been primarily conceived as an online activity to harness resources for problem solving. However, the emergence of Opportunistic Networking (ON) has opened up crowdsourcing to the spatial domain. In this article, we bring the ON model for potential crowdsourcing in the smart city environment. We introduce cognitive features of the ON that allow users’ mobile devices to become aware of the surrounding physical environment. Specifically, we exploit cognitive psychology studies on dynamic memory structures and cognitive heuristics—mental models that describe how the human brain handles decision making among complex and real-time stimuli. Combined with ON, these cognitive features allow devices to act as proxies in their users’ cyberworlds and exchange knowledge to deliver awareness of places in an urban environment. This is done through tags associated with locations. They represent features that are perceived by humans about a place. We consider the extent to which this knowledge becomes available to participants using interactions with locations and other nodes. This is assessed taking into account a wide range of cognitive parameters. Outcomes are important because this functionality could support a new type of recommendation system that is independent of the traditional forms of networking.

Research paper thumbnail of Automated hybrid cost-optimised network design

... We will illustrate the Automated hybrid cost-optimised network design STUART M. ALLEN, STEVE ... more ... We will illustrate the Automated hybrid cost-optimised network design STUART M. ALLEN, STEVE HURLEY, DESMOND M. RYAN, RICHARD K. TAPLIN Stuart M. Allen is a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University Stephen Hurley is a Professor at Cardiff University ...

Research paper thumbnail of 001930 BROADWAN Deliverable D21 Planning guidelines for broadband access networks with case studies

This report presents guidelines for planning broadband access networks. Seven topics are gathered... more This report presents guidelines for planning broadband access networks. Seven topics are gathered in the report, describing the services and their requirements, how to determine the required capacity, description of some important constraints, possible architectures, some cost issues, how to determine if a deployment can be profitable and case studies illustrating detailed planning of a wireless network, respectively. The latter

Research paper thumbnail of Collective spatial awareness

2013 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC), 2013

ABSTRACT Enquiring about and understanding what is going on around ourselves is a fundamental and... more ABSTRACT Enquiring about and understanding what is going on around ourselves is a fundamental and natural human behaviour. The psychological concept of sense of place considers our individual perceptions of particular locations at particular times. In addition to the immediate properties of our environment, it is also strongly dependent on our individual traits, purpose and relationships as they evolve and adapt over time. In this paper we examine how new approaches to participatory ICT can support heightened levels of sense of place through the development of a parallel concept for collective spatial awareness in ICT systems. We discuss how this could be used as the basis for autonomous processing, acquisition and exchange of spatially relevant information and knowledge.

Research paper thumbnail of Inferring the Interesting Tweets in Your Network

2013 International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing, 2013

ABSTRACT As the demand for quick, live and relevant information increases, more people look to mi... more ABSTRACT As the demand for quick, live and relevant information increases, more people look to microblogging sites, such as Twitter, as a source of content. Retweeting acts as a filter of useful information for users with more interesting information likely to be disseminated further through the network. "Interestingness" denotes the level of interest in a particular Tweet and we believe this has an influence on the retweetability of a Tweet. In this paper we introduce a method based on a Bayesian Network for inferring the relative interestingness of a Tweet based on its retweet history, including a scoring system for determining the level of interestingness. We show the results of our work in inferring which Tweets are interesting and validate the success of our scoring system in detecting globally interesting information.

Research paper thumbnail of Measuring individual regularity in human visiting patterns

ABSTRACT The ability to quantify the level of regularity in an individual's patterns of v... more ABSTRACT The ability to quantify the level of regularity in an individual's patterns of visiting a particular location provides valuable context in many areas, such as urban planning, reality mining, and opportunistic networks. However, in many cases, visit data is only available as zero-duration events, precluding the application of methods that require continuous, densely-sampled data. To address this, our approach in this paper takes inspiration from an established body of research in the neural coding community that deals with the similar problem of finding patterns in event-based data. We adapt a neural synchrony measure to develop a method of quantifying the regularity of an individual's visits to a location, where regularity is defined as the level of similarity in weekly visiting patterns. We apply this method to study regularity in three real-world datasets, specifically, a metropolitan transport system, a university campus, and an online location-sharing service. Among our findings we identify a core group of individuals in each dataset that visited at least one location with near-perfect regularity.

Research paper thumbnail of Will you like this place? A tag-based place representation approach

ABSTRACT Increasingly popular location-based services can monitor our geographical positions in r... more ABSTRACT Increasingly popular location-based services can monitor our geographical positions in real time and so can provide a fundamental source for capturing users feelings and personal attitudes towards a particular place at a particular time. We propose a novel procedure for the representation of places through weighted tag-lists based on user reviews on these type of services. In our method the resulting lists can be built according to different criteria aiming to highlight differences and similarities among locations that can be in geographical proximity, belong to a similar type/category, or be included in the personal mobility history of a specific user.

Research paper thumbnail of You are where you eat: Foursquare checkins as indicators of human mobility and behaviour

2012 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, PERCOM Workshops 2012, 2012

Abstract Location-sharing services such as Foursquare provide a rich source of information about ... more Abstract Location-sharing services such as Foursquare provide a rich source of information about the visits of users to locations. In the case of Foursquare, users voluntarilycheck in'to places they visit using a mobile application. An analysis of these data may reveal differences in users personality in terms of their mobility habits, preferred places, and action and location patterns. This knowledge about user behaviour can be used, in addition to information about their preferences, to improve current recommendation systems for ...

Research paper thumbnail of Algorithms for the Automatic Design of WiMAX networks

The 2007 International Conference on Next Generation Mobile Applications, Services and Technologies (NGMAST 2007), 2007

... IST Mobile and Wireless Telecommunications Summit, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2002. [2] RK Taplin,... more ... IST Mobile and Wireless Telecommunications Summit, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2002. [2] RK Taplin, SM Allen, S. Cirstea, KH Craig, S. Hurley, WD Miners, J. Norbury, and M. Willis. Cell planning optimisation tool. Technical report, EMBRACE public deliverable D17, 2002. ...

Research paper thumbnail of Modelling and planning fixed wireless networks

Research paper thumbnail of Optimisation of BFWA networks using emergent intelligence

Communications, Internet, and Information Technology, 2004

This paper presents a detailed account of a novel scheme for finding profit optimal BFWA networks... more This paper presents a detailed account of a novel scheme for finding profit optimal BFWA networks, extending an existing network optimisation tool, and using the principles of emergent, self-organising systems. We describe how populations of agents representing potential users and base sites will disseminate and react to 'local' information to optimise global objectives. The use of two distinct types of

Research paper thumbnail of Interruptibility prediction for ubiquitous systems

Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing - UbiComp '15, 2015

ABSTRACT

Research paper thumbnail of Automatic design of fixed wireless access networks

International Journal of Mobile Network Design and Innovation, Mar 20, 2015

ABSTRACT

Research paper thumbnail of Checking out checking in : observations on Foursquare usage patterns

Research paper thumbnail of Measuring Individual Regularity in Human Visiting Patterns

Proceedings of the 2012 Ase Ieee International Conference on Social Computing and 2012 Ase Ieee International Conference on Privacy Security Risk and Trust, Sep 3, 2012

ABSTRACT The ability to quantify the level of regularity in an individual's patterns of v... more ABSTRACT The ability to quantify the level of regularity in an individual's patterns of visiting a particular location provides valuable context in many areas, such as urban planning, reality mining, and opportunistic networks. However, in many cases, visit data is only available as zero-duration events, precluding the application of methods that require continuous, densely-sampled data. To address this, our approach in this paper takes inspiration from an established body of research in the neural coding community that deals with the similar problem of finding patterns in event-based data. We adapt a neural synchrony measure to develop a method of quantifying the regularity of an individual's visits to a location, where regularity is defined as the level of similarity in weekly visiting patterns. We apply this method to study regularity in three real-world datasets, specifically, a metropolitan transport system, a university campus, and an online location-sharing service. Among our findings we identify a core group of individuals in each dataset that visited at least one location with near-perfect regularity.

Research paper thumbnail of The Effect of Base Station Mast Height on Broadband Fixed Wireless Network Design and Profitability

This paper uses an automated cell planning tool to access the effect of base station mast heights... more This paper uses an automated cell planning tool to access the effect of base station mast heights on network design and profitability when planning Broadband Fixed Wireless Access (BFWA) networks (at 28 and 40 GHz). ECHO (1, 2), the tool used, was developed in the IST project EMBRACE (3) The results confirm the expected result that increasing mast height results

Research paper thumbnail of The Personality of Venues: Places and the Five-Factors ('Big Five') Model of Personality

2013 Fourth International Conference on Computing for Geospatial Research and Application, 2013

Research paper thumbnail of Interruptibility Prediction for Ubiquitous Systems: Conventions and New Directions from a Growing Field

Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, 2015

When should a machine attempt to communicate with a user? This is a historical problem that has b... more When should a machine attempt to communicate with a user? This is a historical problem that has been studied since the rise of personal computing. More recently, the emergence of pervasive technologies such as the smartphone have extended the problem to be ever-present in our daily lives, opening up new opportunities for context awareness through data collection and reasoning. Complementary to this there has been increasing interest in techniques to intelligently synchronise interruptions with human behaviour and cognition. However, it is increasingly challenging to categorise new developments, which are often scenario specific or scope a problem with particular unique features. In this paper we present a meta-analysis of this area, decomposing and comparing historical and recent works that seek to understand and predict how users will perceive and respond to interruptions. In doing so we identify research gaps, questions and opportunities that characterise this important emerging field for pervasive technology.

Research paper thumbnail of Push or Delay? Decomposing Smartphone Notification Response Behaviour

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2015

ABSTRACT

Research paper thumbnail of Retweeting: A study of message-forwarding in twitter

2011 Workshop on Mobile and Online Social Networks, 2011

... The same graph representing the effective audience size (calculated with the addition of non-... more ... The same graph representing the effective audience size (calculated with the addition of non-distinct users) represents, mostly, a continuous positive ... This is an interesting area since it enables researchers to see how fast messages propagate through the Twittersphere. ...

Research paper thumbnail of Crowdsourcing through Cognitive Opportunistic Networks

ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, 2015

ABSTRACT Until recently crowdsourcing has been primarily conceived as an online activity to harne... more ABSTRACT Until recently crowdsourcing has been primarily conceived as an online activity to harness resources for problem solving. However, the emergence of Opportunistic Networking (ON) has opened up crowdsourcing to the spatial domain. In this article, we bring the ON model for potential crowdsourcing in the smart city environment. We introduce cognitive features of the ON that allow users’ mobile devices to become aware of the surrounding physical environment. Specifically, we exploit cognitive psychology studies on dynamic memory structures and cognitive heuristics—mental models that describe how the human brain handles decision making among complex and real-time stimuli. Combined with ON, these cognitive features allow devices to act as proxies in their users’ cyberworlds and exchange knowledge to deliver awareness of places in an urban environment. This is done through tags associated with locations. They represent features that are perceived by humans about a place. We consider the extent to which this knowledge becomes available to participants using interactions with locations and other nodes. This is assessed taking into account a wide range of cognitive parameters. Outcomes are important because this functionality could support a new type of recommendation system that is independent of the traditional forms of networking.

Research paper thumbnail of Automated hybrid cost-optimised network design

... We will illustrate the Automated hybrid cost-optimised network design STUART M. ALLEN, STEVE ... more ... We will illustrate the Automated hybrid cost-optimised network design STUART M. ALLEN, STEVE HURLEY, DESMOND M. RYAN, RICHARD K. TAPLIN Stuart M. Allen is a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University Stephen Hurley is a Professor at Cardiff University ...

Research paper thumbnail of 001930 BROADWAN Deliverable D21 Planning guidelines for broadband access networks with case studies

This report presents guidelines for planning broadband access networks. Seven topics are gathered... more This report presents guidelines for planning broadband access networks. Seven topics are gathered in the report, describing the services and their requirements, how to determine the required capacity, description of some important constraints, possible architectures, some cost issues, how to determine if a deployment can be profitable and case studies illustrating detailed planning of a wireless network, respectively. The latter

Research paper thumbnail of Collective spatial awareness

2013 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC), 2013

ABSTRACT Enquiring about and understanding what is going on around ourselves is a fundamental and... more ABSTRACT Enquiring about and understanding what is going on around ourselves is a fundamental and natural human behaviour. The psychological concept of sense of place considers our individual perceptions of particular locations at particular times. In addition to the immediate properties of our environment, it is also strongly dependent on our individual traits, purpose and relationships as they evolve and adapt over time. In this paper we examine how new approaches to participatory ICT can support heightened levels of sense of place through the development of a parallel concept for collective spatial awareness in ICT systems. We discuss how this could be used as the basis for autonomous processing, acquisition and exchange of spatially relevant information and knowledge.

Research paper thumbnail of Inferring the Interesting Tweets in Your Network

2013 International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing, 2013

ABSTRACT As the demand for quick, live and relevant information increases, more people look to mi... more ABSTRACT As the demand for quick, live and relevant information increases, more people look to microblogging sites, such as Twitter, as a source of content. Retweeting acts as a filter of useful information for users with more interesting information likely to be disseminated further through the network. "Interestingness" denotes the level of interest in a particular Tweet and we believe this has an influence on the retweetability of a Tweet. In this paper we introduce a method based on a Bayesian Network for inferring the relative interestingness of a Tweet based on its retweet history, including a scoring system for determining the level of interestingness. We show the results of our work in inferring which Tweets are interesting and validate the success of our scoring system in detecting globally interesting information.

Research paper thumbnail of Measuring individual regularity in human visiting patterns

ABSTRACT The ability to quantify the level of regularity in an individual's patterns of v... more ABSTRACT The ability to quantify the level of regularity in an individual's patterns of visiting a particular location provides valuable context in many areas, such as urban planning, reality mining, and opportunistic networks. However, in many cases, visit data is only available as zero-duration events, precluding the application of methods that require continuous, densely-sampled data. To address this, our approach in this paper takes inspiration from an established body of research in the neural coding community that deals with the similar problem of finding patterns in event-based data. We adapt a neural synchrony measure to develop a method of quantifying the regularity of an individual's visits to a location, where regularity is defined as the level of similarity in weekly visiting patterns. We apply this method to study regularity in three real-world datasets, specifically, a metropolitan transport system, a university campus, and an online location-sharing service. Among our findings we identify a core group of individuals in each dataset that visited at least one location with near-perfect regularity.

Research paper thumbnail of Will you like this place? A tag-based place representation approach

ABSTRACT Increasingly popular location-based services can monitor our geographical positions in r... more ABSTRACT Increasingly popular location-based services can monitor our geographical positions in real time and so can provide a fundamental source for capturing users feelings and personal attitudes towards a particular place at a particular time. We propose a novel procedure for the representation of places through weighted tag-lists based on user reviews on these type of services. In our method the resulting lists can be built according to different criteria aiming to highlight differences and similarities among locations that can be in geographical proximity, belong to a similar type/category, or be included in the personal mobility history of a specific user.

Research paper thumbnail of You are where you eat: Foursquare checkins as indicators of human mobility and behaviour

2012 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, PERCOM Workshops 2012, 2012

Abstract Location-sharing services such as Foursquare provide a rich source of information about ... more Abstract Location-sharing services such as Foursquare provide a rich source of information about the visits of users to locations. In the case of Foursquare, users voluntarilycheck in'to places they visit using a mobile application. An analysis of these data may reveal differences in users personality in terms of their mobility habits, preferred places, and action and location patterns. This knowledge about user behaviour can be used, in addition to information about their preferences, to improve current recommendation systems for ...

Research paper thumbnail of Algorithms for the Automatic Design of WiMAX networks

The 2007 International Conference on Next Generation Mobile Applications, Services and Technologies (NGMAST 2007), 2007

... IST Mobile and Wireless Telecommunications Summit, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2002. [2] RK Taplin,... more ... IST Mobile and Wireless Telecommunications Summit, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2002. [2] RK Taplin, SM Allen, S. Cirstea, KH Craig, S. Hurley, WD Miners, J. Norbury, and M. Willis. Cell planning optimisation tool. Technical report, EMBRACE public deliverable D17, 2002. ...

Research paper thumbnail of Modelling and planning fixed wireless networks