Yesterday (Wednesday, 3rd December) I had the honour of being invited along to Trinity College, Dublin, to give a slightly modified version of the presentation I gave at the recent Drupal Ireland Meetup on TA-DA (our mobile browser test suite) – which I’ve attached to the end of this post.
Declan O’Sullivan, Rob Brennan, and the kind people in the Knowledge and Data Engineering Group (KDEG) also offered to present some of their own work to me if I were to pop over for a couple of hours, so I willingly obliged!
The ‘new and improved’ revision of the presentation contained a couple of extra slides, and some small tweaks here and there, to allow me to gear the talk towards a more technical audience. This also gave me much more freedom in how I actually approached the whole thing, as I knew in advance that the people I would be talking to were both actively involved in technical development/research, and interested in what I had to say (at least, I hope they were …)
After my own presentation, there were a number of highly relevant questions which led into a small discussion at the break (free tea & sandwiches – truly they know how to keep me happy) including the ever-present elephant-in-the-room:
[quote]How do you balance data from manufacturers (Dan: such as Apple) and what they say about their devices? (Dan: such as Bluetooth support)[/quote]
This question is a tricky one to answer. The example I used in response to it, was the iPhone, and its support of the Bluetooth stack.
Technically, the iPhone is 100% compliant with Bluetooth, insofar as to say that it supports what it says it supports completely. If you have a look at the full list of Bluetooth Profiles available, you’ll see that there are quite a few. Of this rather long list of 28 profiles, the iPhone only actually claims support for 2 – Hands Free, and Headset. As I already mentioned, what Apple claim is supported, is actually supported completely.
However, when you or I ask “does it support x?”, we generally mean it in a broader sense, not in the limited sense as the above example highlights.
Anyway, next up was lunch, where we got into quite a few (interesting) discussions about what they were working on which, if I’m completely honest, only served to draw me further into their world 🙂
The presentations that followed introduced me to a world of research (it would almost make you want to go back to college …) that I wasn’t even aware existed…
Rob Brennan got the ball rolling with a brief introduction into exactly who and what the KDEG is, which wandered into a discussion on all of the research groups within Trinity College. I really am amazed at the amount of research that goes on in that place – the KDEG group alone is around 50 strong! That said, it’s also one of the largest in the university, but still an impressive amount of researchers in a single group.
A very confident Kevin Feeney had the second slot on the podium, and gave an interesting talk on what he’s been working on. He’s managed to use Drupal to build a pretty impressive proof of concept for a “Community Based Policy Management Service”, which can be used to maintain access control over an organisation or community with relative ease.
It takes into account the level in the organisation of the people who make policies (access-rules), where in the case of conflicting rules, the one made by a higher-ranking official takes precedence. There were also some very interesting concepts regarding data categorisation (from an access point of view)
His unique take on the hierarchical structure of groups, and their relative access rights looks like it could be a winner, and he’s actively working towards a Drupal module to prove that it can do all he wants, and more. This could well be something that blows Drupal’s Organic Groups out of the water, but only time will tell if the great promise shown by the project can result in something usable by the masses.
The penultimate talk was given was by a happy Eleanor O’Neill, who was slightly worried that my questions to the previous speakers would leave her tight on time (I have a habit of prolonging Q&A sessions with ridiculous amounts of questions. Of course, they’re all interesting… )
Her brief introduction to Pudecas was quite a refreshing twist on the “Virtual Environment Simulator” projects that some of you may have come across during your time spent in geek-land.
What she and her colleagues have managed to do, is build virtual environments from technical blue-prints of buildings, and import them into the well known games engine for Half Life.
Their aim is to allow for the rollout of rapid prototyping of location-based services, for example in smart buildings – buildings that can adapt or react to their surroundings and inhabitants. This kind of technology would have lights, heating, doors, locks and countless other items of everyday use behave differently depending on who enters or leaves certain areas of a building.
Using a complex network of sensors placed throughout a building, they can use the Half Life games engine (complete with various bots behaving in a human-like manner) to simulate how the building should behave in real life, and apply the information that they gather to their system.
Of course, there are plenty of other obvious uses for technology like this, such as advertising in shopping centres when you approach certain areas in the building, or even for maps of tourist attractions.
However, one of the biggest possible locations I see for this type of technology is in airports. A small RFID handheld device with a simple 2 inch screen that can tell you where your departure gate is, how long it will take to get there, what time your flight is at and where the next X shop is along your route. (I’ll take 50% of the cut for that idea thank you very much).
For the last talk, Rob took the stage for a few minutes to discuss something that I’m not allowed to detail here for you 🙂
They have a number of high profile backers for this secret project, and more than a few interesting ideas. Whats most interesting about it is that it involves collaboration between quite a few research groups in Ireland, but of course, I can’t tell you who 😉
I’m hoping to hear something big out of there in the near future!
Right, thats all for now, so I’ll leave you with the attached presentation that I gave yesterday.
Daniel
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