William Niu's Homepage/Research Page

Publications

Research interests: ontological reasoning, context-aware computing, user modelling and mobile personalisation.

My PhD thesis is Ontological Reasoning about Location for Indoor Pervasive Computing Environments (pdf).

Projects during my PhD (demos):

ONCOR: Ontology- and Evidence-base Context Reasoner
ONCOR (Ontology- and Evidence-based Context Reasoner) is a reasoning component that integrates ontological reasoning into the accretion-resolution (A/R) approach. With the A/R approach ONCOR is able to take a diverse list of contextual sources across different context models in the resolution, or reasoning process. At the heart of ONCOR is an extended Middle Building Ontology (MIBO)---an upper/middle ontology for modelling the inside of a building. We explore the potential of an ontology in the areas of conflict resolution, personalisation and privacy management in Ubiquitous Computing environments.

ONCOR has been integrated into the working prototype of Locator as a location conflict resolution component. The extended-MIBO used for reasoning is a location ontology for the School of Information Technologies building on the University of Sydney campus. It is semi-automatically built by parsing the building maps in SVG/XML formats. The resulting ontology is in the OWL-Lite format with 573 location instances.
The Middle Building Ontology (MIBO) is available in OWL-Lite here (9.5Kb). An extended-MIBO, or the School of IT Building Ontology is also available in OWL-Lite here (122Kb).
Locator
Locator is a demonstrator application of Personis. Locator provides an interface which enables a community of people to locate other members of the community. To join the community, a user needs to register both themself and sensors that can provide evidence about their location. For example, a Bluetooth enabled phone can be registered. Another class of sensor is an activity sensor that detects when a person's computer is in use.

The underlying infrastructure for Locator is based on Personis, which models people, places and devices. It makes use of a range of varyingly reliable evidence to reason about an individual's location.

As Locator has been in actual use for a long period of time, it has provided insights into the way that people use and respond to such information about each other as well as and people's attitudes to management of privacy.
SITIM: School of IT Interactive Map
SITIM is based on a set of SVG maps of the School of IT building in Sydney University. It has been used in a user experiment: Location Log (login = testuser:testuser), allowing users to record/log their physical movements inside the building. Another demonstrator application is also built to display personalised information in the building.

Past projects:

TARO (Teaching with an Automatically Retrieved Ontology):
TARO is a teaching system that visualises and reasons about structured knowledge (or an ontology) for a domain. In this study, the domain of UNIX file permission has been used. TARO utilises an ontology visualisation tool called SIV (Scrutable Inference Viewer) with an ontology that is automatically generated from a glossary or a dictionary file. It differs from other systems in that it allows users to learn progressively by showing concepts that are directly related to the one currently being viewed. It can be overwhelming to absorb a large number of concepts at once. Thus, the hypothesis is that it is more effective to learn new concepts by progressively building on existing (or known) ones.
Scrutable Museum Tour Guides:
There are two versions of the scrutable adaptive museum guides:
- SAM , using Cellerator and PersonisLite, refer to [2005-1] for more details, and
- SASY, by Marek Czarkowski.

Refereed publications:

W. Niu and J. Kay (2009) PERSONAF: Framework for Personalised Ontological Reasoning in Pervasive Computing, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction. (springer, bibtex)
W. Niu and J. Kay (2008) Pervasive Personalisation of Location Information: Personalised Context Ontology, in AH: Proceedings of the International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia, 143-152. (springer, bibtex)
W. Niu and J. Kay (2008) Location Conflict Resolution with an Ontology, in PERVASIVE: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing, 162-179. (springer, bibtex)
M. Assad, D. Carmichael, W. Niu, J. Kay, and B. Kummerfeld (2007) Location in the workplace: how is it used?, in Proceedings of the Workshop on Ubicomp in the Office: Success, Pitfalls and Solutions.
J. Kay, W. Niu, and D. Carmichael (2007) ONCOR: Ontology- and Evidence-based Context Reasoner, in IUI: Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces 2007, 290-293. (acm, bibtex)
D. Carmichael, J. Kay, B. Kummerfeld, and W. Niu (2006) MyWorkPlace: Personalised information about a Ubiquitous Computing enabled building, in Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Personalised Context Modelling and Management for UbiComp Applications at UbiComp 2006. (pdf)
D. Carmichael, J. Kay, B. Kummerfeld, and W. Niu (2006) Why did you show/tell/hide that? : The need for Scrutability in Ubiquitous Personalisation, in Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Exploiting Context Histories in Smart Environments at UbiComp 2006.
A. Bright, J. Kay, D. Ler, K. Ngo, W. Niu, and A. Nuguid (2005) Adaptively Recommending Museum Tours, Workshop on Smart Environments and Their Applications to Cultural Heritage at UbiComp 2005 29-32. (pdf, bibtex)
M. Kruppa, A. Lum, W. Niu, and M. Weinel (2005) Towards Mobile Tour Guides Supporting Collaborative Learning In Small Groups, Workshop on New Technologies for Personalised Information Access at UM 2005 54-63. (pdf, bibtex)
J. Kay and W. Niu (2005) Adapting Information Delivery to Groups of People, in Workshop on New Technologies for Personalised Information Access at UM 2005, 34-43. (pdf, bibtex)
J. Kay, A. Lum, and W. Niu (2005) A Scrutable Museum Tour Guide System, in Second Workshop on Multi-User and Ubiquitous User Interfaces (MU3I) at IUI 2005, San Diego, USA, January 2005, 19-20. (pdf, bibtex)

Unrefereed publications:

W. Niu and J. Kay (2007) Improving Location Reasoning with an Ontology, TR 619, the University of Sydney, October 2007. (pdf)
J. Kay and W. Niu (2007) Accretion-based Ontology Learning for Context Reasoning, TR 608, The University of Sydney, January 2007. (pdf)
J. Kay, A. Lum, W. Niu, and L. Li (2006) TARO: Teaching with an Automatically Retrieved Ontology, TR 596, The University of Sydney, September 2006. (pdf)
J. Kay and W. Niu (2006) Personalised Museum Tours Base One: Building User Models Using Concept Mapping on a Tabletop, Third Workshop on Multi-User and Ubiquitous User Interfaces (MU3I) at IUI 2006. (pdf)

PhD Thesis

W. Niu (2009) Ontological Reasoning about Location for Indoor Pervasive Computing Environments. (pdf)

Honours thesis: Software for the Smart House (dissertation available upon request)
The objective of the project was to design a software application which allowed a user to ubiquitously control home appliances. The resulting software was a Web-based system, which allows users to control household appliances, with proper X10^TM devices installed, via the Internet (HTTP protocol), phones (dial tones), electronic mails (POP3 and SMTP), and short text messages (utilising SMS↔E-mail gateways).

NOTE: To avoid copyright issues, I decide not to distribute the articles on my own server. Should you want to obtain a soft copy of any of the articles for research purpose or personal amusement, please email me at ().