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Schemes for University Lecturers
Industrial Secondment Scheme: Case Study
Active Print - Developing Visual
Hyperlinking Technologies for Pervasive Systems
 Dr John Collomosse
Lecturer - University of Bath
Seconded to Hewlett Packard Laboratories
John Collomosse graduated with
a first class honours degree in Computer Science in
2001, and received a PhD in the field of Image and
Video based Non-photorealistic Rendering (NPR) in
2004. He has been a member of the Media Technology
Research Centre at the University of Bath since
2001, where he completed his PhD prior to his
appointment as lecturer in 2004.
Why a secondment?
Due to the full-time pursuit
of an academic career, John had spent only a brief
period in the IT industry working for IBM. The aims
of The Academy’s Industrial Secondment were to
provide John with a valuable and timely opportunity
to both broaden his industrial experience, and to
gather supporting materials to enhance the teaching
of his two industry focused BSc Software Engineering
courses. John’s exposure to state of the art object
oriented and mobile software development techniques
was also well timed to contribute to the new
specialist MSc programmes addressing themes in the
areas of Mobile and Pervasive Systems.
Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Bristol
John was seconded for six
months to work on Dr Tim Kindberg's Active Print
project within the Technology Lifestyle Integration
group at Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Bristol.
Active Print aims to link
physical objects to digital content (e.g. on the
internet) using camera equipped mobile phones.
Special printed tags attached to objects can be
recognised by software loaded onto the phone.
Pointing a mobile phone at a tag (e.g. contained in
a printed advertisement) directs the user to a
website containing more information. Other
applications include mobile couponing, subscription
and purchasing services.
During the secondment, John
was responsible for designing optimized software
capable of reading tags at video rates on small
footprint mobile devices. As well as supporting
common ISO standards for visual tags, John
engineered novel forms of tag for applications
demanding high data densities and improved
aesthetics. Three invention disclosures were written
as a result of this work, which may lead to patent
applications in the near future. The project
required John to integrate within an established
software development team and to work with a diverse
range of mobile technologies including the
Microsoft’s .NET compact framework, Windows Mobile
and Symbian platforms.
Benefits
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The secondment allowed
John to work on innovative products at the
forefront of emerging mobile technologies,
broadening his experience of these technologies
and IT in an industry context. During the
secondment John gained experience of all major
mobile development platforms; Microsoft .NET,
Symbian C++, and independently worked towards
Sun Certification in the Java programming
language.
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The materials developed
during the secondment will benefit both
undergraduate and postgraduate teaching at Bath.
New case study materials were gathered for the
Software Engineering courses giving “real world”
examples of team software development and the
use of object oriented design patterns in real
products.
-
Lecture notes have been
produced on the topics of Symbian and DirectShow
mobile development, which will benefit new
specialist MSc programmes at Bath.
-
New ideas for
undergraduate and postgraduate projects have
been generated, and one MSc project is already
underway following up work from the secondment.
-
The secondment work on
developing novel forms of tag will lead to
research publications in the near future, and
several areas for ongoing collaboration with
Hewlett Packard have also been identified.
Statement from the Industrial Host
‘HP Labs benefited greatly
from John’s expertise in Computer Vision and Image
Processing. He contributed both his implementation
expertise and his creative and rigorous approach
towards research, leading to several invention
disclosures. His attitude to the team was very
collaborative, which meant that his input extended
beyond the initial plans. This has reinforced our
relationship with his university. We hope to
continue our collaboration and extend the topics
covered.’
Dr Timothy Kindberg
Hewlett Packard Labs, Bristol
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