Research

Benefits of international collaborations: Professor Rod Murray-Smith

Issued: Thu, 27 Jun 2013 12:23:00 BST

Professor Rod Murray-Smith leads the Inference, Dynamics & Interaction Group, and is also a member of the Human–Computer Interaction Group, both based in the School of Computing Science. These groups work on improving mobility, multimodal interaction, visualisation and modelling of mobile devices.

‘My research group contains six PhD students,’ says Professor Murray-Smith. ‘Human– computer interaction is a hot topic and there are a lot of people working on it around the world, but our style of doing things is slightly atypical because we’re combining machine learning, control theory and interactions.

‘I tend to encourage my students to spend time in industry, or collaborating with external partners; for example, we’re working on the brain interaction computer project, which is a European project involving a lot of collaborators across the continent, and one of my students is spending four months at Google at the moment. Others have recently gone on internships to Nokia and to Microsoft, and we’re developing new types of PhDs with our industrial partners, which will be very beneficial for our students.’

The technology under development in Glasgow aims to improve the relationship between humans and their mobile devices, making them increasingly intuitive and adaptable to the individual user. The team have to think beyond what is already accepted practice for phone manufacturers, presenting them with novel and inventive engagement techniques.

One example among the many that are under various stages of development in the school is Moodagent, a product of Syntonetic A/S in Denmark that has had significant involvement from researchers at Glasgow. The Moodagent software works by learning to recognise a relationship between the music stored on it and users’ emotional states. By telling the app what mood you are in, it selects appropriate styles of music to suit it. Other Glasgow technology has been licensed by Nokia for use in their products.

Staying with the mood theme, Professor Murray-Smith’s team is also currently working on a piece of intuitive technology which could let a phone read your emotional state simply from the way you interact with it.

‘The way you use your phone can actually give a lot of information about how you feel: for example, when you are angry your voice might change pitch and so on,’ the professor explains. ‘So Dr Alessandro Vinciarelli and our PhD student Anna Polychroniou are looking at how people answer their phone and how they move it, squeeze it and hold it when they are in certain moods. In theory we could actually make phones aware of how you’re feeling.’

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