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Research opportunities |
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Online communities -- for sharing information, role-playing, gaming, buying and selling, and more -- have become an essential element of the Web. But such communities are rare once people are mobile because, until recently, there was no way to offer such community-style services across different phone networks.
That is changing, thanks largely to ongoing deployment of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) standard, which offers a way to deploy a new generation of mobile services that works across networks.
Still missing, however, is a rich platform upon which to build those group services for mobile users.
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Research focus |
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We are developing a platform to enable new types of media and community experiences in emerging mobile networks, and we are exploring the dynamics of mobile communities to find ways to better serve them.
This work builds on our long experience with HP OpenCall, a suite of carrier-grade platforms for developing next-generation voice, data, video and converged services. HP OpenCall provides a number of the basic components in the IMS architecture, including the OpenCall Media platform (the media processing engine in IMS) and the Home Subscriber Service (the master database in the IMS network).
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Current work |
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In particular, our activities focus on building a group entertainment service platform and on community dynamics research.
Using standards-based IMS components and real-time mobile network emulators from HP OpenCall and industry partners, researchers are developing a service platform to control the creation and delivery of community services to mobile subscribers, including both static and ad-hoc communities. Research has initially focused on enabling mobile multiplayer real-time gaming as a compelling rich media application.
In the area of community dynamics research, we are employing rigorous natural language techniques, mathematical models and graph theory to discover the characteristics -- 'hot' topics of discussion, atmosphere, information flow, information reliability and privacy protections -- of mobile communities. The goal is to learn more about the evolution of these communities -- what makes a new service viral, for example, or why some communities thrive and others quickly fail.
This research feeds back into the service platform research -- suggesting what technical mechanisms need to be developed to create services that people really want and how service providers can leverage the power of community in their offerings.
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Media, mobility & communications |
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