• PubRes

Researcher
Queensland Research Laboratory, Brisbane

NICTA Projects

Dr Ricky Robinson is a researcher in the SAFE Networks group within the Smart Applications For Emergencies (SAFE) Project at NICTA's Queensland Research Laboratory. He is conducting research into context-aware systems, and self-configuring and self-healing networks, with an aim to applying the research outcomes to the domain of emergency response. In addition, he contributes some of his time to the Context-Aware Mobility Project (CAMP) and the Body Area Network of Embedded Systems for Humans (BANESH) project. Finally, he is developing a new publishing and reviewing system for research publications, which has a fundamentally different reviewing and acceptance process to traditional peer-review processes, and simultaneously maintains a reputation index for researchers.

Previous Positions

In 2001, prior to his Ph.D. candidature, he undertook a research internship at Sun Microsystems Research Labs in Mountain View, California. During this internship he helped to develop a prototype of the Multitasking Virtual Machine, a version of Sun's Hotspot Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that is capable of executing multiple isolated tasks within a single instance of the JVM. This design has several benefits including smaller memory footprint and faster execution of code (since tasks subsequent to the first can make use of most of the code that has already been compiled to the native representation by the Hotspot runtime compiler). This research is now subject to the Java Community Process and looks set for inclusion in future versions of Java. Elements of this research have already found their way into the Squawk JVM for very limited capability devices.

Prior to joining NICTA, Dr Robinson worked as a software engineer for a company that develops applications for monitoring the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM). The particular product he helped to develop enabled large energy users (such as steel smelters) to decide when to curtail their electricity usage. The software helps these companies to save thousands, if not millions, of dollars over the course of a year due to the wildly fluctuating prices on the NEM (the price can vary from about $20/MWh to almost $10,000/MWh in a matter of minutes).

Qualifications

Dr Ricky Robinson was awarded a Ph.D. in computer science by the University of Queensland in 2005. He holds a Bachelor of Information Technology (Hons 1) degree from the same institution.

Research Interests

Dr Robinson's current research focus is in designing algorithms for distributing and caching context information, and developing a context management system that is robust to sensor failures and mobility. While there are many existing methods for distributing and caching generic kinds of data, we hypothesize that distribution of context information can be somewhat optimised by taking into account the additional information contained in formal context models. Such information includes classifications of the source of data (whether it is static, user-provided, sensed or derived), and data quality metrics.

He is also keenly interested in technologies that support social (and professional) networks. Furthermore, he has an interest in certain aspects of human factors research. Specifically, he is interested in investigating those factors that make pervasive computing applications (and application in general) enjoyable or rewarding to use.

Collaboration

Dr Robinson collaborates extensively with his colleagues within QRL, and has ties with the STaR, CAMP and BANESH projects.

Selected Publications

Ricky Robinson, Karen Henricksen and Jadwiga Indulska. XCML: A runtime representation for the Context Modelling Language. Fifth Annual IEEE Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communication Workshops (PerComW'07 - Context Modelling and Reasoning). 2007, White Plains, NY, USA.

Karen Henricksen and Ricky Robinson. A survey of middleware for sensor networks: state-of-the-art and future directions. MidSens '06: Proceedings of the international workshop on Middleware for sensor networks. 2006, Melbourne, Australia.

Ricky Robinson and Jadwiga Indulska. The Emergence of Order in Random Walk Resource Discovery Protocols. In The Ninth International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems (Special Session on Complex Adaptive Systems), pages 827-833. Springer-Verlag, volume LNCS 3683, September 14-16, 2005, Melbourne, Australia.

Ricky Robinson and Jadwiga Indulska. A Context-Sensitive Service Discovery Protocol for Mobile Computing Environments. In The Fourth International Conference on Mobile Business, pages 565-572. IEEE Computer Society, July 11-13, 2005, Sydney, Australia.

Contact Details for Ricky Robinson