The 'Instant Knowledge' research project is jointly funded by MobileVCE, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and the EPSRC, carrying out research into the field of machine learning and intelligent agents. The project itself centres around the notion of a personal distributed environment involving mobile devices (such as phones, PDA's, laptops etc.) and using context-sensitive information to extract and share knowledge in a useful way; whilst simultaneously addressing any security and privacy issues.
This is a multi-disciplinary project lead by the MobileVCE organisation, whose membership consists of several industrial members, including many mobile phone operators. The University of Strathclyde and Royal Holloway, University of London are the two other academic partners involved in the project.
The role of Southampton in the project is to provide machine learning and agent expertise in order to collate context features in an intelligent way so that information between agents can be shared either via ad-hoc meetings (e.g. over bluetooth or short-range wireless) or via a central repository (for example a central store on a corporate network.