Research at ORL

The laboratory's core activities centre around networking and communications, multimedia, mobility, and distributed systems. Typically our method is to prototype hardware, systems and applications for each research topic we explore. Our approach is intensely practical, and we focus on building large scale working systems, which we deploy widely both within ORL and within the University. Great care is taken to facilitate the sharing of technology and research results between projects, for example by the use of a common distributed systems framework.

We have some single-page 'posters' which provide a useful overview of some of our projects, past and present.

Current projects

		Distributed Systems using CORBA.
		SPIRIT provides support for fine-grained resource location.
		Virtual Network Computing, remote cross-platform access to PC or Unix desktops.
		The DART project brings information retrieval to multimedia.

		Our interest in networking extends to Broadband Radio ATM.
		piconet is our low-power, short-range radio networking system.
		The Collapsed LAN project is exploring low-latency high bandwidth interconnect.
		The Ultrasonic Location System, or Active Bat, allows finer-grained 3D location.

Mature projects

		The Active Badge system continues to be important in much of our research.
		Some early ATM work resulted in a fabric of ATM switches.
		Smart ATM Modules are multimedia peripherals which compliment the ATM switches.
		Medusa is a software environment for creating multimedia applications.

		The Teleporting System is a novel approach to mobile computing.
		Our interest in sensor systems includes experience with GPS.
		VMR - Video Mail Retrieval using speech recognition.

Past projects

		Early networking research was based on slotted ring technologies.
		The Pandora System was our first major multimedia project.
		The Streams Project brought mobility to multimedia.

		AMIE - a European Commission funded project.
		Multiworks - a European Commission funded project.
		Computer Architecture

Commercial spin-offs

Virata Ltd (formerly ATM Ltd) is developing ATM commercially.

Telemedia Systems Ltd is producing multimedia ATM peripherals commercially.

Adaptive Broadband Ltd develops broadband wireless solutions for the worldwide communications market.