Adaptive ICT

There are two strands to the Adaptive ICT work undertaken in our research centre. Both contribute to supporting and extending BT's growing emphasis on ICT in addition to providing opportunities in Broadband and Mobility.

In the Infrastructure strand we are developing solutions that reduce ICT cost of ownership and improve reliability and quality of service for large-scale ICT deployments. The need for increased self-management of systems is recognised around the world and we are collaborating with a range of industrial and academic contacts including General Dynamics, QinetiQ, HP and the Santa Fe Institute to produce and exploit adaptive, decentralised methods to provide exactly this kind of semi-autonomous behaviour.

In the Applications and Services strand we focus on providing adaptivity directly to the user. In other words the ICT systems adapt themselves to provide effective functionality to the user, by relying on the social and intellectual relationships already existing among the users. Examples include content discovery, directory services and e-learning. We are collaborating with the National Science Foundation of China, Essex University, the Santa Fe Institute and Solution 121 in Japan and are already seeing applications being exploited through licensing or by BT own use.