Richard Tateson

About Me

Richard Tateson joined BT in 1997 after finishing a PhD in developmental biology. His main current projects are Nature-inspired Computing and 'ShoppingGarden'.

My Work

Nature-inspired computing is a wide field. A tangible example is the 'Flyphones' project. Flyphones is a method for managing a wireless communication network (such as a national mobile phone network) in a decentralised, self-organising way. Instead of having 'headquarters' make all the decisions about which radio frequencies are available to which base stations, the base stations themselves are allowed to talk to each other to compete for frequencies. This can have significant benefits in some situations. It's called 'Flyphones' because it is inspired by the way the cells of a developing fruitfly negotiate with each other to decide which will make bristles in the adult fly. The correct overall pattern is produced without any central control.

ShoppingGarden is a way of browsing online catalogues. We came up with it because of our frustrations with trying to find things online by entering text searches, or navigating through the categories laid down by the website we're browsing. ShoppingGarden allows the user to see a range of things from the catalogue, 'reward' the ones they like (and 'punish' the ones they don't) and as a result they are shown more of the kind of stuff they prefer. ShoppingGarden has proved to be even more effective than we'd hoped in its various demo versions. The technology has now been adopted by BT's historical images archive and by the Tate Gallery for browsing their online collection (http://www.tate.org.uk/collection/carousel)

Contact

For enquiries regarding activities in the Pervasive ICT Research Centre please click here.