My research focuses on the relationship between pervasive technologies, people and physical environments. When I say pervasive technologies I think of sensor networks, wired or wireless, visible or invisible (embedded) I see devices (small, mobile or big such as displays). When I say physical environment I think of buildings, workplace, my mental picture of an office (or the different mental pictures that convey the idea of office). When I say people I think of workers, individuals like you or me, that do whatever they happen to be doing at the workplace and that in that process are using, conscious or unconsciously, these sensor networks and these devices – small or big.

I believe that space, the physical environment that surrounds us, our lives and work, and us, people, workers, users, develop a set of relationships that affect the way pervasive technology is understood in terms of reactions, adoption and uses of it. In other words, the relationships people build around physical space (workers around their office, the process of generation and reproduction of social behaviours in that context) affect how people react to, adopt and ultimately use these technologies.

The objective of my research is to define these relationships between space and people and measure its impact on the introduction of pervasive technologies in the workplace, focusing on reactions towards (scale of positive/negative), adoption (degree of success related to the intended use of the system studied) and uses (both expected and unexpected uses of the system and devices involved).

I intend to do this in real environments, where the technology is tested away from the lab, in situ. I conducted a case study last summer in a big UK financial company. They deployed an RFID UWB based location tracking system. They wanted to understand how their space worked (facilities management) and I found the opportunity to study these issues on real people.

If you want to know more about my research, please contact me at i.vallejo@cs.ucl.ac.uk.

Phd committee

Alan Penn, Professor of Architectural and Urban Computing, Director of UCL's Virtual Reality Centre. http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/people/GS_penn.htm
Dr Ruth Conroy Dalton, Lecturer in Architectural Morphology and Theory, UCL, Bartlett School of Graduate Studies. http://www.vr.ucl.ac.uk/people/ruth/
Dr. Stephen Hailes, Deputy Head of Department, Senior Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, UCL. http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/s.hailes/