Scottish city to pioneer personalised local wireless information

Dundee today moved a step closer to becoming Scotland’s city of wireless innovation, with the announcement of a partnership between the University of Abertay Dundee and LastMile Communications, the British company pioneering a wireless delivery platform using WiFi.

Under the agreement, the Abertay campus will become a test bed for LastMile’s state-of-the-art node-based wireless information system. The technology offers end user-focused content to mobile devices on demand, and tailored precisely to their location.

The agreement was announced today (17 May) at the Wireless Event in London (http://www.thewirelessevent.com/).

Abertay’s School of Computing and Creative Technologies will provide the systems expertise, and students will have the opportunity to be involved in the system’s interface design, as well as developing a number of games which can be played across the city over the network.

Lachlan MacKinnon, Professor of Information & Knowledge Engineering at Abertay commented, “Through this project, we are aiming to take the best elements of both local and online communities, giving local residents access to online information which is both relevant and of interest to them.

“For Abertay, being involved with this leading-edge technology has obvious synergies with our development of new degree courses and research interests in smart systems, and with our new campus developments in innovative teaching space and upmarket new student residences,” he added.

“Personalised and local information is the most popular content on the internet today, as users try to sieve through the plethora of websites to find the answers to what they want to know,” added Antony Abell, CEO, LastMile Communications. “Dundee has developed a reputation for innovation, and our technology has the potential to provide a backbone for the delivery of local services and information well into the future.”

LastMile has designed a node-based content delivery platform, which allows information to be stored and processed at the edge of the network, rather than at the centre as with most conventional networks. Because of this, it reduces the need for unnecessary network traffic by putting processing and information within the network itself, enabling users to access information more quickly and make existing networks more efficient.

Initial trials are expected to take place over the next six months.