Instant Knowledge: Social Networking in Enterprise Environments

As well as a brief overview of Vodafone Group R&D, I will talk about the Instant Knowledge programme being carried out by the Mobile VCE consortium. In the modern workplace, collaboration occurs through informal networks of employees as well as formal reporting structures. However, informal networks can be unreliable, and are often opaque to those outside the network. The Instant Knowledge project will use the handheld devices carried by many in today’s workplace to make collaboration through informal networks more effective. By gathering user context data and performing network analyses, information about communicants’ relations can be inferred.

Dr. Nigel Jefferies is the head of university relationships within Vodafone Group Research & Development. He is the chairman of the Wireless World Research Forum, and a member of the Steering Board of the eMobility European Technology Platform. He led the European-funded IST project SHAMAN, which studied the security of future heterogeneous mobile systems as well as other collaborative research projects in the field of secure mobile telecommunications. He has been actively involved in research programmes with the Mobile VCE consortium. His research interests include cryptography, security of systems and applications of mathematics to telecommunications.