Close to beginning the PhD

Hi guys! Lately I’ve been working on the mobsventures Slenky project still, which is progressing as expected. I’m beginning to work on a Videos module for Elgg which will hopefully be able to integrate with the British Telecom MOSAIC Platform. This I think will be a difficult task, but hey if it was easy to do, why do it?

Anyhow for the minute I’m aiming to get the Elgg part of it working hopefully within the next few weeks. The plan is to be able to simulate what MOSAIC will do and get it working to our assumption, as I’ve yet to receive an APi document from them, which as you could imagine doesn’t help me out much…

Though over than that, I’m nearly closer to beginning my PhD, which I’m really having mixed feels about, mostly excitement but also feeling nervous about my ability to complete it in the typical 3 year time scale which I have funding for. Probably when I start doing the PhD I will be blogging more about my findings, readings and any discussion in the area that I eventually chose to take. I do suspect that the area that I will be focusing on will be Domain Specific Modeling Languages and accessibility with the visual impaired and/or deaf. I’ve already started talking with my preliminary supervisor Prof. Tony Clark about the direction I could take and about supervising my MSc project which I will have to undertake next year (part time, concurrently). For my MSc project Tony suggested I look into working with DSLs in the context of web and accessibility which could be a good start for looking into mobile accessibility for the PhD.

Anyhow for my Research Methods lessons I have a critical review of a research paper which I have to complete for next friday, which I will be reviewing:

Karsai, G., Krahn, H., Pinkernell, C., Rumpe, B., Schindler, M., Völkel, S. (2009) ‘Design Guidelines for Domain Specific Languages’, The 9th OOPSLA Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling, Orlando Florida, USA 25-26 October 2009

So for now at least just need to start doing some background reading on the area, then probably a good start to research on the credentials of the authors. Anyhow until next time!