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Posted: Mon, January 20, 2003
Gooch's GIFTS to the business worldBy Basheera KhanJoanna Gooch made headlines last year when she took top honours in the annual WDA Technology Prizes competition. Gooch was one of five finalists for the overall award, for her project known as JoFS, or Jo's File System. It won her both the Software & Internet Technologies category as well as the overall prize in the WDA Technology Prizes, leaving her £2,000 better off.  The file management system was designed to be as user friendly as possible, a feat which Gooch achieved by marrying the
principles of artificial intelligence to those of efficient document management. With authentication and encryption functionality built-in, JoFS was designed to be accessible from anywhere in the world. Gooch, who is currently studying towards her PhD in Computer Science at Swansea University, explains her reasoning behind the application's bedrock principles of slimmed down functionality. "If you give people the option to do a lot of things, there's a chance they'll do the wrong thing. So if you take that away from them, and put their trust in the computer, then they're less likely to get it wrong. "For example, if you were to save one of your files on this system, although you know your file's there and you know you can get to it at any time, you don't know where it's been stored; the computer deals with all that. It's like having a real secretary - you never know where your secretary stores your files, but if you asked for the file, you'd get it." The system also allows users to share documents with colleagues or friends, and is fully searchable. The file encryption serves to protect information even in the event of someone gaining unauthorised access to the file server, as might happen in the case of a hacking attempt. The system could provide invaluable services to companies and organisations for managing documents systematically, cutting down unnecessary paperwork and e-mail clutter and reducing the amount of unorganised data stored on networks. However, it's not yet commercially available, Gooch says, as she is refining the programme functionality as part of her current research. "The increased sophistication in the newer version will come from added intelligence, because although the system is semi-intelligent, what we want is to make it more like a human secretary. Your secretary knows what files you look at, knows who your friends are, knows that if you've been sending lots of messages to someone they might now be one of your friends, so when you next send something to your friends, it should probably go to them." "Basically, I'm building an automated system now, introducing intelligence agents which will operate in the background and every time it learns something new about the way you work, it comes back and offers you a range of options depending on what it's learnt." "And based on what the user chooses in the user preferences, it will make it the system quicker, more efficient, and easier to use." In its current form, the system is called GIFTS, which stands for Global Intelligent File Telesystem. While she'd like to take it to the commercial market, Gooch's current priority is getting her PhD. "But if it gets funding, maybe it's something I can do side by side, once it gets up and running. There's a couple of people working on it with me, on slightly different areas to what I'm doing. Jason Bees is working on the operating system side of it, the really low-level interfacing with the computer, and David Brooks is working on the commercially exploitable side, talking to the University and the Council -institutions where something like this would be really useful." When she's not working on GIFTS, Gooch says she'll be maintaining some involvement with the MSN Student Finance Channel project, the collaborative effort between Swansea University and Microsoft which resulted in one of the most popular content channels on the MSN portal. |
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