Staff Profile

Prof. Andrew Monk is supporting the on-going collaboration between Prof. Patrick Olivier and Prof. Peter Wright in relation to the Connected Home and Community activity and User Perspective of SiDE - the RCUK Digital Economy Research Hub on Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy. Prof. Monk’s contributions to SiDE have been crucial to the early progress of the project and he has funded research associate Dr Jayne Wallace, the first forays into digital jewellery in 2006. His work on usable home technologies was one of the key inspirations for the SiDE proposal.

Prof. Monk was the originator of the interaction unit (IU) analysis of tasks, which the School is currently operationalising in a tool for occupational therapists to specify the detailed nature of tasks to be supported by POMDP (partially observable Markov decision process) cueing system SNAP. This is an ongoing collaboration between SiDE, the University of York and the University of Waterloo (Dr. Jesse Hoey) that is grounded in research conducted by Prof. Monk and to which he has contributed considerable time. A journal paper describing SNAP 1.0 is currently under review and is expected to have a significant impact on the fields of cognitive prosthetics and ubiquitous computing. There are several enhancements to SNAP which will be pursued over the next three years of SiDE and Andrew's continued contribution to this is essential.

Prof Monk's other research is concerned more widely with what people want from the technology in their homes. A particular interest is technology to maintain the independence of older people, e.g., banking for the over 80s, help with activities of daily living for people with dementia and mainstream assistive technology. An account of this search, written for the wider public, is available at http://gadgets4seniors.org/  Follow Andrew @gadgets4seniors.

• Vines J, Blythe M, Dunphy P, Vlachokyriakos V, Teece I, Monk A, Olivier P. Cheque Mates: Participatory Design of Digital Payments with Eighty Somethings. In: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI'12). 2012, Austin, Texas, USA: ACM Press.
• Vines J, Blythe M, Lindsay S, Dunphy P, Monk A, Olivier P. Questionable Concepts: Critique as Resource for Designing with Eighty Somethings. In: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI'12). 2012, Austin, Texas, USA: ACM Press.
• Monk A, Jackson D, Nielsen D, Jefferies E, Olivier P. N-backer: An auditory n-back task with automatic scoring of spoken responses. Behavior Research Methods 2011, 43(3), 888-896.
• Hoey J, Ploetz T, Jackson D, Monk A, Pham C, Olivier P. Rapid specification and automated generation of prompting systems to assist people with dementia. Pervasive and Mobile Computing 2011, 7(3), 299-318.
• Briggs P, Blythe M, Vines J, Lindsay S, Dunphy P, Nicholson J, Green D, Kitson J, Monk A, Olivier P. Invisible Design: Exploring Insights and Ideas through Ambiguous Film Scenarios. In: Designing Interactive Systems (DIS). 2012, Newcastle upon Tyne: ACM Press.
• Grzes M, Hoey J, Khan SS, Mihailidis A, Czarnuch S, Jackson D, Monk A. Relational approach to knowledge engineering for POMDP-based assistance systems as a translation, of a psychological model. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning 2014, 55(1), 36-58.
• Dunphy P, Monk A, Vines J, Blythe M, Olivier P. Designing for Spontaneous and Secure Delegation in Digital Payments. Interacting with Computers 2014, 26(5), 417-432.
• Monk A, Dunphy P, Olivier P, Vines J, Blythe M. New approaches to banking for the older old. In: Digital Economy 2011: Digital Engagement. 2011, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: RCUK.
• Durrant A, Kirk D, Trujillo-Pisanty D, Moncur W, Orzech L, Schofield T, Elsden C, Chatting D, Monk A. Transitions in Digital Personhood: Online Activity in Early Retirement. In: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). 2017, Denver, CO: ACM.
• Vines J, Dunphy P, Monk A. Pay or Delay: The Role of Technology When Managing a Low Income. In: ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2014). 2014, Toronto, Canada: ACM Press.
• Dunphy P, Vines J, Monk A, Blythe M, Olivier P. Understanding Financial Practices: Experiences with ‘Eighty Somethings’ and the Underbanked. In: Enabling Empathy in Health and Care: Design Methods & Challenges Workshop. 2014, Toronto, Canada.