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Steve Benford is Professor of Collaborative Computing. His research concerns new technologies to support social interaction across computer networks. Recently, this has focussed on Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) and has addressed issues such as socially inspired spatial models of interaction, user embodiment, information visualisation and mixed reality interfaces. His research group has developed the MASSIVE CVE system and has collaborated with social scientists and psychologists to evaluate social interaction within MASSIVE through field trials and public demonstrations.

Since 1992 he has been a principal investigator on four EPSRC grants (Virtuosi, The Distributed Extensible Virtual Reality laboratory, Large-scale Multi-user Distributed Virtual Reality and Multimedia Networking for Inhabited Television); an ESPRIT III Basic Research grant (COMIC); two ESPRIT IV Long Term Research grants (eRENA and KidStory); an ACTS grant (COVEN); two UK HEFCE grants and four direct industry funded grants. He has also been a co-investigator on two UK ESRC and one UK MRC funded grants. Research income for these grants has exceeded £3 million pounds.

Professor Benford is an editor of the CSCW journal and has served on the program committees of VRST’98, SIGGROUP’97, ECSCW'93, ECSCW'95 and ECSCW'97. He presented his work at the Royal Society in 1995 and at the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1996. He has published over 100 works including recent papers in ACM TOCHI, The Computer Journal, Presence and also at the ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, ACM VRST and IEEE ICDCS conferences. Recent publications include:

Benford, S., Greenhalgh, C., Reynard, G., Brown, C., and Koleva, B., Understanding and Constructing Shared Spaces with Mixed Reality Boundaries, ACM Transaction on Computer-Human Interfaces (TOCHI) (in press).

Tromp, J., Steed, A., Frecon, E., Bullock, A., Benford, S., Smith, G., Sadagic, A. and Slater, M., Collaborative Virtual Environments: Experiments on Small Group Behaviour in the COVEN Project, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, IEEE Press, 1998 (in press).

Hindmarsh, J., Fraser, M., Heath, C., Benford, S. and Greenhalgh, C., Establishing mutual orientation in fragmented virtual worlds, Proc, ACM CSCW’98, Seattle, US, November 1998, ACM Press.

Reynard, G., Benford, S., and Greenhalgh, C., Awareness Driven Video Quality of Service in Collaborative Virtual Environments, Proc. ACM CHI’98, Los Angeles, US, March 1998, ACM Press.

Benford, S., Greenhalgh, C. and Lloyd, D, Crowded Collaborative Virtual Environments, Proc. ACM CHI'97, Atlanta, US, March 1997, ACM Press.

Steve Benford's website is at [link]