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Austin Tate

Austin Tate is Director of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) and holds the Personal Chair of Knowledge-Based Systems at the University of Edinburgh. He is Chief Technical Officer of I-C2 Systems - a company seeking to develop advanced aids for emergency response. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Scotland's National Academy), Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI, Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a member of the editorial board of a number of AI journals. His internationally sponsored research work is focused on emergency response and involves advanced knowledge and planning technologies, collaborative systems especially using virtual worlds.

A mobile virtual office anywhere in the world

Remember back in the early 1990s when you wanted to collaborate with anyone you used an FTP client, send floppy disks in the post and take half an hour to configure a video link. Then the World Wide Web came along.

Step forward nearly two decades and we are about to be able to set up our office and enter it from anywhere in the world, and have it adapt to the context we are in. Forget URLs. Forget scrabbling about to find tools that work through firewalls when visiting a company. Forget having to spend time on set up and testing with collaborators. Enter a virtual world where your office is always waiting, and your materials are available and laid out as you choose.