The Internet has become an important means of managing the relationships that we have with others in our everyday lives. A recent survey conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) (University of Oxford), has drawn on a representative sample of over two thousand married Internet users to understand the role played by the Internet in...

Artificial companions are typically intelligent cognitive 'agents', implemented in software or a physical embodiment such as a robot. This paper is a summary of a forum on Artificial Companions in Society held in October 2007. Artificial companions (ACs) are typically intelligent cognitive 'agents', implemented in software or a physical embodiment such as a robot. They...

This paper presents preliminary results from a study of how the Internet and the Web might reconfigure access to scientific information. The study combines qualitative and quantitative methods ? in-depth interviews and webmetric analysis ? to explore how the Internet and Web are reinforcing the role of existing sources of information, or tending to either...

'The Future of Computing: A Vision' was a senior women's forum, organised by The e-Horizons Institute (University of Oxford) and Women@CL. It ran for two days in late March 2007 and brought together senior women in computer science and related disciplines to consider their vision of the future of computing and what these visions could...

The problems of identity and personal-information management over the Internet remain unsolved, despite much debate and a number of competing initiatives. Could an identity infrastructure become a shared service for use across sectors, operating in a simple and secure manner and protecting the privacy of personal information? The OII, with the support of the Joint...