Dr. Gardner-Stephen's research interests include SPAM, networking, scalable computing, mobile devices, mobile communication infrastructures, disaster and attack resilient technology, and the application of all these things to make the world a better place, and include:

The Serval Project: Telecommunications any where, any time.

• Using OpenBTS as a basis for creating low-cost low-power GSM mobile telephone base stations
• Using Village Telco's Mesh Potato wireless back-haul devices to create ad-hoc and infrastructure-free "land-line" telephone networks
• Implementing the Mesh Potato feature-set on Android based smart phones to enable the creation of mixed mobile and land-line self-meshing ad-hoc telephone networks
• Creating distributed infrastructure-free protocols that allow people to use their existing telephone numbers on ad-hoc telephone networks, both for temporary disaster-relief telephony and ad-hoc telephony for remote and emerging regions.
• Creating Mesh-Potato compatible devices that operate on other unlicensed spectrum, such as the ISM UHF bands that promise much greater range, especially in remote and emerging regions.
• Creating network services that scale to millions of simultaneous connections to handle demand surges, e.g., during disaster situations.
• Creating innovative mesh-based networking solutions to meet specific industrial needs.

SPAM:

• Investigating methods for filtering SPAM in languages other than English.