Orchid Project

Obviously, drones used to support humanitarian relief in a disaster zone have a very different purpose from drones used to target and kill enemy combatants in a battle-field. However, the logistical and operational challenges are similar. When the US military lost one of its stealth drones over Iran in 2011, the Iranians claimed that they […]

Picking up on the Disaster response video, SciDevNet have a news piece on their front page (most viewed article) talking about our work and interactions with RescueGlobal. http://www.scidev.net/global/disasters/news/artificial-intelligence-to-help-disaster-aid-coordination.html Gopal

In 2007, the websites of the big government ministries, media outlets and banks in Estonia suddenly went offline. The information black-out lasted for three weeks. What was going on? The online arbiters of official reality in this former Soviet-dominated republic had become the victim of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by a group […]

The final report from the first stage of the DECC smarter heating controls study that MyJoulo contributed to is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/what-people-want-from-their-heating-controls-a-qualitative-study

There is now more than one chemical spill zone. There are, in fact, three zones spread over a huge area. At police national HQ, a strategic command bunker has been set up. The Gold commander has the Google Maps snapshots of the various incidents punched up on screen. He is getting updates from his Silver […]

At a site near to a chemical spill, the incident commander has set up a tent and is directing her team of 100 field agents. She has a visual fix on the location up on screen. It’s a Google Maps satellite-coordinated representation of the spill zone, tagged with information from her agents about hazardous areas, casualties, […]

A joint University of Southampton and Microsoft Research Cambridge team, lead by the ORCHID researcher Matteo Venanzi, were one of the winners of the Crowdsourcing at Scale 2013 Shared Task Challenge. The challenge involved computing accurate aggregations of tween sentiment judgments for large crowdsourced datasets collected by Google and Crowdflower. The Soton/MSR team designed a […]

There are media reports of bombs on the London Underground, and you’re outside Kings Cross station, which is closed. An angry mob is building up. There’s a guy shouting into his mobile phone. Is he trying to call loved ones and becoming frustrated because he keeps getting the answer machine? Or is he a first […]

Let’s say there’s been a large-scale disaster such as a chemical spill. As it unfolds, a reconnaissance team of field agents is deployed on the ground to search for survivors, log casualties and identify where help is needed. They have their own food, water, power tools and comms equipment. They even have their own pop-up […]

Steve and I went back to Building 32 to interview ORCHID team members Nadia Pantidi and Joel Fischer from the University of Nottingham about their disaster response research. It was terrifically interesting. Nadia talked about her study of a training exercise at Fort Widley in Texas for urban search and rescue responders and her work […]