Orchid Project

Amazon testing drones for deliveries Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, is testing unmanned drones to deliver goods to customers, according to Chief Executive Jeff Bezos. Read more:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25180906 Sent from my iPhone

This is an interesting blog post about a Task Recommender system for Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. This system allows turkers to rate tasks given by requesters so that new tasks can be proposed to them to maximise their utlity…. that’s incentive engineering in action for me! http://crowdresearch.org/blog/?p=8341&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FollowTheCrowd+%28Follow+the+Crowd%29 Gopal

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/why-you-might-buy-electricity-from-elon-musk-some-day/281824/ Gopal Sent from my iPad

Tom, thanks for this post about the stress suffered by digital volunteers from bodies such as the Standby Task Force (SBTF). This organisation deploys networks of people from around the world to support on-the-ground disaster response efforts by creating online crisis maps and collecting and tagging crowd-sourced tweets and social media imagery. Since 2010, the […]

I spent some time last week working with the “Geeklist Corps of Developers” on their Typhoon Haiyan hackfest. I tried to bring simple machine learning to bear on categorising tweets into different classes, ranging from the general “Infrastructure” down to the more specific “Need Water”, “Food Offered”, and others. This (perhaps unsurprisingly) did not work […]

As recently mentioned by Nick, he has been contacted by a BBC journalist who was researching developments in social media around the Typhoon in the Philippines. They made this film in response http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24993953 MicroMappers (http://micromappers.com/) have produced a number of crowdsourcing apps to help categorise tweets. They call their apps ‘Clickers’, for example TweetClicker is an application […]

DECC is offering funding for 2-month secondments. “Applicants are invited to apply for funding for research placements from the RCUK Digital Economy Theme (DE) Sustainable Society Network+ (SSN+). This placement is targeted at researchers eligible for funding under the RCUK scheme and must take place in commercial or government entities in the UK and overseas […]

The University of Nottingham’s AtomicOrchid is a location-based mixed reality game which plays with the idea that a dirty bomb has exploded on the campus. A search-and-rescue team is despatched to pick up people from the radioactive zone. They are equipped with smartphones which connect them to their command post, letting them stream back video […]

There is an interesting article on the BBC web site about how twitter feeds are being analysed and used for disasters (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24993953). This approach is very human-centric and resource intensive and I cannot help thinking that some simple automated technology would really help them. I know the journalist well and he’s on the look out […]

When Rescue Global deployed its team of field agents to the flooded area of Uttarakhand in India, they experimented with Google Glass. This new piece of computer equipment is effectively a smartphone built into a pair of spectacles. It enables a first responder to receive (on a heads-up display) map data and high-level information from […]