Orchid Project

I recently came back from a 3 month internship at MSR Cambridge. This was the first joint Bing / MSR internship whose aim was to deliver contributions to both the Bing’s production side and scientific research. My work focussed on large-scale label aggregation of human judgments for search engine evaluation using graphical models and the […]

Human Computation Conference 2013 Overview Report from the first AAAI – Human computation and crowdsourcing conference (HCOMP). This is one of the main conferences in the crowdsourcing area and this year received papers from diverse communities including machine learning, HCI, psychology, information retrieval, speech recognition, etc. Papers are mostly application-centric. Technical papers (e.g. machine learning) […]

Interesting report by Rescue Global on their September 2013 deployment in India to monitor the wide-scale flooding in Uttarakhand. Strategic (or Gold) command was based at the organisation’s London HQ, a tactical (or Silver) command post was established at the military airbase in Dehradun, while field operatives (at the Bronze level) were flown by helicopter to […]

A technique Steve and I often use is to construct ‘alternative futures’ – hypothetical scenarios designed to test received versions of events or established ways of thinking. We intend to work with the ORCHID team to imagine the kinds of disasters that drone technology might have to respond to. Some of the scenarios that emerge might […]

Lots of interesting insights on where HACs could be useful from David Jones and his team. You can read their full report here: http://www.rescueglobal.org/images/uploads/Rescue_Global_Operation_Inundantia_India_Deployment_Report_111113.pdf Gopal

Steve and I have just caught up with Genesis of Cr0n, the ‘mixed reality’ game which fuses immersive online gameplay and real-world performance. Fascinating stuff! Most interesting for us is the use of a narrative framework which posits an ‘alternative future’ scenario straight out of cyberpunk science fiction – the UK is run by a […]

There are reports on Twitter of bombs exploding on the London Underground, the official news media talks blandly of electrical power surges, the mobile phone networks are jammed by people making calls, there is panic, the stock market crashes. But there are no actual bombs. Instead, there is a virtual bomb, an information bomb, detonated […]

The last week of October saw the launch of the first phase of a new game currently being developed as part of the Orchid project by the universities of Nottingham and Southampton in collaboration with Urban Angel, a Nottingham-based group of artists who specialize in interactive theatre and transmedia experiences. Genesis of Cr0n is the theatrical […]

The drug wars in Mexico have created a situation where people rely on social media to safeguard themselves. Here, it is believed, is an instantaneous source of grassroots information more trustworthy than official news outlets. So when in 2011 messages spread on Twitter that gunmen were kidnapping children from schools in Veracruz, parents rushed to […]

Nice article, Alex. Interesting that this survey of Twitter as a crowd-sourced crisis management medium in the wake of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings shows the usefulness of the 72 rule. Before the 72 hour mark was reached, only 20% of the most viral content on Twitter was true information, while 29% was fake information […]