This week, all the ORCHID PhD Students got together in Southampton for a 2 day conference and hackfest. Day 1 involved a number of talks about research in industry, robotics, blogs, inference, and visual frameworks. We also heard about how to write CVs, postgraduate life (without the rose tinted glasses), internships, how to get your […]
Let’s say there’s a massive explosion at a housing estate in North London and the local authorities decide to evacuate the area. They set up strategic command at Scotland Yard and pitch an incident tent at Tottenham to direct officers in the field. There is a hierarchy of control here, which has the potential to […]
Every disaster is an unknown quantity which immediately reposes the oldest philosophical question – what does it mean to be in the world? Logic dictates that a body is either there or not there, 100% there or 0% there. This way of thinking is adequate for most occasions. But when there is a disaster (such […]
Steve and I will be guided in our thinking about Paul Virilio and his theories of the global accident by two of the foremost Virilio scholars in the world – namely, John Armitage and Ryan Bishop. Now, it just so happens that both are based at Winchester School of Art, which is part of the […]
Steve and I went back to Building 32 to interview Alex Rogers, Luke Teacy, Victor Naroditskiy and Gopal Ramchum. One common thread was how disaster management involves the real-time pooling of computer-driven dronecam imagery and crowd-sourced messaging. We are interested in how a narrative is pieced together from these fragments. As a disaster unfolds, it emerges […]
Perhaps the defining characteristic of autonomous agents is that they are capable of substituting for human labour. As such, many suspect that the development of technologies enabling such agents will have significant impact on employment, replacing humans in many jobs previously thought immune to automation. We performed a study of which jobs in particular are […]
Really great Wired article, Alex. Interesting that the digital mapping of crowd-generated tweets, photos and videos in disaster management has accelerated so rapidly from its origin in the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Each successive crisis (the Pablo Typhoon in the Philippines, the war in Libya, Hurricane Sandy, the recent floods in northern India) has revealed new […]
The International Day for Disaster Reduction falls on Sunday 13 October. http://www.un.org/en/events/disasterreductionday/
Wired.co.uk investigates how those involved in humanitarian disaster response have had to adjust to deal with big crisis data in emergencies following the Haiti earthquake in 2010 - http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-09/30/digital-humanitarianism
Steve went to the ORCHID all-hands meeting in Egham and caught up with all strands of disaster management research – from the University of Nottingham as well as the University of Southampton. Particularly illuminating were the poster sessions, where scientists talked through their research in detail. There were a number of disaster scenarios in play […]
We are developing systems that allow first responders, unmanned ground and aerial vehicles, and software agents to work effectively together.
Learn more about Disaster response »We are developing novel algorithms and interfaces to optimise energy consumption and coordinate consumers and producers in the smart grid.
Learn more about Smart Grid »We are developing approaches that make full use of the skills, preferences and capabilities of citizen scientists.
Learn more about Citizen Science »