Orchid Project

I wrote this as a heads-up email after yesterday’s AgentSwitch catch up in London, but I think it might be useful for posterity and general interest. This is not intended as objective ‘Minutes of the Meeting’, rather,  I’m discussing some points from my point of view. Ongoing development Soton hired a new full time developer […]

I was with small team from ORCHID attending the Fort Widley international Urban search and rescue exercise which revolved around an earthquake scenario (‘disaster city’ for grown-ups they call it). This exercise involved emergency responders from a number of countries performing a number of rescue missions including but  not limited to: 1. Digging inside tunnels […]

To view a call for Citizen Science meetups this week, click on ‘Programme’ on the left: www.un.org/en/events/scienceday

http://google.org/crisismap/sandy-2012 and some other interesting resources and comments here http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/28/google-has-set-up-a-crisis-map-for-those-preparing-for-hurricane-sandy/

‘Nemesis’ electric car breaks UK land-speed record http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19733430

A sensor that digitally maps the area through which the wearer is moving, in real time, has been created by scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project is supported by the US Air Force and the Office of Naval Research, and could help rescuers in a disaster. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19716723

Guardian story about the New Forest Cicada work - http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/20/smartphone-endangered-cicada-detector?intcmp=122

The following DECC report on smart meters might be of interest to some of you:Quantitative Research into Public Awareness, Attitudes, and Experience of Smart Metershttp://www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/11/tackling-climate-change/smart-meters/6194-quantitative-research-into-public-awareness-attit.pdfOli

This is a video of the segway based UGVs that myself and Feng will be working with on our collaborative trip to the ACFR. The plan for the trip is to implement our algorithms in scenarios involving these UGVs as well as the UAVs previously seen in Francesco’s work and human agents. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGOe2knYl1M&feature=plcp

Interesting on-line course on gamification taught by Kevin Werbach at the university of Pennsylvania. It is relevant for those who study mechanisms for motivating workers in crowdsourcing. https://www.coursera.org/course/gamification