Orchid Project

At Southampton, we have developed an intelligent agent that sits in a home, and by learning its thermal properties, controls the heater so as to minimise the cost or the carbon emitted from the heating load. It uses multi-output Gaussian process regression to predict on-site external temperature as well as carbon intensity of the grid. […]

Dear All, Here’s an interesting set of presentations on the use of mobile devices and citizen science for conservation and biodiversity monitoring - http://digitalconservation.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/smartphone-symposium/. Steve Roberts in Oxford is already working with many of the participants. Alex

Dear All, We’ve had some ORCHID logos and artwork designed to illustrate what a human-agent collective is and how it relates to each of the three application domains. The original Adobe Illustrator files are all on dropbox in ORCHID/Logo and Images/. I’ll make convenient PDF and PNG versions of each one as well. Feel free […]

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As a consequence of the global economic crisis, many European contries are now involved in taking strong measures to decrease the heavy tax evasion that is deemed as a majour problem for the health of national economies. A succesful initiative taken in Italy in this line has been to crowdsource tax evasion crimes through an […]

The UK Energy Research Centre holds a summer school each year aimed at giving PhD students an understanding of energy systems as a whole and of pathways to low-carbon and resilient energy systems. There is no charge to attend the summer school, and the UKERC provide all accommodation and food. The 2012 summer school will […]

If you are interested in proposing a Zooinverse Labs project please can you produce a short proposal addressing the questions raised in the following link http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22910547/CSA_labs_draft.pdf&nbsp; <!–[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings></xml><![endif]–><!–[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-GB</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> […]

Tripadvisor is turning out to be a key determinant factor in the success and failure of hotels and restaurants. In fact, a recent article on the BBC was commenting about how bad reviews can really kills entire businesses. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16501967 And interesting challenge would be to understand how to prevent unfair ratings from untrustworthy tripadvisor users, […]

I have been doing some thinking over the holidays about our work on energy monitoring and feedback and where we might take it in the future that I thought I’d share with you. My thinking was influenced on the one hand by the findings from our study, and in particular some of the interviews I […]

I met Muki Haklay a few months ago, he is a professor at UCL focusing on citizen science. He is organising the following summit on the topic in London next Feb, which could be of interest to some in the lab. ————————————————- Dear colleagues, I’m circulating this announcement to you, as you might be interested […]