Orchid Project

Whereas we unconsciously accept the risks of new technologies once they become part of everyday life, it takes an accident to restore our consciousness of human frailty. As Virilio sardonically puts it, a heads-on collision soon re-establishes the facts. This ‘shock of the real’ is the starting-point for a new kind of ecology – not […]

Last week, Dave Nicholson and Sam Miller attended BAE Systems Defence Information (DI) Technology Exhibition in London. The Exhibition was attended by DI technical authorities / capability managers and technical leads from the Advanced Technology Centre. It showcased a range of products and  technologies being developed and delivered within the DI business. An ORCHID stand […]

We’ve now written an overview article on Human Agent Collectives that will be published later this year in the Communications of the ACM. You can access it at: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/364593/. The article gives a rationale for HACs, outlines an example of their use in a disaster response context and highlights the key research challenges as we see […]

Hi all, I am now back from Arizona, Steve and Joel are still there. We have gathered a lot of data and answered a lot of our own questions, and will be passing the ethnography data to Nottingham for further analysis. If anyone have any specific questions that you think we haven’t covered or covered […]

Search and Rescue teams from Apache County and wider Arizona use Win C.A.S.I.E, standing for Computer Aided Search Information Exchange. It is a piece of software developed in part by John Bownds of the University of Arizona. It provides a series of questions to be asked at the beginning of a search and rescue mission, […]

The Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) launched in 2010 with a high-profile front-man in the shape of Hollywood actor George Clooney. It was soon analysing satellite imagery collected from the border between Sudan and South Sudan. Its mission was to assess potential threats to civilians and, by releasing its reports on social media, deter war crimes. […]

[Of key importance to Provenance but also touches on all aspects of Orchid research]. Process to go from mission notification to an actual plan involves asking 7 questions answered in sequence. Timing for this process is between several weeks and a few hours: planning time should take less than 1/3rd of the total time they […]

As well as actually rescuing people, Rescue Global experiments with new technology to find out if it can be applied in the field, and to understand its limitations. Google Glass is one example of this new technology. Rescue Global intends to equip their pathfinders (the people deployed into disaster areas to reconnoitre or rescue) with […]

Rescue Global is starting to make use of IFTTT (if this then that) to link events and apps together. They believe in the “Unix Philosophy” of tools that do one thing very well and provide a simple way to pass information between to others. We’ve alerted them to the existence of Huginn (something we’ve posted […]

High tech, high complexity communications and systems provide great performance and many benefits, however many field operatives are loathe to use them due to reliability concerns. With older, cruder communications system it was possible to repair them in the field, or drop back to more basic features. With the complex systems employed in modern operations, […]