[Prepared by Steve Reece and Tom Nickson] In May Joel Fischer, Tom Nickson and Steve Reece will join Rescue Global in the Angel Thunder exercise in the US. Orchid is attending Ex AT to determine how and what information is gathered during Search and Rescue in general and the information flow between each component of […]
I’ve just found out about Huginn, a platform designed to host automated agents to perform online tasks. The github has some quite compelling use cases that could be tied into many of ORCHID’s projects – a short sampling: “Track counts of high frequency events and send an SMS within moments when they spike, such as the term […]
The public generally associate drones with the fleets of Predator and Reaper weapons platforms. However, technology first developed in the military soon spins off into the commercial sector – as evidenced by the post-WWII emergence into everyday American life of semiconductors, computers and jet aircraft. Is the increasing promotion of ‘disaster drones’ in the humanitarian […]
Today, Nipun Batra, Jack Kelly and Oliver Parson are really pleased to announce the release of NILMTK: an open source toolkit for non-intrusive load monitoring (http://nilmtk.github.io/). The toolkit will allow researchers to easily develop algorithms which disaggregate a household’s total electricity consumption into individual appliances. Specifically, the toolkit includes: a number of parsers to read […]
The paper “Community-Based Bayesian Aggregation Models for Crowdsourcing” by the ORCHID PhD student Matteo Venanzi was the best paper runner up at the 23rd International World Wide Web conference (WWW 2014). http://www2014.kr/
We just had an internal talk on breaking Captchas – I was amazed at how difficult it is. The reCaptcha project uses the captcha requirements of many sites to help in a massive crowd-sourced book digitisation project. http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore
A recent BBC article looks at the rise on human-centric data flow, as ever from mobile devices. Handling such vast data, the kind of things it can help [or not] with, and ownership are all very hot topics. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26383058
In recent work we’ve been leveraging community analysis methods to understand a real HAC – that of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS). To our surprise there are very strong patterns in the data, despite the users not collaborating and knowing one another. The community structure was reminiscent of the structure Edwin Simpson found when looking […]
Athlete injured after drone crash Australia’s air safety body is looking into reports that a triathlete has been injured by a drone falling on her. Read more:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26921504 Sent from a mobile phone.
Nearly a month since it went missing, Flight MH370 has still not been found. The Malaysian police are conducting a criminal investigation into the plane’s disappearance, but have admitted they might never discover why someone switched off its communications and diverted it thousands of miles off-course. They have considered various hypotheses – mechanical or electrical […]
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.
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