Orchid Project

A new smartphone app that listens for the distinctive call of a highly endangered insect will soon help conservationists find out whether it has become extinct or not. The unusual blend of crowdsourcing and conservation is part of an experiment to see if visiting tourists using the app can...

There’s something rotten on the streets of Bristol. The city’s IgFest begins today, offering a range of ‘urban games’, in which groups of players take part in themed chases around the Old City, following mission objectives and immersing themselves in living interactive narratives. In other words – they’re playing video...

Orchid, a uk university research programme funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, is to use artificial intelligence methods to coordinate the human and machine elements of a disaster management operation. Humans can provide only partial situational awareness, such as where facilities are and what buildings are damaged....

Technology and society: To what extent can social networking make it easier to find people and solve real-world problems?
IN 1967 Stanley Milgram, an American social scientist, conducted an experiment in which he sent dozens of packages to random people in Omaha, Nebraska. He asked them to pass them on to...

Is your Euro 2012 fantasy football team sliding down the league at an alarming rate? If you thought Chris from the office was hard to beat, watch out – soon you might be competing against a computer.
Sarvapali Ramchurn, a computer scientist at the University of Southampton, UK, and colleagues have...

An ominous plume of black smoke hangs over east London. The scarcely believable news arrives in snippets: A huge blast has rocked the Thames Barrier; a surge of water is ploughing through the city; a sports stadium has collapsed; more explosions are reported on Twitter.
Thousands of people are trying to...

Research on drone technology and disaster management led by Professor Nick Jennings and highlighted by the BBC could prove vital in improving the response of emergency services and populations to disaster management.
The technology being developed by Professor Jennings and his research team in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, in association with...

Less than a decade after the first electronic computer, British mathematician Alan Turing posed the question, ‘Can machines think?’.
To answer that point Turing devised a test in which machines conducted conversations with human judges. If the machine’s written responses fooled the judges into believing it was a person, it could...

Researchers from the University of Oxford are using tiny data loggers to study “social networks” in birds. Researchers fitted thousands of birds in Oxfordshire with the miniature devices and are gathering data on which individuals form long-term bonds and how groups live and forage together. One of the team, PhD...

A new way of analysing the social networks that link individual animals to each other has been tested on wild great tits by Oxford University researchers.
How animals associate in groups can have important consequences in terms of the health and survival of both individuals and whole populations, and can influence...