Drawing on Rescue Global’s deployment to the Philippines after super typhoon Haiyan, and on 30 years of operations analysis, David Jones reviews the command environment and the difficulties of producing intelligience in a complex emergency.
A ground-breaking transmedia alternate-reality game (ARG), which is the first large-scale project to explore ‘digital provenance’, has been launched.
In the art world, provenance documents the chain of ownership of an artefact: In the digital world, provenance is a description of what influenced an artefact, a data set, a document, a...
Some interesting collaborative research taking place in the Mixed Reality Lab over in the School of Computer Science. Researchers are working on on a national project called ORCHID, which looks at what it calls human/agent interaction. Basically, how people and computers interact to respond to specific situations.
Joel Fischer, one of the ORCHID team...
Previous technological innovation has always delivered more long-run employment, not less. But things can change.
IN 1930, when the world was “suffering…from a bad attack of economic pessimism”, John Maynard Keynes wrote a broadly optimistic essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”. It imagined a middle way between revolution and stagnation that...
The “fragmented” coordination between relief actors in the Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan last month underscores the need for artificial intelligence to streamline disaster response, says a team behind such an effort.
The ORCHID project — a consortium of UK universities and private firms — aims to make this possible by combining...
The first Crowdsourcing at Scale workshop was held on November 9 at the conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2013) in Palm Springs, Calif. A big part of the workshop was a Shared Task Challenge where we invited workshop attendees to come up with their own way to accurately...
A coordinated army of smart software and pilotless aircraft could help emergency workers save lives and mitigate damage after disaster strikes
IN THE aftermath of a disaster like the massive typhoon Haiyan, which devastated the Philippines on 8 November, confusion often reigns and sketchy information abounds. This can leave responders unsure...
In this video, we provide an overview of key research challenges being addressed by ORCHID researchers in the development of Human-Agent Collectives (HAC) for disaster response applications. Such challenges arise at the various stages of the disaster management process. In the preparedness phase, there is a need to determine where...
What next for citizen science? Professor Steve Roberts on how advanced maths can make the findings of this exciting new field more useful.
A University of Southampton student has received national recognition from the British Computer Society (BCS) for his research into multi agent systems. This is the third student from the university’s Agents, Interaction and Complexity (AIC) research group to win a Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC) award for...
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.
Learn more about Smart Grid »We are developing approaches that make full use of the skills, preferences and capabilities of citizen scientists.
Learn more about Citizen Science »