A collaboration of researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Southampton and Nottingham are at the forefront of a new science that is finding ways in which computers can work intelligently in partnership with people. This could support the management of some of today’s most challenging situations, such as the aftermath of major disasters and smart energy systems.
At a recent event, at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London, world-leading ORCHID research was showcased from the fields of energy systems, citizen science and disaster response. The event featured keynote talks from project leaders, presentations of case studies and demonstrations of technologies such as:
  • Joulo – a home heating advice system that uses a low-cost temperature logger and online algorithms to provide feedback to households on how they are using their current heating system, along with autonomous intelligent home heating agents that can learn the householders’ comfort preferences in order to provide efficient comfortable heat control.
  • AtomicORCHID – a mobile mixed-reality game in which first responders work together with a response headquarters to rescue as many casualties as possible. This game has allowed researchers to study team coordination and understand how human responders can be supported by computational agents that assist the planning and execution of the rescue mission, including the coordination of multi-UAV deployments.
  • Japan Nuclear Crowd Map platform – Following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, citizen scientists deployed sensors and uploaded data to help track the spread of airborne radioactive particles. To identify accurate information from some many sources, the platform combines reports from thousands of sensors and uses machine learning algorithms to correct for biases and noise and weed out those sensors that are defective.

The five-year ORCHID project has looked at how we work with computers: instead of issuing instructions to passive machines, we will increasingly work in partnership with agents, highly interconnected computational components that are able to act autonomously and intelligently, forming human-agent collectives (HACs) that can work symbiotically with people.