- Date:
- 2009-2012
- Themes:
- Trust and Provenance, Grid and Distributed Computing, Decentralised Information Systems
- Funding:
- ESRC
A quantitative node for the ESRC-funded Digital Social Research programme.
Through the synthesis of statistical and computing expertise the project aims to realise the ESRC's vision of e-science enabling cutting edge methodological developments to help quantitative researchers do new and better research and to provide learning pathways to bring these cutting edge developments into working practices of quantitative social sciences.
Primary investigators
- Professor William Brown (University of Bristol)
- lavm
Secondary investigators
- Danius Michaelides
- hy2
- Professor Ian Plewis (University of Manchester)
- Dr Mark Tranmer (University of Manchester)
- Professor David De Roure (University of Oxford)
- Dr Paul Lambert (University of Stirling)
- Professor Mac MacDonald (Institute of Education)
Partners
- University of Bristol
- University of Manchester
- Universtiy of Oxford
- Universtiy of Stirling
- Institute of Education
Associated research groups
- Web and Internet Science
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2011-2013
- Theme:
- Trust and Provenance
Mission: to support the widespread publication and use of provenance information of Web documents, data, and resources. The Working Group will publish W3C Recommendations that define a language for exchanging provenance information among applications. (See Charter)
Primary investigator
- lavm
Secondary investigator
- tdh
Partner
- W3C Working Group
Associated research groups
- Web and Internet Science
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2010-2015
- Themes:
- Human Computer Interaction, Trust and Provenance
- Funding:
- EPSRC, AHRC
The PATINA project aims to revolutionise the design of technologies for supporting research. It was awarded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the RCUK Digital Economy programme and will run for three years from October 2010.
Current digital research support systems take attention away from the material that they describe. PATINA will provide researchers with new opportunities to create research spaces that emphasise the primacy of research material, and support the sharing of research activities as well as results. Through recording of research practice the project will also enable you to ââ¬Ëwalk in the footstepsââ¬â¢ of other researchers, and explore how the provenance of your developing ideas links with theirs through shared objects that exist both online and in the real world.
The consortium will build wearable prototypes that can enhance research objects by projecting related information back into their research space. These technologies will also provide the means to capture, record, and replay the researcher's activities to support intuitive archiving, sharing and publication of interactions with research objects. The design of the technologies will draw on theoretical frameworks of space developed from studies of research spaces as diverse as libraries, museums, homes and archaeological fieldwork sites.
The project is led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with the Universities of Brighton, Greenwich, Newcastle, Southampton and Swansea. It involves partnerships with Microsoft Research, Nokia Research and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Primary investigators
- lavm
- Dr Mike Fraser, Bristol
- Dr Graeme Earl, Archeology, Southampton
- Prof Matt Jones, Swansea
- Dr Rosamund Davies, Greenwich
- Dr Martyn Dade-Robertson
Partners
- Archeology, Southampton
- University of Bristol
- University of Newcastle
- University of Brighton
- University of Greenwich
- University of Swansea
Associated research groups
- Web and Internet Science
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2011-2015
- Themes:
- Systems and control, Intelligent Systems and Machine Learning, Image processing and Computer Vision
- Funding:
- ERC starting grant
Today's state-of-the-art methods for data processing are model based. We propose a fundamentally new approach that does not depend on an explicit model representation and can be used for model-free data processing. From a theoretical point of view, the prime advantage of the newly proposed paradigm is conceptual unification of existing methods. From a practical point of view, the proposed paradigm opens new possibilities for development of computational methods for data processing.
The underlying computational tool in the proposed setting is low-rank approximation. Recent work by the applicant, co-workers, and others has demonstrated advantages of computational methods based on low-rank approximation over classical methods, based on solution of linear systems of equations. In this project, we will further advance the theory and algorithms for low-rank approximation by developing robust and efficient local optimisation methods and methods based on convex relaxations.
Low-rank approximation has applications in systems and control, signal processing, computer algebra, and machine learning, to name a few. Generic examples in system theory and signal processing are model reduction and system identification. Dimensionality reduction, classification, and information retrieval problems in machine learning can be formulated and solved as low-rank approximation problems, thus benefiting from the theory, algorithms, and numerical software tools developed in this research project. Beyond the scope of the project, we envisage that the newly proposed paradigm will catalyse cross-disciplinary research, leading to selection of the best theoretical tools and computational methods available as well as development of new ones by a synergy of ideas from different application domains.
Primary investigator
- im
Associated research group
- Information: Signals, Images, Systems Research Group
- Date:
- 2010-2011
- Theme:
- Web Science
- Funding:
- JISC
The project aims to align musical composer artifacts within a number of scholary data catalogs including Grove, RISM, Copac & British Library. The project will also expose the aligned composers as RDF using a canonical URI, which will link to the LinkedBrainz/MusicBrainz data where possible.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- ds
- David Bretherton
Partners
- Grove
- RISM
- Copac
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2011-2012
- Themes:
- Agent Based Computing, Simulation, Modelling and Evalution, Knowledge Technologies
- Funding:
- EPSRC (KTS), Hampshire County Council
The key outputs of the ALADDIN project include the development of a high-fidelity disaster simulation platform and a live situational awareness application. These tools have, so far, been used to evaluate and demonstrate a number of state-of-the-art task and resource allocation algorithms. Given this, we aim to transfer the knowledge acquired in developing these tools and algorithms to the Emergency Planning team at Hampshire County Council. Work will involve upgrading what is currently research-oriented software to more specialised software for experts in the disaster management area. By so doing, we aim to transfer our expert knowledge in the area of multi-agent coordination, disaster simulation, and situational awareness to our partner. This will enable them to assess their emergency response and preparedness strategies. Conversely, by interacting with the domain experts from Hampshire County Council, we aim to enhance our understanding of the research problems that have yet to be tackled in the area of disaster management and, more generally, in situations where large numbers of agents need to be coordinated in a dynamic and uncertain environment. Moreover, through the implementation of our technologies in real-world systems, we aim to generate new data sets that will be useful to us and to the research community at large
Primary investigator
Secondary investigator
- bs07r
Partner
- Hampshire County Council
Associated research groups
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Agents, Interaction and Complexity
- Date:
- 2011-2011
- Themes:
- Technology Enhanced Learning, Accessible Technologies
- Funding:
- _other (Creative Partnerships)
The GO Platform project funded by Creative Partnerships with Great Oaks School can best be described as an interactive communication system in the school, which will take advantage of new web 2.0 technologies such as; social-networking sites, blogs, wikis, video-sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, etc... This will give the school community a platform to share and exchange creative teaching ideas and opportunities and to extend these to a wider audience. It will also be a place to promote the school's new theatre and sports facilities to a wider community. For this the school will need to engage a practitioner with the appropriate skills and experience. ÃÂ The second element is to investigate new ways of pupils to access existing and new technologies. For example; our SLD pupils and some MLD pupils have little or no way of accessing the internet without support. Through assistive technologies and universal accessability, our pupils can have a greater independence and means of communication both at school and and home. Through the use of augmentative and alternative communication, pupils on the autistic spectrum could develop a means of communication with their peers and adults. We envisage this could be done through the use of iPads that will be given to members of staff and students working in pairs.
The third element to the project would be more specific and would test the first element. We will create and video, performances and animated social stories across the whole school delivered through subject areas. Special Needs pupils have a wide range of learning difficulties and these social stories will address some of these needs, from a short story about respecting people's body space, to preparing an autistic pupil for buying new shoes. We will employ a creative practitioner with drama, film, art, poetry, music and animation skills who also has an understanding of special needs.
Through this project pupils, staff, families and community will develop new skills which will be sustained through a programme of CPD and training. Our Change school question is shaping up to be 'How can we work with teachers and pupils in their curriculum areas to create the Go Platform?' This will then transcend in to 'How can we test the Platform so that it can become sustainable?'
This will hopefully be a research project that will need input from all parties.
Primary investigators
- E.A. Draffan
- Sebastian Skuse
- Mike Wald
Partners
- Creative Partnerships
- Great Oaks School
Associated research group
- Web and Internet Science
- Date:
- 2011-2016
- Themes:
- Agent-Based Computing, Human-Computer Interaction, Trust and Provenance, Agent Based Computing, Human Computer Interaction
- Funding:
- EPSRC
With a reported 5 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, access to communication technologies has reached unprecedented levels and has fundamentally altered the ways in which we experience computational systems. Once delivered through a desktop machine to an office worker, computing has become an interwoven feature of everyday life across the globe in a way that profoundly affects us all. We are now interconnected using mobile devices; we routinely invoke remote services through a global "cloud" infrastructure and increasingly rely on computational devices in our everyday life. Computational devices monitor our health, entertain us, guide us and keep us safe and secure. However, this explosive growth in these devices and on-line services is only a precursor to an "era of ubiquity," where each of us will routinely rely upon a plethora of smart and proactive computers that we carry with us, access at home and at work, and that are embedded into the world around us.
As computation increasingly pervades the world around us, it will profoundly change the ways in which we work with computers. Rather than issuing instructions to passive machines, we will increasingly work in partnership with highly inter-connected computational components (aka agents) that are able to act autonomously and intelligently. Specifically, humans and software agents will continually and flexibly establish a range of collaborative relationships with one another, forming human-agent collectives (HACs) to meet their individual and collective goals. This vision of people and computational agents operating at a global scale offers tremendous potential and, if realised correctly, will help us meet the key societal challenges of sustainability, inclusion, and safety that are core to our future. However, these benefits are mirrored by the potential of equally concerning pitfalls as we shift to becoming increasingly dependent on systems that interweave human and computational endeavour.
As systems based on human-agent collectives grow in scale, complexity and temporal extent, we will increasingly require a principled science that allows us to reason about the computational and human aspects of these systems if we are to avoid developments that are unsafe, unreliable and lack the appropriate safeguards to ensure societal acceptance.
Delivering this science is the core research objective of this Programme. In more detail, it seeks to establish the new science that is needed to understand, build and apply HACs that symbiotically interleave human and computer systems to an unprecedented degree. To this end, it brings together three world-leading academic groups from the Universities of Southampton, Oxford and Nottingham (with multi-disciplinary expertise in the areas of artificial intelligence, agent-based computing, machine learning, decentralised information systems, participatory systems, and ubiquitous computing) with industrial collaborators (initially BAE Systems, PRI Ltd and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics) to collectively establish the foundational scientific underpinnings of these systems and drive these understandings to real-world applications in the critical domains of future energy networks, and disaster response.
Primary investigators
- Nick Jennings
- Professor Alex Rogers (Oxford)
- lavm
- Professor Steve Roberts (Oxford)
- Professor Tom Rodden (Nottingham)
Secondary investigators
- Sarvapali Ramchurn
- Sebastian Stein
- tdh
- Long Tran-Thanh
- mv1g10
Partners
- BAE Systems
- Secure Meters Ltd
- Australian Centre for Field Robotics
- Rescue Global
Associated research groups
- Web and Internet Science
- Agents, Interaction and Complexity
- Date:
- 2011-2013
- Themes:
- Multimedia, Web Science, Digital Libraries
- Funding:
- EUFP7 (ICT-2009.4.1/270239)
ARCOMEM is about memory institutions like archives, museums, and libraries in the age of the Social Web. Memory institutions are more important now than ever: as we face greater economic and environmental challenges we need our understanding of the past to help us navigate to a sustainable future. This is a core function of democracies, but this function faces stiff new challenges in face of the Social Web, and of the radical changes in information creation, communication and citizen involvement that currently characterise our information society (e.g., there are now more social network hits than Google searches). Social media are becoming more and more pervasive in all areas of life. In the UK, for example, it is now not unknown for a government minister to answer a parliamentary question using Twitter, and this material is both ephemeral and highly contextualised, making it increasingly difficult for a political archivist to decide what to preserve. This new world challenges the relevance and power of our memory institutions. To answer these challenges, ARCOMEM's aim is to: - help transform archives into collective memories that are more tightly integrated with their community of users - exploit Social Web and the wisdom of crowds to make Web archiving a more selective and meaning-based process To do this we will provide innovative tools for archivists to help exploit the new media and make our organisational memories richer and more relevant.
We will do this in three ways:
- first we will show how social media can help archivists select material for inclusion, providing content appraisal via the social web
- second we will show how social media mining can enrich archives, moving towards structured preservation around semantic categories
- third we will look at social, community and user-based archive creation methods As results of this activity the outcomes of the ARCOMEM project will include:
- innovative models and tools for Social Web driven content appraisal and selection, and intelligent content acquisition
- novel methods for Social Web analysis, Web crawling and mining, event and topic detection and consolidation, and multimedia content mining - reusable components for archive enrichment and contextualization
- two complementary example applications, the first for media-related Web archives and the second for political archives - a standards-oriented ARCOMEM demonstration system The impact of these outcomes will be to a) reduce the risk of losing irreplaceable ephemeral web information, b) facilitate cost-efficient and effective archive creation, and c) support the creation of more valuable archives. In this way we hope to strengthen our democracies' understanding of the past, in order to better direct our present towards viable and sustainable modes of living, and thus to make a contribution to the future of Europe and beyond.
Primary investigators
Secondary investigators
- Jonathon Stephen Hare
- dpd
- ads04r
- Sina Samangooei
- Heather Packer
Partners
- SUDWESTRUNDFUNK
- PARLAMENTSDIREKTION
- HELLENIC PARLIAMENT
- ATHENA RESEARCH AND INNOVATION CENTER IN INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & KNOWLEDGE TECHNOLOGIES
- DEUTSCHE WELLE
- GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ UNIVERSITAET HANNOVER
- INSTITUT TELECOM PARIS
- ATHENS TECHNOLOGY CENTER SA
- YAHOO IBERIA SL
- STICHTING EUROPEAN ARCHIVE
Associated research group
- Web and Internet Science
- Date:
- 2010-2013
Primary investigator
Associated research group
- Information: Signals, Images, Systems Research Group