HUMAN-AGENT COLLECTIVES: FROM FOUNDATIONS TO APPLICATIONS [ORCHID]

Lead Research Organisation: University of Southampton
Department Name: Electronics and Computer Science

Abstract

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.

Planned Impact

A key component of ORCHID is the close connection and inter-play between world-leading fundamental research, the demonstration of this research in compelling real-world application scenarios, and the involvement of collaborating partners whose future lies in exploiting such research in these application areas. This provides the ideal environment for producing high impact research across a broad set of areas including: - Advances in knowledge of direct relevance to those involved in understanding the design, construction and use of systems that exploit HACs. These advances will be reflected in new concepts and theories, new interactive techniques and new platforms to support human-agent collaboration (i.e. the new science of HACs). - Novel technologies and demonstrators that showcase the use of HACs in a number of application areas which will show which methods, models and technologies are effective. In particular, the proof of concepts, working prototypes, simulations and studies will provide empirical evidence of the theoretical concepts, the technical feasibility of their construction and the social acceptability of the technologies. - Open source sets of code, toolkits and competitions that encourage a wider community to share and contribute to the research. This will target a broad set of industrial research labs and advanced developers exploring the ways in which increasingly large scale agent arrangements might be exploited. Particularly, relevant in this regard is the Horizon Digital Economy hub with which we will co-promote events and so gain access to their extensive network of partners. This work is of potential interest to a broad set of beneficiaries. In particular, the focus on reducing environmental impact seeks to enhance the quality of life for the everyday citizen and the planet and the work on disaster response seeks to exploit technology to rescue and preserve life. In order to identify where research can be applied, and also for identifying new areas for HAC systems and new collaboration partners, a dedicated Knowledge Transfer Officer will be employed. As part of ORCHID's regular management process, we will reflect upon and update the knowledge transfer strategy by reviewing the key target audiences and the mechanisms used to deliver to them. Our initial set of communities to engage include: - Our collaborating partners, who will benefit from access to the leading researchers in this new area, the ability to shape the ongoing research as it happens, the exchange of researchers through inward and outward secondments, and the ability to demonstrate and evaluate the work in scenarios that closely align with their applications of interest. In recognition of this fact, all of these partners will make a significant investment, which at present, totals over 2M. - Charities concerned with promoting the reduction of carbon emissions and response to disasters, such as the Carbon Trust, Energy Saving Trust, Ushahidi, and the Disasters Emergency Committee, who will benefit from the abilities of HAC technologies to aid in energy reduction and disaster response and the ability to more directly involve people in helping with these issues. - Policy makers and the general public who will benefit from an understanding of the capabilities and issues to emerge from human-agent collectives. For example, the shift to increasingly open access to data, through initiatives such as data.gov.uk, has highlighted innovation in this space and placed issues of access, availability and control of data on the political agenda. The next decade will require a still closer partnership between researchers and law-makers as we establish the key principles of governance in this domain, and we will exploit our links with the James Martin 21st Century School to do so.

Publications

10 25 50
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Naroditskiy V (2012) Verification in referral-based crowdsourcing. in PloS one

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Moreau L (2015) The rationale of PROV in Journal of Web Semantics

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Trung Dong Huynh (Author) (2013) The PROV-JSON serialization

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Han T (2014) The cost of interference in evolving systems in Proceedings of COIN 2014: The 17th International Workshop on Coordination, Organisations, Institutions and Norms

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Biermann F (2014) Task assignment with controlled and autonomous agents in Mathematical Social Sciences

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Alan A (2016) Tariff Agent Interacting with a Future Smart Energy System at Home in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

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Rutherford A (2013) Targeted social mobilization in a global manhunt. in PloS one

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Stein S (2011) Robust Execution of Service Workflows Using Redundancy and Advance Reservations in IEEE Transactions on Services Computing

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Davide Ceolin (Author) (2013) Reliability Analyses of Open Government Data

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Wu F (2014) Regret-based multi-agent coordination with uncertain task rewards in Proc. 28th Conf. on AI (AAAI)

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Naroditskiy V (2014) Referral incentives in crowdfunding in Proceedings of HCOMP2014: Conference on Human Computation & Crowdsourcing

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Victor Naroditskiy (Author) (2013) Redistribution in Online Mechanisms

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Krause J (2013) Reality mining of animal social systems. in Trends in ecology & evolution

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Durrant A (2011) Pursuing Leisure: Reflections on Theme Park Visiting in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)

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Moreau L. (2015) Provenance of publications: A PROV style for latex in 7th USENIX Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Provenance, TaPP 2015

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Huynh T (2018) Provenance Network Analytics An approach to data analytics using data provenance in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery

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Bachour K (2015) Provenance for the People

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Aigrain S (2015) Precise time series photometry for the Kepler-2.0 mission in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

 
Title ORCHID Artist in Residence 
Description Film based around ORCHID's contribution to disaster response 
Type Of Art Film/Video/Animation 
Year Produced 2016 
Impact An exhibition is planned by the artists (Steve Beard and Victoria Halford) in the near future. 
 
Description The ORCHID team all shared the ethos of undertaking fundamental research in real-world contexts and are worked closely with the Programme's industrial collaborators to demonstrate and evaluate this fundamental work in application domains of energy systems, citizen science and disaster response. In total 19 Human Agent Collective (HAC) applications were built, including:

HAC-ER, a prototype disaster response system that comprises a multi-UAV coordination system, a crowdsourcing component to gather information from inhabitants of an affected area and create heatmaps of the disaster zone, the AtomicORCHID coordination component, and a provenance tracking tool

AgentSwitch, a personalised energy tariff recommender system, which incorporates a predication algorithm for yearly energy consumption and disaggregation of energy feeds

and

Cicada app, an iPhone and Android app, originally developed to detects the New Forest Cicada and subsequently extended to detect other insects.
Exploitation Route ORCHID engaged with Rescue Global, Hampshire County Council and Hampshire Fire and Rescue Services around policy and process in disaster response. Work with Rescue Global to develop an augmented bird-table is ongoing.

ORCHID research on classifier combination in the citizen science domain was successfully applied to three industrial application problems in collaboration with BAE Systems.

Joulo was deployed and tested in collaboration with major energy companies, and subsequently acquired by Quby in 2015.

ORCHID engaged with uSwitch who facilitated access to their energy comparison API in support of the design and demonstration of ORCHID's AgentSwitch demonstration system.

Other ORCHID supported achievements include:

the CrowdScanner system that was developed for, and won, the US State Department's TAG challenge for social mobilisation and rapid information gathering

the Bayesian Classifier Combination algorithm for the Shared Task Challenge, developed in collaboration with a Microsoft Research/Bing team, that won the Shared Task Challenge in the Crowdsourcing at Scale workshop

an automated fantasy football manager that has outperformed 2.5m players in the online Fantasy Premier League and

the OutrunCancer platform that was launched to evaluate networked incentive schemes in collaboration with Cancer Research UK.
Sectors Aerospace

Defence and Marine

Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)

Electronics

Energy

Environment

URL http://www.orchid.ac.uk/
 
Description ORCHID has released software both to support academic articles (Latent force software accompanying JMLR article), in collaboration with industry (Infer.NET which is a MSR software that automatically generates large scale inference code for Bayesian graphical models) and as open access toolkits (Prov Python library version 1.1.0 (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/prov) which has over 46,000 downloads, the ProvStore (https://provenance.ecs.soton.ac.uk/store/): a public online repository for provenance and NILMTK: an open source non-intrusive load monitoring tool kit.
First Year Of Impact 2012
Sector Aerospace, Defence and Marine,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Energy,Environment
Impact Types Societal

Economic

 
Description Improving local authority planning
Geographic Reach Local/Municipal/Regional 
Policy Influence Type Citation in other policy documents
Impact The HCC emergency planning unit used our software to better plan their response to the mass evacuation of civilians from homes and businesses over a large region (city scale) such as the one around the Fawley refinery. This has, in turn, led to change in operating procedures. In particular, for example, they have significantly improved their techniques to estimate evacuation completion times, from an educated guess of one hour, that we have shown to be highly optimistic, to a more realistic figure of three hours for Fawley village. These more realistic estimates have helped to better identify choke points in the road network and new congestion control strategies to reduce evacuation times have subsequently been devised and adopted. Target Audience: Local Government
 
Description Police Workshop on Provenance
Geographic Reach Local/Municipal/Regional 
Policy Influence Type Influenced training of practitioners or researchers
Impact Workshop was provided to NCA, South East Regional Cyber Crime Unit
 
Description A robust toolbox for exoplanet analysis
Amount £220,000 (GBP)
Organisation The Leverhulme Trust 
Sector Charity/Non Profit
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description ASUR: Human-agent collaboration for multi-UAV Control
Amount £50,000 (GBP)
Organisation Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (DSTL) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Adaptive Demand Response
Amount £250,000 (GBP)
Organisation TSB Bank plc 
Sector Private
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Aperio: Low cost facade management in naturally ventilated buildings
Amount £494,000 (GBP)
Funding ID EP/L024608/1 
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Automated assessment of broiler chicken welfare
Amount £738,000 (GBP)
Funding ID BB/K001388/1 
Organisation Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Autonomous behaviour and learning in an uncertain world
Amount £1,200,000 (GBP)
Funding ID EP/J012300/1 
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Biosound/Mosquito Project
Amount £500,000 (GBP)
Organisation Google 
Sector Private
Country United States
Start  
 
Description Casma
Amount £500,000 (GBP)
Organisation Economic and Social Research Council 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description CharIoT: Leveraging the Internet of Things to reduce fuel poverty
Amount £277,000 (GBP)
Funding ID EP/L02392X/1 
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Creating energy for change
Amount £1,076,000 (GBP)
Funding ID EP/K002589/1 
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Cyber security solutions for smart traffic control systems
Amount £500,000 (GBP)
Funding ID EP/N02026X/1 
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start 03/2016 
End 02/2018
 
Description Design by privacy
Amount £50,000 (GBP)
Organisation Microsoft Research 
Sector Private
Country Global
Start  
 
Description Domestic energy management
Amount £15,000 (GBP)
Organisation Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Future everyday interaction with the Autonomous IoT
Amount £806,000 (GBP)
Funding ID EP/N014243/1 
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Home Hub of all things as platform for multi sided market powered by Internet of Things
Amount £982,000 (GBP)
Funding ID EP/K039911/1 
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Human mobility analysis and anomaly detection
Amount £77,000 (GBP)
Organisation Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (DSTL) 
Department Centre for Defence Enterprise
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Intelligient SME energy management and trading with ancillary services
Amount £200,000 (GBP)
Funding ID EP/M507167/1 
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description KTS with BAE Systems
Amount £50,000 (GBP)
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Mixed reality game pattern cards
Amount £10,000 (GBP)
Organisation University of Nottingham 
Sector Academic/University
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Multi-agent collectives for sensing, autonomy, intelligence and control
Amount £1,316,000 (GBP)
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description ORCHID Artist in Residence
Amount £15,000 (GBP)
Organisation The Leverhulme Trust 
Sector Charity/Non Profit
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Prototyping open innovation models for ICT-enabled manufacturing in food and packaging
Amount £1,827,000 (GBP)
Funding ID EP/K014234/1 
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Referrak incentives in crowdsourcing
Amount £8,000 (GBP)
Organisation British Council 
Sector Charity/Non Profit
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Researcher Links Workshop for Disaster Response
Amount £50,000 (GBP)
Organisation British Council 
Department British Council Researcher Links
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Thermomodelling and inference with Home OS
Amount £60,000 (GBP)
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description Transforming feedback - interactive, practice-level visualisation of electricity consumption
Amount £50,000 (GBP)
Organisation Kingston University London 
Sector Academic/University
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description User centred networking
Amount € 5,000,000 (EUR)
Funding ID 611001 
Organisation European Commission 
Sector Public
Country European Union (EU)
Start  
 
Description biosound
Amount £225,000 (GBP)
Organisation University of Oxford 
Department Oxford Martin School
Sector Academic/University
Country United Kingdom
Start  
 
Description ACFR 
Organisation University of Technology Sydney
Country Australia 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution Provision of UAVs and algorithms for field trials
Collaborator Contribution Provision of UAV field trial facilities
Impact Footage of field trials
Start Year 2011
 
Description Rescue Global 
Organisation Rescue Global
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Charity/Non Profit 
PI Contribution provision of ORCHID technologies
Collaborator Contribution Field testing of technologies
Impact Presentations at AIDR 2014 and development of ORCHID disaster response technologies
Start Year 2013
 
Description Secure 
Organisation Secure Meters
Country India 
Sector Private 
PI Contribution Development of smart meter technology
Collaborator Contribution Provision of equipment and internship opportunities for students
Impact Student internships
Start Year 2011
 
Title A method for inferring a relevance for a data source using regression technique (on kernelised data) 
Description A method for inferring a relevance for a data source using regression technique (on kernelised data) 
IP Reference GB1109210.3 
Protection Patent granted
Year Protection Granted 2012
Licensed Commercial In Confidence
Impact Utilisation by BAE Systems
 
Title A method for inferring an output distribution using Gaussian Process (on kernelised data) 
Description A method for inferring an output distribution using Gaussian Process (on kernelised data) 
IP Reference GB1109209.5 
Protection Patent granted
Year Protection Granted 2012
Licensed Commercial In Confidence
Impact Utilisation by BAE Systems
 
Title A method for inferring the relevance for a pre-processing technique using machine learning 
Description A method for inferring the relevance for a pre-processing technique using machine learning 
IP Reference GB1109206.1 
Protection Patent granted
Year Protection Granted 2012
Licensed Commercial In Confidence
Impact Utilisation by BAE Systems
 
Title Adaptive Task Assignment 
Description Adaptive task assignment for crowdsourcing platform 
IP Reference MS355469.01 
Protection Patent granted
Year Protection Granted 2015
Licensed Commercial In Confidence
Impact The ActiveCrowdToolkit .NET v0.1 includes the methods: Majority voting, Vote distribution, Dawid&Skene, Bayesian Classifier Combination (BCC), Community-Based BCC.
 
Title Crowdsourcing system with community learning 
Description Crowdsourcing system with community learning 
IP Reference MS 340522.01 
Protection Patent granted
Year Protection Granted 2015
Licensed Commercial In Confidence
Impact The ActiveCrowdToolkit .NET v0.1 includes the methods: Majority voting, Vote distribution, Dawid&Skene, Bayesian Classifier Combination (BCC), Community-Based BCC.
 
Title HETEROGENEOUS DATA FUSION USING GAUSSIAN PROCESSES 
Description A method and apparatus for processing data, the data comprising: a set of one or more system inputs; and a set of one or more system outputs; wherein each system output corresponds to a respective system input; each system input comprises a plurality of data points, such that at least one of these data points is from a different data source (8, 10, 12, 16, 18, 20, 22) to at least one other of those data points, the method comprising: performing a kernel function on a given system input from the data and a further system input to provide kemelised data; and inferring a value for further system output corresponding to the further system input; wherein the step of inferring comprises applying a Gaussian Process to the kemelised data. The data sources (8, 10, 12, 16, 18, 20, 22) may be heterogeneous data sources. 
IP Reference WO2012164243 
Protection Patent granted
Year Protection Granted 2012
Licensed Commercial In Confidence
Impact Utilisation by BAE Systems
 
Title ActiveCrowd Toolkit 
Description The ActiveCrowdToolkit .NET v0.1 includes the methods: Majority voting, Vote distribution, Dawid&Skene, Bayesian Classifier Combination (BCC), Community-Based BCC. 
Type Of Technology New/Improved Technique/Technology 
Year Produced 2014 
Impact Test crowd consensus methods with one line of code Use a set of existing data aggregation models to combine crowd labels and learn information about the workers. 
URL http://orchidproject.github.io/active-crowd-toolkit/
 
Title Gridcarbon 
Description GridCarbon presents a summary of the generation mix data broken down into major categories of fuel type and various interconnectors. This data is converted into a grid carbon intensity value by weighting each generation type by its contribution to total generation and by its individual carbon intensity. The resulting figure is then divided by 0.93 in order to reflect the 7% losses in the transmission and distribution networks. 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2012 
Open Source License? Yes  
Impact Increased reputation of ORCHID project. 
URL http://www.gridcarbon.uk/
 
Title Latent force software 
Description Latent force software accompanying JMLR article 
Type Of Technology New/Improved Technique/Technology 
Year Produced 2014 
Impact Latent force models (LFM) are principled approaches to incorporating solutions to differential equations within non- parametric inference methods. Unfortunately, the development and application of LFMs can be inhibited by their computational cost, especially when closed-form solutions for the LFM are unavailable, as is the case in many real world problems where these latent forces exhibit periodic behaviour. Given this, we develop a new sparse representation of LFMs which considerably improves their computational efficiency, as well as broadening their applicability, in a principled way, to domains with periodic or near periodic latent forces. Our approach uses a linear basis model to approximate one generative model for each periodic force. We assume that the latent forces are generated from Gaussian process priors and develop a linear basis model which fully expresses these priors. We apply our approach to model the thermal dynamics of domestic buildings and show that it is effective at predicting day-ahead temperatures within the homes. We also apply our approach within queueing theory in which quasi-periodic arrival rates are modelled as latent forces. In both cases, we demonstrate that our approach can be implemented efficiently using state-space methods which encode the linear dynamic systems via LFMs. Further, we show that state estimates obtained using periodic latent force models can reduce the root mean squared error to 17% of that from non-periodic models and 27% of the nearest rival approach which is the resonator model (Sarkka et al., 2012; Hartikainen et al. 2012). 
URL http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/papers/v15/
 
Title Literatin 
Description An extension that assesses the readability of text using SMOG, and cross-compared with popular and classic literature. The principle behind the plug-in is to allow users to explore the complexity of any text found within a webpage. Users identify the text of interest, activate the plug-in and the text is automatically captured and checked for readability using a SMOG based algorithm. A cross-comparison is then made between the complexity and length of the input text, with values stored for existing popular and classic literature. The idea is to present information about text complexity in a way users can relate to. 
Type Of Technology Webtool/Application 
Year Produced 2012 
Impact Literatin presents information about text complexity in a way users can relate to. 
URL https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/literatin/igpbgncfceidjgcjddcdamjgbpdcmbnl
 
Title ML for mobility analysis 
Description Understanding human mobility patterns is a significant research endeavour that has recently received considerable attention. Developing the science to describe and predict how people move from one place to another during their daily lives promises to address a wide range of societal challenges: from predicting the spread of infectious diseases, improving urban planning, to devising effective emergency response strategies. Individuals are also set to benefit from this area of research, as mobile devices will be able to analyse their mobility pattern and offer context-aware assistance and information. For example, a service could warn about travel disruptions before the user is likely to encounter them, or provide recommendations and mobile vouchers for local services that promise to be of high value to the user, based on their predicted future plans. More ambitiously, control systems for home heating and electric vehicle charging could be enhanced with knowledge of when the user will be home. 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2013 
Impact ? Rahwan, I., Dsouza, S., Rutherford, A., Naroditskiy, V., McInerney, J., & Venanzi, M., et al. (2013). Global manhunt pushes the limits of social mobilization. IEEE Computer. Get Bibtex Citation ? McInerney, J., Rogers, A., & Jennings, N. R. (2012). Improving location prediction services for new users with probabilistic latent semantic analysis. In 4th International Workshop on Location-Based Social Networks. Get Bibtex Citation Download as PDF ? McInerney, J., Stein, S., Rogers, A., & Jennings, N. R. (2012). Exploring periods of low predictability in daily life mobility. In Mobile Data Challenge by Nokia Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Nokia. Get Bibtex Citation 
URL https://pypi.python.org/pypi/vbihmn/
 
Title NILMTK 
Description Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is the process of estimating the energy consumed by individual appliances given just a whole-house power meter reading. In other words, it produces an (estimated) itemised energy bill from just a single, whole-house power meter. NILM is sometimes called: •"non-intrusive appliance load monitoring (NALM or NIALM)" •"[electriciy | energy | smart meter] disaggregation" NILMTK is a toolkit designed to help researchers evaluate the accuracy of NILM algorithms. NILMTK is not yet suitable for end users because NILMTK is not yet capable of out-of-the-box disaggregation (i.e. disaggregation where you do not yet have submetered training data), although we hope that it might be some time in the future. 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2014 
Open Source License? Yes  
Impact NILMTK v0.2 includes a combinatorial optimisation NILM algorithm. FHMM and Hart's 1985 algorithms coming soon to v0.2. More algorithms in the pipeline! Publications 1.Nipun Batra, Jack Kelly, Oliver Parson, Haimonti Dutta, William Knottenbelt, Alex Rogers, Amarjeet Singh, Mani Srivastava. NILMTK: An Open Source Toolkit for Non-intrusive Load Monitoring. In: 5th International Conference on Future Energy Systems (ACM e-Energy), Cambridge, UK. 2014. DOI:10.1145/2602044.2602051 arXiv:1404.3878 [slides] [bib] 2.Nipun Batra, Jack Kelly, Oliver Parson, Haimonti Dutta, William Knottenbelt, Alex Rogers, Amarjeet Singh, Mani Srivastava. NILMTK: An Open Source Toolkit for Non-intrusive Load Monitoring". In: NILM Workshop, Austin, US. 2014 [pdf] [Presented as a 30-minute IPython demo of NILMTK v0.1 and a poster.] 3.Jack Kelly, Nipun Batra, Oliver Parson, Haimonti Dutta, William Knottenbelt, Alex Rogers, Amarjeet Singh, Mani Srivastava. Demo Abstract: NILMTK v0.2: A Non-intrusive Load Monitoring Toolkit for Large Scale Data Sets. In the first ACM Workshop On Embedded Systems For Energy-Efficient Buildings, 2014. DOI:10.1145/2674061.2675024. arXiv:1409.5908 [Won best demo award] [bib] [Presented as an IPython demo of v0.2 and a poster] 
URL https://github.com/nilmtk/nilmtk
 
Title PROV Toolbox 
Description Provenance is a record that describes the people, institutions, entities, and activities involved in producing, influencing, or delivering a piece of data or a thing. In particular, the provenance of information is crucial in deciding whether information is to be trusted, how it should be integrated with other diverse information sources, and how to give credit to its originators when reusing it. In an open and inclusive environment such as the Web, where users find information that is often contradictory or questionable, provenance can help those users to make trust judgements. PROV is a set of W3C specifications defining a model, corresponding serializations and other supporting definitions to enable the inter-operable interchange of provenance information in heterogeneous environments such as the Web. ProvToolbox is a Java library to create Java representations of PROV-DM, and convert them between RDF, PROV-XML, PROV-N, and PROV-JSON 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2013 
Open Source License? Yes  
Impact Wide international take up of tool, as utilising the W3C Provenance Standard 
URL http://lucmoreau.github.io/ProvToolbox/
 
Title Smart Home Network 
Description The smart home framework (SHF) is a software framework aimed to simplify and speed up the modelling of smart infrastructure (i.e., smart home, smart communities and the smart grid) in the research community. It provides basic software components (e.g., appliances, generators and storage) that can be assembled together to build general models of smart homes and communities. These components can be extended to construct specialised models to meet the specific needs of any particular project. This approach enables rapid, bottom-up modelling of smart homes and communities with resuable models and components. The SHF emphasises on reusability which we believe will eventually lead to standardised models of appliances (e.g., washing machines, ovens, fridges), smart homes and smart communities that can be made available online for all. 
Type Of Technology Webtool/Application 
Year Produced 2013 
Impact In a nutshell, the framework contains the code for modelling smart homes and communities. Also, it comes with two additional toolkits for optimisation and visualisation for smart home and community data. 
URL http://www.smarthomeframework.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
 
Title Xively Radiation Dataset 
Description A dataset containing nuclear radiation readings from crowdsourced Geiger counter devices installed in Japan through the Xively platform 
Type Of Technology New/Improved Technique/Technology 
Year Produced 2014 
Impact Venanzi, M., Rogers, A., & Jennings, N. R. (2013). Crowdsourcing Spatial Phenomena Using Trust-Based Heteroskedastic Gaussian Processes. In First Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP). 
URL http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/354861/
 
Company Name Joulo 
Description Joulo develops energy monitoring systems that enable customers to download their energy usage data and receive advice on ways to minimise their energy consumption. 
Year Established 2013 
Impact Its brilliance is recognized by winning the 2013 British Gas Innovation Award. The technology was acquired by Quby in early 2015.
Website http://www.joulon.com
 
Description Autonomy and Advanced Systems Showcase 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Policymakers/politicians
Results and Impact The multi-UAV controller developed by ORCHID researchers was demonstrated to David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science, and Don Nutbeam, Vice Chancellor of the University of Southampton. The demo was part of the Autonomy and Advanced Systems showcase event at the University of Southampton where key representatives from industry were invited to get a flavour of the latest research outputs of the University and discuss potential tie-ups with research groups.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2014
 
Description BBC Summer of Wildlife 2013 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact The New Forest Cicada Project hands on activities were presented at the BBC Summer of Wildlife Event in Birmingham on 14 September 2013. There were over 4,000 visitors to this event.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2013
 
Description British Science Festival, Birmingham 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Schools
Results and Impact A software game based on a disaster response scenario for an audience of secondary school children. This sparked discussion around the use of technology in humanitarian aid.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2015
 
Description British Science Festival, Newcastle 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Schools
Results and Impact Groups of up to 30 secondary school children took part in an electronic Cicada Hunt, using mobile phones. This prompted discussion of biosound research and the use of 'smart' technology.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2014
 
Description FIrst Lego League Event 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Schools
Results and Impact Presentation on autonomous systems and judging of the robot building competition
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2013
 
Description I'm a Scientist 
Form Of Engagement Activity A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press)
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Schools
Results and Impact For two weeks in June this year, Gopal Ramchurn participated in the national public engagement competition known as in "I'm a Scientist, Get Me Out of Here". This is an X-factor style competition where primary school students get to meet and interact with scientists. Thus, in the Cadmium Zone more than 400 students from several schools asked over 17,000 questions, with over 9000 answers being given. Gopal had the highest number of page views (over 1000 in two weeks!) and answered lots of questions on robots, apps, and technology (all relevant to ORCHID) but also questions such as 'Will AI become complex enough to become self aware?', 'why doesn't the world fall down?', 'why can't dogs and cats breed?' and 'why is mercury poisonous?'. Gopal and other scientists participated in live half-hour sessions and offline over a number of days. Every day of the final week, there were the dreaded evictions which Gopal managed to avoid till the last day! He eventually came second in his zone and thoroughly enjoyed the experience!
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2013
URL http://imascientist.org.uk/
 
Description ORCHID Industry Day(s) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact A series of presentations, panel discussion and exhibitions of human-agent collective demos. This generated further interest, opportunities for internships for research students and follow up activities (including grants).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2012,2013,2014,2015
 
Description ORCHID Showcase 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact The event comprised an exhibition of human-agent collective demos, academic presentations, press event and interviews and a panel discussion.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2015