WAIS seminar: Research Discussion: Lab of Things? What Things?

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Speaker(s): Kirk Martinez, Dr Jonathon S Hare and Dr Enrico Costanza Organiser: Dr Tim Chown Time: 19/03/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 File size: 676 Mb Abstract The new WAIS seminar series features classic seminars, research discussions, tutorial-style presentations, and research debates. This seminar takes the form of a research discussion which will focus on the Internet of Things (IoT) research being undertaken in WAIS and other research groups in ECS. IoT is a significant emerging research area, with funding for research available from many channels including new H2020 programmes and the TSB. We have seen examples of IoT devices being built in WAIS and other ECS groups, e.g. in sensor networking, energy monitoring via Zigbee devices, and of course Erica the Rhino (a Big Thing!). The goal of the session is to briefly present such examples of existing Things in our lab with the intent of seeding discussion on open research questions, and therefore future work we could do towards new Things being deployed for experimentation in Building 32 or its environs. The session will discuss what 'things' we have, how they work, what new 'things' might we want to create and deploy, what components we might need to enable this, and how we might interact with these objects.

Scalable real-time crisis mapping and analytics of social media streams for disaster management and breaking news

Real-time geoparsing of social media streams (e.g. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, FourSquare) is providing a new 'virtual sensor' capability to end users such as emergency response agencies (e.g. Tsunami early warning centres, Civil protection authorities) and news agencies (e.g. Deutsche Welle, BBC News). Challenges in this area include scaling up natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR) approaches to handle real-time traffic volumes, reducing false positives, creating real-time infographic displays useful for effective decision support and providing support for trust and credibility analysis using geosemantics. I will present in this seminar on-going work by the IT Innovation Centre over the last 4 years (TRIDEC and REVEAL FP7 projects) in building such systems, and highlights our research towards improving trustworthy and credible of crisis map displays and real-time analytics for trending topics and influential social networks during major news worthy events.