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.

Artificial Intelligence

Pearon's resource from the Brookshear Chapter

Mandevillian Intelligence: From Individual Vice to Collective Virtue

Abstract Mandevillian intelligence is a specific form of collective intelligence in which individual cognitive vices (i.e., shortcomings, limitations, constraints and biases) are seen to play a positive functional role in yielding collective forms of cognitive success. In this talk, I will introduce the concept of mandevillian intelligence and review a number of strands of empirical research that help to shed light on the phenomenon. I will also attempt to highlight the value of the concept of mandevillian intelligence from a philosophical, scientific and engineering perspective. Inasmuch as we accept the notion of mandevillian intelligence, then it seems that the cognitive and epistemic value of a specific social or technological intervention will vary according to whether our attention is focused at the individual or collective level of analysis. This has a number of important implications for how we think about the cognitive impacts of a number of Web-based technologies (e.g., personalized search mechanisms). It also forces us to take seriously the idea that the exploitation (or even the accentuation!) of individual cognitive shortcomings could, in some situations, provide a productive route to collective forms of cognitive and epistemic success. Speaker Biography Dr Paul Smart Paul Smart is a senior research fellow in the Web and Internet Science research group at the University of Southampton in the UK. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a professional member of the Association of Computing Machinery, and a member of the Cognitive Science Society. Paul’s research interests span a number of disciplines, including philosophy, cognitive science, social science, and computer science. His primary area of research interest relates to the social and cognitive implications of Web and Internet technologies. Paul received his bachelors degree in Psychology from the University of Nottingham. He also holds a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Sussex.