Researchers from the University of Southampton are testing strategies that will sustain and improve crowdsourced analysis of drone footage in humanitarian relief efforts.

Professor Elena Simperl from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is spearheading the new research project as it explores how to maintain crowd contributions after an immediate emergency has passed.

The experiment is a winner of the first wave of Collective Intelligence Grants from the Nesta innovation foundation, which seek to combine human and machine intelligence for social good.

Drones provide a cheap, fast and detailed means of capturing aerial images in disaster zones, especially when compared to helicopters and satellites. The analysis of this content can now be crowdsourced to people across the globe thanks to modern mobile technologies, enabling aid workers to coordinate recovery efforts effectively from the ground.

“High levels of media coverage can attract a lot of volunteers to analyse drone footage during an emergency, but the number of participants can drastically decrease once the media attention fades,” Elena explains. “This reduced participation can have a troubling impact on communities’ long term recovery, with less reliable data making it difficult to keep information up to date and assign resources in an effective manner.”

Southampton researchers have partnered with WeRobotics and Rescue Global for the project, which will draw conclusions that are relevant for all humanitarian relief, citizen science and crowdsourcing projects that struggle to maintain engagement.

Scientists will first explore strategies such as task variation and sequencing to test if they could sustain analysis in post-disaster and development scenarios. They will then investigate how experts and volunteers learn over time, acquiring skills and motivation to conduct more difficult analysis of drone footage.

Professor Gopal Ramchurn, of ECS, says: “We have a strong ethos of working with practitioners and co-creating research questions and tackling these questions with them. WeRobotics and RescueGlobal will be helping us validate the crowdsourcing techniques we will develop within the project, bringing to bear their experience deploying such platforms in the real-world.”

The Collective Intelligence Grants programme has received over 200 applications since its launch in September 2018, with researchers around the world proposing innovative approaches to solve social problems.

Twelve successful experiments have been announced in the programme’s first wave, with recipients as far as Hong Kong and San Francisco launching experiments ranging from the use of swarm algorithms based on bees and fish for groups with conflicting political views, through to crowdsourced airstrike images as digital evidence for legal practitioners in court.

A team of undergraduate students from the University of Southampton designed, tested and launched an autonomous can-sized satellite in an international competition with the American Astronautical Society.

Team Soton spent a year creating the ‘CanSat’ that could release an auto-gyro on a controlled 400-metre descent, while recording telemetry and transmitting it to a ground station.

The group, which included MEng Electronic Engineering student Adrian Kraft, trialled their design at a final in Stephenville, Texas, finishing as a top 20 entry despite facing technical difficulties during their launch.

The CanSat competition challenged the world’s undergraduates and postgraduates to produce a design that used an auto-gyro descent control for a science payload when released from a rocket, protecting its contents from damage during the launch and deployment.

Charlie North, Team Soton Leader, said: “The competition provided an exciting opportunity for the team to gain experience of an end-to-end life cycle of a complex engineering project. The team has enjoyed the whole experience and gained valuable skills that we will take into our respective careers.”

Team Soton designed their concept by dividing responsibilities into specialised subsystems, with Electronic Engineering’s Adrian Kraft focusing on electrical power and designing the electric circuits including the payload PCB, while MEng Aeronautics and Astronautics students Charlie North, Matteo Trombini, Dimo Iordanov, Roberto Holmes, Jake Trowbridge, Seren Moeketsi, Nikita Maksimov and Arshad Fasiludeen covered mechanics, flight software, descent control, data handling and sensors. Adrian also designed the team logo.

The team was supervised by the School of Engineering’s Professor Hugh Lewis and supported by Faculty funding and industry sponsors Aesir Space (Volante Global) and the ESL Group.

Around 100 teams from around the globe entered this year’s competition, with the top 40 teams invited to the launch weekend after a preliminary design review.

Team Soton were ranked seventh overall entering the Texas event with only two British teams qualifying. However they slipped to a final placing of 19th after unfortunately losing communication to the payload prior to take off which may have been related to software issues or damage to the power systems.

This summer’s competition was won by Turkey’s Istanbul Technical University. Turkish teams, who attract tens of thousands of pounds of sponsorship money, traditionally do very well in the CanSat competition and place highly every year.

An international research team including open data specialists from the University of Southampton have released a European knowledge graph that will boost procurement data analytics and decision making capabilities across the continent.

Researchers from the TheyBuyForYou project have integrated tender and company data to complete a first release of the open source knowledge graph for public procurement. As of the first quarter of 2019, the graph consists of over 23 million triples (records), covering information about almost 220,000 tenders.

Public procurement tenders amount to close to two trillion euros annually in the EU, making it critical that the market operates fairly and efficiently, supporting competitiveness and accountability. Data-driven insights can help make this happen, supporting buyers and suppliers alike in their decision making to enable a more open procurement landscape in Europe.

Professor Elena Simperl, Director of the Southampton Data Science Academy, explains: “Knowledge graphs bring together data from a variety of sources into a common format that can be easily extended and reused by organisations. By releasing the graph open source, we hope to encourage developers to use it in their own products and give us feedback on how we could improve it.”

TheyBuyForYou has built a technology platform in the first half of its three-year programme to visualise the comprehensive, cross-border and cross-lingual graph, which includes public spending and corporate data from multiple sources across the EU.

Dr George Konstantinidis, a data management expert in Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, adds: “Managing, integrating, interacting with, and providing analytics on top of procurement data is dependent upon reliable, and well-designed data infrastructure. The TheyBuyForYou knowledge graph is a coordinated effort to achieve these goals.”

TheyBuyForYou is supported by EU Horizon 2020 funding and brings together researchers, innovators and public administrations from five European countries. ECS researchers, including Yuchen Zhao, Laura Koesten and Tom Blount, are working on guidelines for procurement data visualisation, using interdisciplinary expertise to devise concepts and technologies that make the graph and its properties easier to understand and use.

The knowledge graph is compatible with standards in the procurement domain and is available here.

Computing experts from the University of Southampton have published the latest progress in energy-efficient parallel computation in a new book with the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).

The book, which is edited by the School of Electronics and Computer Science’s Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi and Dr Geoff Merrett, includes the findings from a multi-million pound research programme investigating the management of power and reliability in future many-core mobile and embedded systems.

Many-Core Computing: Hardware and Software offers valuable insight for engineers, designers, architects and managers within academia and industry.

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Dean of Engineering and Physical Sciences, said: “We have entered a significant and exciting age in computing, as the focus has moved away from performance-centric serial computation and towards energy-efficient parallel computation. This important new book draws upon findings from the Southampton-led PRiME Programme Grant, with most of the chapters either a direct result of research undertaken on this project, or else the collaborations and discussions that we had during it.”

PRiME collaborators held a focussed one-day workshop on many-core systems in 2018 from which the editors invited some of the distinguished speakers to contribute to the book.

Dr Geoff Merrett, Head of Southampton’s Centre for the Internet of Things and Pervasive Systems, added: “It was great to work with such a fantastic collection of international leaders in the field of many-core computing in order to bring this book together, and the result is an essential resource on the state and future of the field spanning hardware technologies all the way through to software systems.”

The new book opens with programming models, operating systems and their applications. The authors present runtime management techniques, followed by system modelling, verification and testing methods, and architectures and systems, before concluding with some examples of innovative applications.

PRiME brought together four UK universities and five companies with world-leading expertise in advanced electronics and computer systems, utilising £5.6m of funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) between 2013 and 2018.

Researchers in ECS will continue to exploit some of the breakthroughs achieved through PRiME as part of a recently announced EPSRC International Centre on Spatial Computational Learning. The team will be investigating how to ensure that machine learning applications remain energy efficient and make best use of available hardware.

Software teams competed to design and implement 5G applications that deliver new media experiences in a hacking event from a consortium led by the University of Southampton.

The Urban Hacking in 5G event showcased the latest advances in 5G networking and technologies across four days at the University of Bristol’s Smart Internet Lab.

Participating teams, known as Hackers, were challenged to create inclusive, participative and entertainment experiences for the public.

The FLAME consortium is coordinated by Professor Michael Boniface, Head of the University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre, and is working with 12 partners across six countries to deliver a ground-breaking media delivery platform.

Read the full story here.