Browse: Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences > School of Electronics and Computer Science

Outlines current agile methods: SCRUM, XP, DSDM, Crystal, Kan Ban (Lean)

General Feedback for Envisioning Deliverable

Designing for delight. Thinking beyond Human Computer Interface to designing for user experience starting from the fundamentals of good design for a purpose

Qual Methods lecture 21Feb17

Qualitative Analysis Lecture Feb 27th, Steve Snow

COMP6217 is based around a significant piece of group work - to create a design portfolio for a new social media website/app/tool/extension/platform. Teams work on their design throughout the semester, and keep a design and development blog that will act as a digital portfolio of their work. At the end of the semester they will also be asked to submit an individual reflective summary that will outline their teams objectives and progress, their part in its progress, and a critical analysis of whether or not they were successful. At the end of the course teams will be asked to pitch their ideas to an interdisciplinary Dragon's Den style panel who will expect them to not only have created something that is technical viable, but will also want to see other economic, social, legal and ethical factors taken into consideration. In this presentation we explain the structure of the group project, what is expected in the blog, brainstorm ideas, and explore some potential ideas to help students understand the scope of the work required. The outcome of the group project does not have to be a fully working piece of software, instead we are looking for a well developed idea that contains enough detail to be convincing to the panel.

Abstract: In my talk I will discuss the way in which the ideas of the Data Science, Web and Semantic Web, Open Science contribute to new methods and approaches to data driven chemistry and chemical informatics. A key aspect of the discussion will be how to facilitate the improved acquisition and integration and analysis of chemical data in context. I will refer to lesions learnt in the e-Science and Digital Economy (particularly the IT as a Utility Network) programmes and the EDISON H2020 project. Jeremy G. Frey Jeremy Frey obtained his DPhil on experimental and theoretical aspects of van der Waals complexes, in Oxford, followed by a fellowship at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory with Yuan Lee. In 1984 he joined the University of Southampton, where he is now Professor of Physical Chemistry and head of the Computational Systems Chemistry Group. His experimental research probes molecular organization from single molecules to liquid interfaces using laser spectroscopy from the IR to soft X-rays. In parallel he investigates how e-Science infrastructure supports intelligent access to scientific data. He is strongly committed to collaborative inter and multi-disciplinary research and is skilled in facilitating communication between diverse disciplines speaking different languages. He has successfully lead several large interdisciplinary collaborative RUCK research grants, from Basic Technology (Coherent Soft X-Ray imaging), e-Science (CombeChem) and most recently the Digital Economy Challenge area of IT as a Utility Network+, where he has successfully created a unique platform to facilitate collaboration across the social, science, engineering and design domains, working with all the research, commercial, third and governmental sectors.

We're not a particularly healthy culture. Our "normal" practices are not optimised for our wellbeing. From the morning commute to the number of hours we believe we need to put in to complete a task that may itself be unreasonable, to the choices we make about time to prepare food to fit into these constraints - all these operations tend to make us feel forced into treating ourselves as secondary to our jobs. How can data help improve our quality of life? FitBits and AppleWatches highlight the strengths and limits of Things that Count, not the least of which is the rather low uptake of things like FITBITS and apple watches. So once we ask the question about how data might improve quality of life, we may need to add the caveat: pervasively, ubiquitously, in the rich variety of contexts that isn't all about Counting. And once we think about such all seeing all knowing environments, we then need to think about privacy and anonymity. That is: does everything have to be connected to the internet to deliver on a vision of improved quality of life through data? And if there is a Big Ubiquity - should we think about inverting new norms, like how to make personal clouds and personal data stores far more easy to manage - rather than outsourcing so much data and computation? In this short talk, I'd like to consider three scenarios about Going where too few humans have gone before to help others The challenges of qualitative data Supporting privacy and content to motivate thinking about data capture, re-use and re-presentation, and opportunities across ECS for machine learning, AI, infoviz and hci.

Title: The Paradigm of Crowdsourced Systems Abstract: High acceptance rates of truly personal, portable devices such as smartphones and smart gadgets, along with the successful introduction of DIY computer platforms, like Arduino's and Raspberry Pi's, have lead to an unprecedented abundance of well-connected and well-equipped devices. Crowdsourced Systems is a new system paradigm that seeks to exploit the high availability of such devices and thus change the way data is generated, processed and consumed. In this talk, we will discuss this new paradigm, the challenges and opportunities it poses, review real-world use-cases and present relative on-going standardization efforts. Short CV: Dr. Constantinos Marios Angelopoulos is Lecturer in Computing at Bournemouth University (U.K.) specializing in future and emerging paradigms of computer networks and distributed systems. He is also the Lead Editor of the ITU-T Work Item on Crowdsourced Systems; co-author of the ITU-T Technical Report on “Artificial Intelligence in IoT” and the Vocabulary Co-rapporteur for ITU-T SG20. In the past, he has worked for three years as a postdoctoral researcher at University of Geneva (CH) under the prestigious Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship for Foreign Researchers.

Recent elections, including the 2016 UK Referendum on Brexit and the 2017 US election, have seen a great deal of discussion about fake news. How exactly has the discussion of fake become so central to debates about modern democracy? In this talk, Nick Anstead will examine the difficulty of defining fake news and the evidence that it has political consequences. He will argue that there is too great a tendency to see the problem of fake news as technological, when the reality is that the underlying causes are political, social and economic. This analysis has important ramifications for how societies seek to combat fake news and ensure a knowledgeable and engaged electorate.

Slides for 2017 talk on Version Control and Project Management for Software Engineering Group Project

Camera trap ecology can be viewed as the combination of three steps: data collection, data processing (photo classification), and data analyses. Careful application of these steps can yield valuable insights into ecological parameters. There have been highly successful citizen science projects which crowdsourced at least one of the first two steps, saving substantial time and resources for researchers. However, we believe there is potential to take citizen science camera trapping from “citizens as sensors” to having active participants in all phases of research, which could benefit both researchers and citizen scientists. To that end, we implemented our pilot project – MammalWeb – to integrate all three phases of camera trapping into a complete citizen science web platform. Through a partnership between Durham University and the Durham Wildlife Trust, we recruited citizen scientists from the public to deploy and monitor camera traps across the north east of England. They were trained in camera trapping methodology and asked to employ the same sampling protocol. To integrate camera trap ecology into education, computer science students at Durham University help develop the backend technology for MammalWeb, and secondary school students are leading multidisciplinary projects with teachers to create outreach material for ecological curricula and the public. As of February 2017, over 60 citizen scientists are monitoring camera traps at more than 190 sites across northeast England. They have uploaded over 110,000 images to MammalWeb, of which more than 74,000 have been classified by more than 200 registered users. An algorithm adapted from past work was developed by computer science students at Durham University to calculate consensus identifications of animals from the crowdsourced data, on which a user-facing dashboard is being created for participants to explore and interrogate the database. Our collaboration with secondary schools has engaged students in becoming seed ecological ambassadors, and created multimedia projects to share ecological knowledge with their communities. In this talk, I will describe: The MammalWeb user experience How our collaboration with educational institutions has produced actively involved citizen scientists in camera trap monitoring, and How participants help develop MammalWeb into a modular and generalisable citizen science web platform for big data ecology. This platform can then be deployed by other organisations to crowdsource their research. Lastly, I will report key challenges faced by this approach, and possible future directions for the work This is joint work with Pen-Yuan Hsing; Lorraine Coghill; Vivien Kent; Russel Hill; Mark Whittingham; Philip Stephens

In recent years, there has been increased interest in real-world event summarization using publicly accessible data made available through social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook. People use these outlets to communicate with others, express their opinion and commentate on a wide variety of real-world events, such as disasters and public disorder. Due to the heterogeneity, the sheer volume of text and the fact that some messages are more informative than others, automatic summarization is a very challenging task. This paper presents three techniques for summarizing microblog documents by selecting the most representative posts for real-world events (clusters). In particular, we tackle the task of multilingual summarization in Twitter. We evaluate the generated summaries by comparing them to both human produced summaries and to the summarization results of similar leading summarization systems. Our results show that our proposed Temporal TF-IDF method outperforms all the other summarization systems for both the English and non-English corpora as they lead to informative summaries.

How to write advisory reports for government and corporations

Data is ubiquitous; everyone has it and deals with it. However, just because everyone deals with it, doesn't mean that we naturally handle it well or efficiently. In this talk, Adriane Chapman will introduce herself to the WAIS group and describe her interest in making data useful and usable. She will describe her past work in provenance, and her current work in annotations, provenance and data modelling.

Using grounded theory in a cyber-security context

This is the description of what is required for the final project deliverable. It is a a written project retrospective which covers: whole team reflections on team working, their product and achievements; individual reflective reports

The lab studies the IEEE 802.15.4 communication standard for O-QPSK (Offset-Quadrature Phase Shift Keying) modulation and demodulation, implemented on a USRP 2922 (Universal Software Radio Peripheral) and enables the detection of communication between off-the-shelf RF modules working under the 802.15.4 standard, using LabVIEW Communications as the programming environment.

The purpose of this seminar session is to share with you some of my experience with publishing in top quality journals. The session will be structured as follows: - Publish or Perish - The CS Debate (conferences vs journals) - Top journals - Multidiciplinary work - The Process

This LabVIEW Communications source code interfaces with USRP software defined radio equipment to implement a QPSK transmitter and a corresponding receiver. The source code also provides a simulator of the QPSK transmitter and receiver, which can be run without the use of USRP equipment.

Moira McGregor has worked on various projects at the Mobile Life Research Centre including: everyday use of digital maps; the sharing economy; mobile battery maintenance; and speech technology in workplace meetings. What these projects have have in common is a desire to look at the use of mobile technology as it happens in order to understand how users make sense of the technology, and also how users interweave this use with other interactions going on around them at the same time. The above coincides with a general move from studying mobile phone technology in the controlled setting of the lab, to the challenge of devising methods to allow the study of mobile phone use in situ, out ‘in the wild’. This focus on use in situ calls for a focus on working with distributed research methods, including video analysis, interactional and conversational analysis, interviews, and technical probes – all of which have been deployed in Moira’s work in order to give access to moment by moment interaction with mobile technology. The resulting small scale and detailed perspective may be combined to complement the more pervasive approaches of recording mobile phone use by instrumenting technology with sensors and logging use over longer periods, with large cohorts of users. Moira is currently a PhD student at the MobileLife Research Centre in Stockholm. Her work looks at how technology is used in everyday life – from mobile phone use in co-present interaction with others, to how an app like Uber is changing the work practices of taxi drivers. In this seminar, Moira will present some of the research methods used in her studies and some of her preliminary findings.

Researchers from the Web and Internet Science group have been exploring hypertexts and computational narrative for nearly two decades. In this seminar we present our most recent work on the Leverhulme Trust funded project StoryPlaces (http://storyplaces.soton.ac.uk/) where we have investigated the poetics and technology associated with location aware narratives. Location Aware Narratives are a type of Strange Hypertext (hypertexts that go beyond traditional node-link models) because location aware stories reflects the physical context of the reader - examples include tour guides where the reader is required to be in a particular location to access certain pages, interactive fiction where location is used to set the tone or backdrop to the drama, or dynamic narrative that changes or responds to the user’s wanderings. The StoryPlaces system is driven by a Sculptural Hypertext engine which models narrative as a state machine and delivers a mobile storytelling experience through a location aware web application. StoryPlaces is based on a general model for location aware narrative called "Canyons, Deltas, Plains" that we have shown to support the structures used in a broad sample of location aware storytelling systems. By working with both student and professional writers we have expanded our knowledge of the common patterns and structures used by authors in location aware narrative, and have begun to see how the structures of the narrative and the topology of the locations involved are intrinsically connected, and that the 'poetics of space' are a fundamental part of this medium. As part of the seminar we will demonstrate the StoryPlaces reader, and show how these patterns have begun to inform the design of our authorship tools.

Guest lecture for COMP2213. Moira McGregor has worked on various projects at the Mobile Life Research Centre including: everyday use of digital maps; the sharing economy; mobile battery maintenance; and speech technology in workplace meetings. What these projects have have in common is a desire to look at the use of mobile technology as it happens in order to understand how users make sense of the technology, and also how users interweave this use with other interactions going on around them at the same time. The above coincides with a general move from studying mobile phone technology in the controlled setting of the lab, to the challenge of devising methods to allow the study of mobile phone use in situ, out ‘in the wild’. This focus on use in situ calls for a focus on working with distributed research methods, including video analysis, interactional and conversational analysis, interviews, and technical probes – all of which have been deployed in Moira’s work in order to give access to moment by moment interaction with mobile technology. The resulting small scale and detailed perspective may be combined to complement the more pervasive approaches of recording mobile phone use by instrumenting technology with sensors and logging use over longer periods, with large cohorts of users. Moira is currently a PhD student at the MobileLife Research Centre in Stockholm. Her work looks at how technology is used in everyday life – from mobile phone use in co-present interaction with others, to how an app like Uber is changing the work practices of taxi drivers. In this seminar, Moira will present some of the research methods used in her studies and some of her preliminary findings.

Abstract "Storytelling in Mixed Realities: Making Sense of the World 1D Since the early days of civilization, the way we tell and consume stories defines how do we make sense of the world. Every new technology has an impact on our narrative artifacts. Today mobile ubiquitous digital technologies allow us to structure and distribute our narratives in novel and unprecedented ways. During this talk i will presents some old and recent projects developed in collaboration with a vast team of researchers and artists, that exemplify novel approaches to content and context through interactive storytelling and gaming. Bio Valentina Nisi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Madeira and founder and researcher at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI). Her area of investigation revolves around Digital Media Art and HCI. Her research focuses on designing and producing digitally mediated experiences in real spaces, merging culture, context and landscapes. Valentina previously worked with Glorianna Davenport and Mads Haahr at MediaLab Europe, MIT MediaLab European research partner. In 2006 she co-founded Amsterdam based non profit organization FattoriaMediale, together with Ian Oakley and Martine PostHuma de Boer, designing and producing interactive mobile stories for several Amsterdam neighbourhoods. Her work has won several Awards and been published and shown internationally,

Harnessing the potential of semantic web technologies to support and diversify scholarship is gaining popularity in the digital humanities. This talk describes a number of projects utilising Linked Data ranging from musicology and library metadata, to the representation of the narrative structure, philological, bibliographical, and museological data of ancient Mesopotamian literary compositions.

Abstract: The concept of privacy has divided lawyers, scholars and policymakers for decades, not only in terms of whether it is a good or bad thing, but even what it is. Some say it is a human right, some that it is a prerequisite for democracy; others note that individuals are prone to breaching their own privacy and are remarkably relaxed about it, and have described various privacy paradoxes or other common inconsistencies in attitude; some argue that it is unenforceable; still others argue that it is a blocker to the knowledge economy and the socially-beneficial use of big data; and many more say that whatever its merits it is dead. In this talk, Kieron O'Hara will argue that the reason for this apparently confused disarray is that different privacy discourses are going on simultaneously, talking past each other and cheerfully committing various category errors. He sets out a series of seven types of privacy discussion, which are distinct but relatable to each other, as ! a first step towards clearing up some of the confusion, and argues that privacy itself is strongly implicated at the boundaries between the self and world. Our attitudes towards privacy depend crucially on where we wish those boundaries to be.

Over the last decade, social media has become a hot topic for researchers of collaborative technologies (e.g., CSCW). The pervasive use of social media in our everyday lives provides a ready source of naturalistic data for researchers to empirically examine the complexities of the social world. In this talk I outline a different perspective informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) - an orientation that has been influential within CSCW, yet has only rarely been applied to social media use. EMCA approaches can complement existing perspectives through articulating how social media is embedded in everyday life, and how its social organisation is achieved by users of social media. Outlining a possible programme of research, I draw on a corpus of screen and ambient audio recordings of mobile device use to show how EMCA research can be generative for understanding social media through concepts such as adjacency pairs, sequential context, turn allocation / speaker selection, and repair. In doing so, I also raise questions about existing studies of social media use and the way they characterise interactional phenomena.

5 Researchers from two Institutions

Abstract: The UN sustainable development goals, an intergovernmental set of 17 aspirational goals and 169 targets to be achieved by 2030, were launched last year. These include ending poverty and malnutrition, improving health and education, and building resilience to natural disasters and climate change. A particular focus across the goals and targets is achievement 'everywhere', ensuring that no one gets left behind and that progress is monitored at subnational levels to avoid national-level statistics masking local heterogeneities. How will this subnational monitoring of progress towards meeting the goals be undertaken when many countries will undertake just a single census in the 2015-2030 monitoring period? Professor Tatem will present an overview of the work of the two organizations he directs; WorldPop ( www.worldpop.org ) and Flowminder ( www.flowminder.org ); in meeting the challenges of constructing consistent, comparable and regularly updated metrics to measure a! nd map progress towards the sustainable development goals in low and middle income countries, and where the integration of traditional and new forms of data, including those derived from satellite imagery, GPS and mobile phones, can play a role.

Slides from 5 minute lightning talk given at OER17, London. The presentation was recorded and is available via the conference website - see link shared. Presentation starts at 12 minutes in. "This lightning talk will describe the open source OER solution ‘EdShare’. The open content platform which is running a number of successful OER sites in the HEI community including edShare@GCU, EdShare Soton, eShare, Humbox, LanguageBox and more. The platform, which originated from a Jisc funded institutional exemplars project in 2008, is now a stable and fully supported solution available from the University of Southampton enterprise group to support the sharing and engagement with OERs and OEP. The platform is based on the open content system EPrints, and has been heavily influenced by web 2.0 sharing sites. This lightning talk will summarise existing key features of the platform including streamlined submission, user community profiles, inline preview support, shareable editing rights, dissemination routes. Details will also be included on the future direction of EdShare and how you can be involved in the shaping the development roadmap."

Slides from presentation given at OER17, London. The presentation talks about the need for well designed digital spaces which consider the needs for OERs and OEP. It also sets out how EdShare is being used by a growing community of institutions and subject specific communities.

In this talk, I will discuss the unexpected uses of social machines, and how individual and collective behaviour on platforms such as Twitter, Wikipedia, and the Zooniverse contribute to their development, success, and failure. Based on these observations, we will explore how we can take advantage of the emergent features and interpretive flexibility of social machines, in order to support current global challenges.

The LifeGuide research programme is a multidisciplinary initiative led by Professor Lucy Yardley (Psychology) and Dr Mark Weal (Computer Science) at the University of Southampton. We have developed a unique set of open source software tools, that allows intervention designers with no experience of programming to create interactive web-based interventions to support healthy behaviour. In this talk I will give a brief overview of digital behavioural change interventions, describe the LifeGuide platform that has been developed at the University of Southampton, and through a number of exemplar projects discuss some of the lessons learnt from this interdisciplinary collaboration.

using the technical report to motivate scholarly research

preview of draft the technical report to motivate scholarly research

Portfolio Template Download this dotx template and use it to create your own version of the portfolio

Expanding the framework for reflection

protocol to follow during a reading group, guidance for preparation

Group allocation for the remainder of the term week4-week15.

Animal-Computer Interaction + Formative feedback on the coursework

Data Analysis, Interpretation, and Presentation (ch.8 of Preece, Rogers and Sharp)

Data Gathering (II) lecture for Interaction Design

In preparation for the coursework

A walk though of an approach to finding potentially relevant papers for the group project. Also a set of links on how to read papers.