A fellowship and two new projects with the Mixed Reality Lab as partners have been successful in getting funded by the EPSRC.
The fellowship is an EPSRC Dream Fellowship,the projects are ORCHID and Wi-be
Professor Steve Benford has received a fellowship to start 1 September 2011 ending 31 August from EPSRC. THe Dream Fellowship is called, Inspiration, Immersion and Impact with the Creative Industries, and will be spaced around his time as Head of School.
The overall aim is to enable Professor Benford to immerse himself within key industry partners to broaden his experience and perspective. IEPSRC grant ref: EP/J005215/1.
This project will consider, for the first time, both the technology for
monitoring energy-use behaviour of individuals and
effective feedback mechanisms, in terms of content and format/timing of
the information to be presented back to
individuals in order to support behavioural modifications and bring
about reduction in energy demand. In short, the proposed research aims
to bring about a fundamental change by conducting an integrated ICT, energy and
behavioural assessment of Wi-be technology. Based on a
new collaboration, the study will provide assessment tools, initial
guidance and vastly improved understanding for the
effective implementation of the technology that would result in major
reduction of energy demand.
The core research objective of this Programme (called ORCHID) is to establish the new science that is needed to understand, build and apply human-agent collectives (HACs) that symbiotically interleave human and computer systems to an unprecedented degree. Such HAC systems embody a number of distinctive features that make it particularly challenging to engineer, control and predict their behaviour. Their global scale and decentralised nature means control and information will be widely dispersed among the large number of, potentially self-interested, actors with different aims and objectives (some of whom may be humans, others may be software agents). The various system elements will exhibit a range of availabilities (some actors may always be present, others only transiently). The collections of independent heterogeneous entities will need to be coordinated with individual agents that are agile enough to adapt their behaviour and action to the prevailing circumstances to best achieve their goals. The interaction in real-world contexts means uncertainty, ambiguity, and bias are endemic and so the agents need to handle information of varying quality, trustworthiness and provenance. Thus, techniques are required to provide an auditable information trail from the point of capture (a sensor or a human participant), through the fusion and decision processes, to the point of action, and the agents will have to reason about the trust and reputation of their collaborators in order to take the best course of action, as well as taking into account uncertainty regarding observations. Finally, in many cases, it is important that the collective action of the individually motivated actors results in desirable social outcomes (such as fairness, efficiency or stability).