Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training Blog
To share our activity, progress and successes
Angela Thornton (2019 cohort), who is partnered with Carboncopies Foundation, had the opportunity to give a presentation at the Foundation’s Journal Club this past weekend.
Angela talked about her doctoral thesis which looks at Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) and the Creation of a Substrate Independent Mind (SIM). After her presentation, Angela took questions on WBE.
Angela’s presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyXLMGKV72Q
Fourth-year Horizon CDT PhD student Serena Midha is recruiting participants to take part in a research study.
Serena is researching mental workload from a daily life perspective. Serena and her team are aiming to gather a full 5 days of subjective workload levels, as well as data on what activities were being done to generate these ratings. They also want to further their understanding of people’s personal experiences of mental workload.
Participant requirements:
Participants will be offered £75 for participating in the study.
More information about the study can be found here.
You can contact Serena with any queries.
You can check out Serena’s Research Highlights here: https://highlights.cdt.horizon.ac.uk/students/psxckta
post by Angela Thornton (2019 cohort)
On 31st January 2021 I will be making my inaugural presentation at the Carboncopies Foundation Journal Club. This club typically meets once a month and allows both members of Carboncopies and the public to listen to experts on a range of topics related to Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) and to discuss this in an open forum. The live events and videos of previous meetings are hosted on YouTube.
I am delighted (and a little overwhelmed) to be following in the footsteps of pioneers in the field of WBE such as Professor Robin Hanson, Dr Randal Koene, Dr Keith Wiley and Dr Michael Cerullo to name but a few.
My aim is to share some initial insights from an online study and online groups that I conducted with the public as well as mapping out my research pathway going forward. Using a Longitudinal Qualitative Panel, stratified by age, I will be working with the same individuals over the next 1-2 years. This will enable me to explore their understanding of and attitudes towards the complex concepts in Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) and the hypothetical creation of a Substrate Independent Mind (SIM). On this journey, we will co-create individual journeys or narratives using a range of qualitative research methods.
In conjunction with this, I will also be conducting Horizon scanning and expert interviews which will allow me to overlay a scientific and technological timeline. These outputs will add another dimension to the technical 2008 Road Map to WBE (Sandberg, A., & Bostrom, N., 2008) by creating a hypothetical Road Map for the Individual and Society.
Horizon CDT PhD student Mel Wilson (2018 cohort) has recently launched an online survey to look at Children & Young People’s (CYP) contact with family, friends and social networks during the pandemic.
post by Mel Wilson
For nearly a year we have all been under greater stress due to the restrictions and changes to our lives as a result of the measures in place nationally and globally to limit the effects of Covid-19.
But what has that meant for children and young people?
I was previously researching resilience and vulnerability in school settings but these changes have meant, like many of those addressing the needs of children and young people, that access to those groups has been limited.
My studies have shifted to researching the effects of the last year on the resilience and vulnerabilities of children and young people.
Please share and ask your CYP to complete the following if they can:
Children & Young People’s contact with family, friends and social networks during the pandemic
Primary-age students survey
Secondary-age students survey
I currently have 3 studies running and am actively seeking further participants, children, young people and adults. Please see www.melaniewilson.uk for more details and links to contribute to these studies.
Thank you!
post by Ana Rita Pena (2019 cohort)
My PhD is investigating how technologies to protect individual’s privacy in automated decision for loan applications impact people. Within the scope of this broad topic, I am interested in personal experiences of loan applications in regard to trust, fairness and decision making.
I am currently recruiting for my next study: Attitudes and experiences with Loan Applications: UK context. The study is made up of a 45 minute interview (held online) and a follow-up online survey.
This study aims to understand how people feel about loan applications, data sharing in this context, and how well they understand the decision process behind these decisions.
We will be focusing on personal loans in particular. Participants will not have to disclose specific information about the loan they applied for (in regards to monetary value for example) but are invited to reflect on their experiences.
I am looking to recruit people who:
— are over the age of 18
— have applied for a loan in the UK
— are proficient in English
— able to provide consent to their participation
Participation in the study will be compensated with a £15 online shopping voucher.
More information about the interview study can be found here.
If you have any further questions or are interested in participating, don’t hesitate to contact me at ana.pena@nottingham.ac.uk
Thank you!
Ana Rita Pena
You can read more about Rita’s research project here.
post by Pepita Barnard (2014 cohort)
I am excited to be working with Derek McAuley, James Pinchin and Dominic Price from Horizon on a Social Distancing (SoDis) research project. We aim to understand how individuals act when given information indicating concentrations of people, and thus busyness of places.
We are employing a privacy-preserving approach to the project data collected from mobile device WiFi probe signals’ data. With the permission of buildings’ managers and relevant Heads of Schools, the SoDis Counting Study will deploy WISEBoxes in a limited number of designated University buildings, gather the relevant data from the Cisco DNA Spaces platform, which the University has implemented across its Wi-Fi network, and undertake a gold standard human-count.
What are WISEBoxes? There’s a link for that here
Essentially, WISEBoxes are a sensor platform developed as part of a previous Horizon project, WISEParks. These sensors count the number of Wi-Fi probe requests seen in a time-period (typically 5 minutes) from unique devices (as determined by MAC address). MAC addresses, which could be considered personally identifiable information, are only stored in memory on the WISEBox for the duration of the count (i.e. 5 minutes). The counts, along with some other metadata (signal intensities, timestamp, the WiFi frequency being monitored) are transmitted to a central server hosted on a University of Nottingham virtual machine. No personally identifiable information is permanently stored or recoverable.
We will have ‘safe access’ to Cisco DNA Spaces API, meaning MAC addresses and other identifiers will not be provided to the SoDis research team. The data we gather from Cisco DNA Spaces API will be processed to produce information similar to that gathered by the WISEBoxes, i.e. counts of number of unique users connected to an access point in a period of time.
To develop our ‘busyness’ models, we will also deploy human researchers to count people in designated buildings and spaces. This human-counting element will provide a gold standard for said buildings, at the time of counting. This gold standard can then be modelled against data simultaneously produced from WiFi signal counting methods, producing an estimated level of busyness.
With the help of several research assistants, we will collect 40 hours of human-counting data, illustrating building activity over a typical workweek. We expect to start this human-counting work in the School of Computer Science Building mid-January 2021.
This gold standard human-count will include both a door count and an internal building count. For each designated building, we will have researchers posted at the entrances and exits to undertake door counts. The door counters will tally numbers of people going in and numbers going out within 5-minute intervals using + and – signs. On each floor, researchers will count people occupying rooms and other spaces in the building (e.g., offices, labs, atrium, corridors). Each space will be labelled by room number or name on a tally sheet. Researchers will do two rounds of their assigned floor per hour, checking numbers of people occupying the various spaces. Different buildings will require different arrangements of researchers to enable an accurate count. For example, to cover a school building like Computer Science on Jubilee, we will have 6 researchers counting at any one time.
We expect some of the data collected from the WiFi probes and connections to be spurious (noise), however this is not of concern. Why? Well, to represent busyness, we do not need to worry about exact numbers.
It is accepted that the data may not be accurate, for example, someone’s device may use or send a WiFi probe signal to an access point (AP) or WISEBox in the designated building who is not actually in the building. This potential for inaccuracy is a recognised feature of the privacy-preserving approach we are taking to model busyness for the social distancing tool, SoDis. The researchers undertaking the human-counting study may miss the occasional person roaming the building, but this level of error is not of particular concern. When the human-count is triangulated with the sources of WiFi data, a model of busyness for that space will be produced.
The approach we are testing is relevant not only to our current desire to reduce infection from COVID-19 but may also prove useful to support other health and social causes.
The practice of attempting to replicate historical analogue music equipment within the digital domain remains a popular and enduring trend. Some notable examples would include electric guitar tone studios, or digital amplifier simulators, virtual synthesisers and effects plugins for digital audio workstations such as Logic, GarageBand or Cubase.
As expected, such examples attempt to replicate the much-loved nuances of their analogue counterparts, whether that be the warmth of vintage valve amplification and magnetic tape saturation, or the unpredictable, imperfect and organic characteristics of hand-assembled and aged electronic circuitry.
Within the Sonic Futures online interactive exhibits we can hear the sonic artefacts of these hardware related characteristics presented to us within the digital domain of the web; the sudden crackle and hiss of a sound postcard beginning to play and the array of fantastic sounds that can be achieved with Nina Richards’ Echo Machine. After all, who would be without that multi-frequency, whooping gurgle sound you can create by rapidly adjusting the echo time during playback?
Within digital music technology, while this appetite for sonic nostalgia is interesting in itself, we can also see how this desire to digitally replicate an ‘authentic experience’ extends to the way in which these devices are visually represented, and how the musician, music producer or listener is directed to interact with them. Again, we see this in the Sonic Futures online interactive exhibits: the Sound Postcard Player with a visual design reminiscent of a 1950s portable record player; the Echo Machine’s visual appearance drawing upon the design of Roland’s seminal tape-based echo machine of the 1970s, the RE-201 or Space Echo; and Photophonic with its use of retro sci-fi inspired fonts and illustrations.
We can see even more acute examples of this within some of the other examples given earlier, such as virtual synthesisers and virtual guitar amplifiers, where features such as backlit VU meters (a staple of vintage recording studio equipment) along with patches of rust, paint chips, glowing valves, rotatable knobs, flickable switches and pushable buttons are often included and presented to us in a historically convincing way as an interface through which these devices are to be used.
This type of user-interface design is often referred to as skeuomorphism, and is prevalent within lots of digital environments; the trash icon on your computer’s desktop is a good example (and is often accompanied by the sound of a piece of crunched-up paper hitting the side of metallic bin). Skeuomorphism as a design-style tends to go in and out of fashion. You may perhaps notice the look and feel of your smartphone’s calculator changing through the course of various software updates from one that is to a lesser or greater degree skeuomorphic, to one that is more minimalist and graphical and often referred to as being of a flat design.
Of course, it is only fitting that the Sonic Futures virtual online exhibits seek to sonically and visually reflect the historical music technologies and periods with which they are so closely associated. At a point in time when we are all seeking to create authentic or realistic experiences within the digital domain, whether it be a virtual work meeting or a virtual social meetup with friends and relatives, using the visual and sonic cues of our physical realities within the digital domain reassures us and gives our experience a sense of authenticity.
Along with the perceived sonic authority of original hardware, another notable reason why skeuomorphic design has been so persistent within digital music technology can be explained by the interface heavy environment of the more traditional hardware-based music studio (think of the classic image of the music producer sitting behind a large mixing console with a vast array of faders, buttons, switches dials and level meters). When moving from this physical studio environment to a digital one, in order to facilitate learning, it made sense to make this new digital environment a familiar one.
Another possible contributing factor is the relative ease with which the digital versions can be put to use within modern music recording and producing environments: costing a fraction of the hardware versions and taking up no physical space, they can be pressed into action within bedroom studios across the globe. Perhaps this increased level of accessibility generates a self-perpetuating reverence for the original piece of hardware, which is inevitably expensive and hard to obtain, and therefore its visual representation within a digital environment serves as a desirable feature, an authenticating nod to an analogue ancestor.
There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. The digital audio workstation Ableton Live (along with some other DAWs and plugins) almost fully embraces a flat design aesthetic. This perhaps begs the question: what role, if any, does the realistic visual rendering of a piece of audio hardware play in its digital counterpart? What does it offer beyond the quality of the audio reproduction? From the perspective of a digital native (someone who has grown up in the digital age) its function as a way to communicate authenticity is thrown further into question and perhaps it is skeuomorphic design’s potential to communicate the history behind the technology that comes into focus.
Visit Echo, Sound Postcards and Photophonic to try the online experiments for yourself. You can also read more about the Sonic Futures project.
–originally posted on National Science and Media Museum Blog
As part of research into the use of personal data in improving the rail passenger experience, I am currently inviting individuals travelling on the train this month (December) to trial a proposed travel companion app aimed at helping rail travellers prepare for how they spend their time during journeys.
The app includes features such as travel information and reminders, as well as records of previous trip experiences.
Participants will be required to use the app for their upcoming trip, after which they will have to complete a short questionnaire to share their thoughts about the app.
The study is open to anyone above the age of 18 years with some experience of rail travel in the UK. In addition, you will need to be travelling before the 20th of December, 2020.
More information can be found here .
Feel free to contact Christian with any queries: christian.tamakloe@nottingham.ac.uk
Hello. I am 3rd year Horizon CDT PhD student partnered with the Dstl. My PhD project is about the detection of deep learning generated aerial images, with the final goal of improving current detection models.
I am looking for participants from all backgrounds, as well as those who have specific experience in dealing with either Earth Observation Data (Satellite aerial images) or GAN-generated images.
Purpose: To assess the difficulty in the task of distinguishing GAN generated fake images from real satellite photos of rural and urban environments. This is part of a larger PhD project looking at the generation and detection of fake earth observation data.
Who can participate? This is open to anyone who would like to take part, although the involvement of people with experience dealing with related image data (e.g. satellite images, GAN images) is of particular interest.
Commitment: The study should take between 5-15 minutes to complete and is hosted online on pavlovia.org
How to participate? Read through this Information sheet and follow the link to the study at the end.
Feel free to contact me with any queries. Matthew.Yates1@nottingham.ac.uk
Continue reading “Call for Participants: Detecting fake aerial images”
post by Cecily Pepper (2019 cohort)
My first summer school started with an invite via email. Despite my interest in the topic, my first thought was that robotics was not my area of expertise (coming from a social science background), so maybe I shouldn’t bother applying as I’d be out-of-my-depth. Although after some consideration, I thought it would create some great opportunities to meet new people from diverse backgrounds. So, I stopped worrying about my lack of knowledge in the area and just went for it; and I got a place!
The summer school was held digitally due to COVID-19 restrictions, which had both its benefits and pitfalls. On the first day, we were welcomed by Debra Fearnshaw and Professor Steve Benford, and were then given the opportunity to introduce ourselves. From this it was apparent that there was a wide variety of delegates from several universities, with a range of disciplines including social sciences, robotics, engineering and manufacturing. The first day mostly consisted of talks from experts about the challenges we face in connecting technology and the potential of co-robotics within the fields of agrirobotics, home and healthcare. The main task of the summer school was to create a cobot (collaborative robot) that could overcome some of the issues that COVID-19 has created or exacerbated. The issue that the group chose to address had to fall into one of the categories introduced on the first day: food production (agrirobotics), healthcare or home. Along with this challenge, more details were needed on function, technological components, and four key areas of the cobot design: ethics, communication, learning and safety. These aspects were introduced on the second day. After being split into groups at the end of the first day, I felt happy as my group had a range of experience and expertise between us, which I felt would bode well for the challenge as well as being beneficial for myself as I could learn something from everyone.
Similarly, the second day consisted mostly of talks, this time based on the four themes mentioned previously. The ethics discussion was interesting and included in-depth explanations around aspects to consider when reflecting upon the ethical consequences of our designs, such as privacy, law, security and personal ethics. An online activity followed the ethics talk but was soon interrupted by a technical glitch. Despite this, we were able to engage with alternative resources provided in order to reflect upon the ethics of our cobot design. This was useful both for our eventual design, as well as applying this to our own PhD research.
The other themes then followed, including a discussion around interaction and communication in technology. This was an insightful introduction to voice user interfaces and alike, and what the current research is focusing on in this field. While fascinating on its own, it was also useful in thinking about how to apply this to our cobot design, and which features may be useful or necessary for our cobot’s functionality. A talk on the third theme of learning was then delivered, including details about facial recognition and machine learning, and the applications of these in the field of robotics. Likewise, this was useful in reflecting upon how these features may be applicable in our design. Finally, the theme of safety was considered. This talk provided us with the knowledge and ability to consider safety aspects of our cobot, which was particularly apt when considering COVID safety implications too. Overall, the first two days were quite lengthy in terms of screen time (despite some breaks), and I found myself wilting slightly towards the end. However, I think we could all understand and sympathise in the difficulty of minimising screen time when there is a short space of time to complete all of the summer school activities.
On the final day, we split into our teams to create our cobot. This day was personally my favourite part of the summer school, as it was fantastic to work with such a variety of people who all brought different skills to the group. Together, we developed a cobot design and went through the themes from the previous day, ensuring we met the design brief and covered all bases. Probably the biggest challenge was keeping it simple, as we had so many ideas between us. Despite our abundance of ideas, we were strict with ourselves as a group to focus and keep the design simplistic. Additionally, the five-minute presentation time meant that we had to keep our design simple yet effective. We then presented our home assistant cobot, Squishy. Squishy was an inflatable, soft cobot designed to assist carers in lifting patients who were bed-bound (as occupational injuries are a significant problem within the care industry). Squishy’s soft design enabled comfort for the patient being lifted, while the modular design provided a cost-effective solution and the possibility of added-extras if necessary. Along with this, Squishy was beneficial in that it consisted of wipe-clean surfaces to enable effective cleaning in light of COVID-19, as well as aiding social distancing by reducing the need for carer-patient contact. Other features of Squishy included machine-learned skeletal tracking and thermal cameras to aid safe functionality, and minimal personal data collection to maintain ethical standards. After the presentations and following questions, the judges deliberated. Results were in…my team were the winners! While I was happy to have won with my team, the most fruitful part of the experience for me was meeting and learning from others who had different backgrounds, perceptions and ideas.
Overall, I felt the summer school was well-organised and a fantastic opportunity to work with new people from diverse backgrounds, and I was very glad to be a part of it. I’m also pleased I overcame the ‘Imposter Syndrome’ feeling of not believing I would know enough or have enough experience to be a valuable delegate in the summer school. So, my advice to all students would be: don’t underestimate what you can contribute, don’t overthink it, and just go for it; you might end up winning!
