Researchers from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton are designing incentives for collection and verification of information to make crowdsourcing more reliable.

Crowdsourcing is a process of outsourcing tasks to the public, rather than to employees or contractors. In recent years, crowdsourcing has provided an unprecedented ability to accomplish tasks that require the involvement of a large number of people, often across wide-spread geographies, expertise, or interests.

The world's largest encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, is an example of a task that can only be achieved through crowd participation. Crowdsourcing is not limited to volunteer efforts. For example, Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) and CrowdFlower are ‘labour on demand’ markets that allow people to get paid for micro-tasks, as simple as labelling an image or translating a piece of text.

Recently, crowdsourcing has demonstrated effectiveness in large-scale, information-gathering tasks, across very wide geographies. For example, the Ushahidi platform allowed volunteers to perform rapid crisis mapping in real-time in the aftermath of disasters such as the Haiti earthquake.

One of the main obstacles in crowdsourcing information gathering is reliability of collected reports. Now Dr Victor Naroditskiy and Professor Nick Jennings from the University of Southampton, together with Masdar Institute’s Professor Iyad Rahwan and Dr Manuel Cebrian, Research Scientist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), have developed novel methods for solving this problem through crowdsourcing. The work, which is published in the academic journal PLoS ONE, shows how to crowdsource not just gathering, but also verification of information.

Dr Victor Naroditskiy of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity group at the University of Southampton, and lead author of the paper, says: “The success of an information gathering task relies on the ability to identify trustworthy information reports, while false reports are bound to appear either due to honest mistakes or sabotage attempts. This information verification problem is a difficult task, which, just like the information-gathering task, requires the involvement of a large number of people.”

Sites like Wikipedia have existing mechanisms for quality assurance and information verification. However, those mechanisms rely partly on reputation, as more experienced editors can check whether an article conforms to the Wikipedia objectivity criteria, has sufficient citations, etc. In addition, Wikipedia has policies for resolving conflicts between editors in cases of disagreement.

However, in time-critical tasks, there is no established hierarchy of participants, and little basis for judging credibility of volunteers who are recruited on the fly. In this kind of scenario, special incentives are needed to carry out verification. The research presented in the PLOS ONE paper provides such incentives.

Professor Iyad Rahwan of Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi and a co-author of the paper, explains: “We showed how to combine incentives to recruit participants to verify information. When a participant submits a report, the participant's recruiter becomes responsible for verifying its correctness. Compensations to the recruiter and to the reporting participant for submitting the correct report, as well as penalties for incorrect reports, ensure that the recruiter will perform verification.”

Incentives to recruit participants have previously been proposed by Dr Manuel Cebrian from UCSD, and a co-author of the paper, to win the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge, where teams had to locate 10 weather balloons positioned at random locations throughout the United States. In that scheme, where the person who found the balloons received a pre-determined compensation, for example $1,000, his recruiter received $500 and the recruiter of the recruiter got $250. Dr Manuel Cebrian says: “The results on incentives to encourage verification provide theoretical justification for the incentives used to win the Red Balloon Challenge.”

‘Energy avatars’ in our homes that could advise us on how best to use our energy, and even prompt us on changing appliances to gain better cost savings, are part of the future of energy use described by Professor Nick Jennings in a new video on the BBC website.

Professor Nick Jennings, Head of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and one of the world’s leading experts on agent technology, describes how his research team are devising software which enables people to cut their energy use according to different criteria which can be displayed on devices in the home.

In the video Professor Jennings demonstrates how smart information provided by agents can provide live displays of energy use, which his research team has also characterized according to equivalent use by cars or individual air passengers, for example. ‘This helps us keep track and share information which then encourages people to minimize the amount of energy that they use,’ he says. The key is to enable people to cut their energy use without spending too much time working out how to do it.

Professor Jennings believes that systems like this will be essential as we confront the depletion of non-renewable energy sources and the introduction of greener but more expensive alternatives such as wind and wave power.

The introduction of the ‘Smart Grid’ network will be an essential element in more efficient energy use, enabling utilities and the public to monitor and remotely adjust the millions of devices that use electricity. In-home displays of energy use will be essential to facilitate the efficient working of the Smart Grid, and Professor Jennings and his team are currently working on software that will give consumers more understanding of their energy use – even from individual appliances – and therefore greater control over cost and carbon emissions.

The software also learns the energy profile of the house and will monitor this and suggest ways of optimizing usage to fit pre-set parameters. "Interacting with you, it might say, for example, if your washing machine is very inefficient, if you bought a new one within a certain period of time you would have got that money back," says Professor Jennings.

"People are not interested in spending lots of time investigating their energy usage, even though it is such a big bill, so it makes sense to let machines automate some of the process,” he adds.

For further information on this research contact Professor Nick Jennings.

ECS researchers are developing a smartphone app that will be able to help conservationists discover if a highly endangered insect has become extinct or not.

The New Forest cicada (Cicadetta Montana) is native to Britain but has not been spotted or heard from for more than a decade.

But Dr Alex Rogers, from the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group, is hoping the new software he and his team are developing can help in the scientific hunt for the insect.

“The cicada has a distinctive high-pitched song that is on the very upper limit of an adult’s hearing range. It is so high pitched that you are never quite sure you are hearing it but the average smartphone is quite capable of picking up such frequencies,” said Alex.

Visitors to the New Forest will be able to download the app, turning their mobile into a portable cicada detector. They will then be able to use their phones to scour the area in search of the elusive creatures.

“If a potential song is detected the app gives immediate feedback that it thinks a cicada has been heard. It will then ask permission to upload the recording to a server so it can be analysed in more detail. We’d then contact them off-line and investigate the sighting, revisiting the site to get more recordings,” added Alex.

The app could also be used to detect a number of other insect species such as Roesel’s bush crickets, wood crickets and the common grasshopper, and Davide Zilli, a PhD student in the team, is currently working on automatic ways to detect and classify these different insects.

He said: “We also want users to report back to us that they have visited specific sites and heard nothing, so that we can build maps of areas that have been explored, and encourage others to investigate less well explored areas.”

Researchers from Electronics and Computer Science have released a smartphone app designed to help in the search for a rare cicada found only in the New Forest National Park.

The New Forest Cicada (Cicadetta montana s. str.) is the only cicada native to the UK. During May to July it sings with a very characteristic high-pitched song, which is at the limits of human hearing and is particularly difficult for most adults to hear. Sightings of the cicada within the New Forest date back to 1812, but the last unconfirmed sighting was in 2000. However, it’s quite likely that colonies remain undiscovered in less visited parts of the forest.

The search for the cicada will be launched at the New Forest National Park BioBlitz, which is being organised by the New Forest National Park Authority on Friday 7 and Saturday 8 June 2013. The wildlife monitoring marathon will be held at Roydon Woods Nature Reserve near Brockenhurst. From 4pm on 7 June until 4pm on 8 June, nature lovers can join experts on bug hunts and river surveys, as well as take part in pond dipping, fungi forays and an early morning birdsong walk.

Dr Alex Rogers, a Reader in the Agents, Interaction and Complexity Research Group in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, who leads the work of the New Forest Cicada Project says: “Modern smartphones have extremely sensitive microphones and enough computing power to automatically detect and recognise the song of the New Forest cicada.

“We’re hoping that the millions of visitors to the New Forest can use their smartphones to help us locate any remaining colonies of the cicada that might remain in the forest.”

The app records a 30 second survey using the smartphone’s microphone and looks for the particular frequencies and sound patterns that characterise the cicada’s song. If it thinks a cicada might have been heard, it prompts the user to upload the recording, so that it can be analysed in more detail.

“The cicada likes sunny south-facing clearings, and will only sing on a warm day when there is little wind, so we’ll be encouraging people to use the app when conditions are best. We’ll be able to use the reports from the app to compile a map of areas that have already been searched, in order to focus the efforts of the professional entomologists who are also looking for the cicada”, says Davide Zilli, the PhD student who has developed the app.

“We use an approach similar to that used in human speech recognition to detect the cicada’s song. As we collect more recordings from the forest we hope to be able to extend this to automatically recognise many more common insects.”

Natalie Fisher, Interpretation Officer at The New Forest National Park Authority, adds: “The New Forest has a unique mix of habitats, which make it one of the best places for wildlife in Britain. We’re very excited by the fact that this app, and the activities going on during the BioBlitz, will draw attention to the rich wildlife that we have right on our doorsteps”.

The app is available for both iPhone and Android smartphones and is available on the iTunes and Google Play app stores by searching for ‘Cicada Hunt’. More information about the cicada and the app can be found on the project’s website – www.newforestcicada.info.

Researchers at the University of Southampton have proposed an answer to the long-running debate as to how stable the Earth system is. The Earth, with its core-driven magnetic field, oceans of liquid water, dynamic climate and abundant life is arguably the most complex system in the known Universe. Life arose on Earth over three and a half billion years ago and it would appear that despite planetary scale calamities such as the impacts of massive meteorites, runaway climate change and increases in brightness of the Sun, it has continued to grow, reproduce and evolve ever since. Has life on Earth simply been lucky in withstanding these events or are there any self-stabilising processes operating in the Earth system that would reduce the severity of such perturbations? If such planetary processes exist, to what extent are they the result of the actions of life? Forty years ago James Lovelock formulated his Gaia Hypothesis in which life controls aspects of the planet and in doing so maintains conditions that are suitable for widespread life despite shocks and perturbations. This hypothesis was and remains controversial in part because there is no understood mechanism by which such a planetary self-stabilising system could emerge. In research published in PLOS Computational Biology, University of Southampton lecturer Dr James Dyke and PhD student Iain Weaver detail a mechanism that shows how when life is both affected by and alters environmental conditions, then what emerges is a control system that stabilises environmental conditions. This control system was first described around the middle of the 20th Century during the development of the cybernetics movement and has until now been largely neglected. Their findings are in principle applicable to a wide range of real world systems - from microbial mats to aquatic ecosystems up to and including the entire biosphere. Dr Dyke says: “As well as being a fascinating issue in its own right, we quite desperately need to understand what is currently happening to the Earth and in particular the impacts of our own behaviour. “Pretty much whatever we do, life on Earth will carry on, just as it did for the previous 3.5 billion years or so. It is only by discovering the mechanisms by which our living planet has evolved in the past can we hope to continue to be part of its future.” A copy of the paper “The emergence of environmental homeostasis in complex ecosystems” published in PLOS Computational Biology is available in full.

A Southampton ECS student is celebrating after winning the best student paper award at an international conference for his research into the problem of energy poverty in remote communities.

Muddasser Alam received the accolade at the recent Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (AAMAS) conference, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, for his paper Cooperative Energy Exchange for the Efficient Use of Energy and Resources in Remote Communities.

His research presented a new approach to sharing resources in an electricity grid in remote rural communities in places like Africa and Asia. Homes that have little or no access to electricity are increasingly being equipped with some form of micro-generation such as a solar panel or wind turbine that can power basic lighting, cooking or heating. These micro-generators require costly batteries.

Muddasser, a PhD student the Agents, Interaction, and Complexity Group, supervised by Dr. Alex Rogers and Dr. Sarvapali Ramchurn, explored ways in which the use of these batteries could be minimised including interconnecting homes to exchange unused or stored energy.

Muddasser explained: “By introducing this mechanism they can avoid charging the battery too many times and avoid the inefficiencies associated with storing energy in a battery. This research will allow smart electricity grids to be evolved from the ground up.

“AAMAS is the top conference in my field and winning a renowned award early in my career means a lot for my future.”

Muddasser received a $1,000 prize and certificate for his award.

His co-supervisor Dr Sarvapali Ramchurn said: “Muddasser’s work will hopefully help materialise the vision of developing smart grids from the ground up that we see as a real game changer in terms of eradicating poverty around the world.”

Mudasser’s research was carried out as part of the ORCHID project, based in ECS, that investigates how human and software agents can work effectively together in various settings including Smart Grids and emergency response.

AAMAS is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multi-agent systems. It aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

An article on the value of wasps by Dr James Dyke, Lecturer in Complex Systems Simulation, and a members of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group in ECS, appears in today’s edition of The Conversation, a new online news source from UK universities.

James’s article ‘Wasps deserve to be loved’ examines the public’s negative attitude to wasps compared to the importance of the role they play in complex ecosystems – particularly in pollinating species by feeding on nectar, and in feeding solid food, in the form of common garden pests, to their larvae. ‘It would be practically impossible to predict the impact of the extinction of even a single species of wasp on the many other creatures and plants it interacts with, directly or indirectly,’ comments James.

Drawing a parallel with the legal rights accorded by the UK even to suspected terrorists, as in the recent Abu Qatada case, James concludes that while wasps may be a nuisance, and even life-threatening to some people, they and other species deserve our fullest consideration in terms of the benefit of their activities to the biosphere: ‘Until recently, we have simply taken for granted that the other species we share the Earth’s biosphere with contribute greatly to our well being,’ he writes. 'In an important way, these hidden benefits are very much like rights – you only notice how vital they were after they are taken away.’

James confesses to being fascinated by the Earth and in particular the way it has been affected by the emergence and evolution of life. ‘How did life start on Earth? Is there life elsewhere in the universe? - For as long as I can remember I experience a singular mix of emotions when looking up at the clear night sky,’ he says, ‘something that alas doesn't happen very often being a city dweller. My previous job at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry was centrered around the Helmholtz Alliance project, Planetary Evolution and Life, that was coordinated by the German Aerospace Agency.' He is still a member of the NASA Astrobiology Focus Group Thermodynamics, Disequilibrium and Evolution.’

More recently James has become interested in how a particular species is affecting the Earth and what that may mean for life now and in the future. ‘Anthropogenic Climate Change has become something of a cause celebre’, he comments, ‘but other impacts that Homo sapiens are having on the Earth system are arguably as profound and long-lasting.’

James is a co-chair of Sustainability Science Southampton

A University of Southampton student has received national recognition from the British Computer Society (BCS) for his research into multi agent systems. This is the third student from the university’s Agents, Interaction and Complexity (AIC) research group to win a Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC) award for his thesis, in conjunction with the BCS.

Long Tran-Thanh was selected as runner-up in the Distinguished Dissertation Award 2013 for his dissertation on Budget-limited multi-armed bandits. He also received an honourable mention in the 2012 Dissertation Award sponsored by the European Artificial Intelligence Association (ECCAI).

His thesis explores sequential decision-making and focuses on different multi-armed bandit models with constraints, such as budget limits or pulling restrictions. His research investigates how autonomous agents can make decisions within those models if the information is not known or is uncertain. He is the first to focus on observing the output of that decision-making and has developed efficient algorithms to help balance exploration and exploitation in order to maximise total payoff.

His findings are already attracting interest in real-world applications such as online keyword bidding, decentralised coordination of unmanned autonomous vehicles and crowdsourcing.

Long is the third student from the AIC group to be recognised by the awards. Dr Rajdeep Dash won the Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2007 for his research into computational mechanism design and in 2008 Senior Research Fellow Talal Rahwan also won the prize for his work developing new algorithms to enable greater co-operation between agents.

Professor Nick Jennings, Head of AIC, said: “We are delighted that Long has been recognised for his excellent research. He is the third student from AIC to be recognised by the CPHC and BCS in this way – a fantastic achievement for one research group.”

Long said: “I was surprised and pleased to receive this award. It recognises the hard work I have done over the past three years and I hope it will help me in my future career.”

The annual CPHC/BCS award selects the best British PhD/DPhil dissertations in computer science. Following a rigorous review process involving over 60 technical experts, the judging panel selected four dissertations it regarded as exemplary, one of which was Long’s.

The judging panel said of Long’s dissertation: “The panel thought it was particularly noteworthy that Long’s thesis both makes significant theoretical contributions, and provides solutions which can be beneficially employed in practice.”

Long, who was born in Vietnam and grew up in Hungary came to Southampton in 2008 to study his PhD in Computer Science and is now a post doctoral research fellow at the University working on the ORCHID project that investigates how human and software agents can effectively work together to collect the best possible information from a disaster environment.

““When I first came to Southampton I was very impressed by the enthusiasm of the academic staff and I thought I would get good support and motivation here and I was right. I have been here for five years and it has been the best time of my life,”“ said Long.

‘Choose the Earth’, is the message of James Dyke’s latest headline article in The Conversation, ‘not because it is easy, but because it is hard.’

Dr Dyke is a Lecturer in Complex Systems Simulation, and a member of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group in ECS (Electronics and Computer Science). He developed and leads the teaching of the multidisciplinary Global Challenges undergraduate module at the University of Southampton.

Contrasting the scientific and technical challenges posed by climate change and human impact on the environment with the huge achievement of US scientists who successfully landed American astronauts on the Moon in 1969 - less than 10 years after President Kennedy made this a national goal, Dr Dyke sets out the scale of the effort that could ensure the sustainability of our planet.

Reducing carbon emissions, providing new means of power generation, and building smartgrids are some of the technological problems to be faced; halting deforestation and ensuring better and more sustainable use of the Earth’s resources will require concerted global efforts. In addition to this, Dr Dyke also calls for changes to governance and political institutions: ‘Rather than top down, imposed solutions that don’t work, get people involved in processes and issues that matter to them. Connect them with others and have them feel invested in these projects and collectively build consensus and power from the bottom up.’

However, the major challenge is even more radical, he says: ‘Hyper-consumerism and the demand for growth is simply not compatible with the finite resources of our planet, and the use of Gross Domestic Product as the only measure that counts needs to be addressed, so that natural resources and human lives are defined by more than monetary values.’

The full article is available in The Conversation, Wednesday 27 November.