The OU’s Citizen Science and AI Research group had a stand at the Parks Trust Love Nature event on the 4th of July. The group sported a fantastic number of activities throughout the day: Rachel Redford, Citizen Science Project Officer, engaged with children and adults alike about the fascinating world of moth eco-systems; Nirwan Sharma, Research Associate,…
The Research Excellence Framework 2021 results are out! KMi contributed to several units of assessment, the biggest of which was Computer Science and Informatics, which submitted 45 full-time equivalent staff, 44% more than in 2014. The Open University’s Computing Research is ranked 27 out of 90, for Research Power, which puts us in the top…
As the COVID-19 pandemic puts the focus on literacy and numeracy in home-schooling, KMi researchers have developed technologies to also help families learn about the natural environment. The Human-Computer Collaborative Learning in Citizen Science (X-Polli:Nation) project, which received £507,000 from the Engineering and Physical Research Council has responded to the pandemic by creating a new collection of interactive…
At the 25th Anniversary KMi Festival we invited staff from across the OU campus to come and find out how our latest knowledge and media technologies are impacting education, science, and cities. The Festival attendees included Lady Kitty Chisholm, one of the three founders of KMi, the STEM Executive Dean, Nick Braithwaite, and the new…
We are delighted to announce new research funding from the EPSRC to explore the potential for collaborative learning between humans and AI within the framework of environmental citizen science. A new collaboration between KMi (Siddharthan and Rüger) and STEM Deanery / EEES (Ansine), in partnership with Imperial College London, University of Aberdeen, Learning Through Landscapes and St Alban’s Primary School,…
Congratulations on Trung Huynh’s viva success! Last Friday, Trung Huynh successfully defended his PhD thesis Text Classification With Deep Neural Networks. The thesis is a body of research work over the last six years culminating in a successful system that identifies documents pertaining to Adverse Drug Reactions in corpora as diverse as tweets and…
Prof Stefan Rueger of KMi presented Dr Ian Witten of Waikato University to Executive Dean Mary Kellett at Friday’s Degree Ceremony. Ian received a honorary doctorate "Doctor of the University" from the OU for services to the educationally underprivileged. Ian Witten is a Computer Scientist who has contributed to the research in his discipline in…
Stefan Rueger of KMi presented recent work on markerless motion capture at a landmark Conference for Visual Media Production that was held at BFI Southbank. The significance of this joint work with Frederic Fol Leymarie, Prashant Aparajeya and Vesna Petresin of Goldsmiths is that it will allow a practical way of capturing the motion of…
Computer Science and Informatics at the OU (including KMi and Computing and Communications) performed very strongly in the recent HEFCE REF exercise, with 75% of outputs rated world-leading or internally-excellent (up from 70% in 2008), an excellent research environment (100%), and a 30% larger submission (31 FTE, up from 24 in 2008). This result places Open University…
KMi professor Stefan Rueger was invited to an EPSRC network-of-networks meeting on 27 March 2014 in his role as coordinator of the Multimedia Knowledge Management research network to help map out the research challenges within EPSRC’s network portfolio. One interesting aspect of this workshop was that it did not involve the conventional jotting down of…
