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Sponsoring Martin Dittus, 2012 EngD cohort
The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) coordinates thousands of online volunteers to trace roads, waterways, huts and houses from satellite data. The resulting maps were used during humanitarian responses to typhoon Haiyan in 2013, the Ebola epidemic in 2014, the 2015 Nepal earthquake, and many other crises. In some cities HOT organises mapathons, social events where new contributors can learn the practice. HOT has an ambition of formidable scale: even after months of work by thousands of volunteers, many regions remain unmapped. How can organisers of such crowdsourcing initiatives best grow their volunteer capacity? The research aims to identify processes that can foster such community growth.
It was developed in close collaboration with HOT organisers, and takes the form of three large-scale quantitative observational studies at the scale of the individual, the group, and the collective. The volume and breadth of HOT activities provides an opportunity to observe a range of contributor engagement aspects within the same crowdsourcing system, involving a large number of projects and participants, with many opportunities to evaluate specific organiser choices and organisational practices. To date we have observed thousands of contributors across a large number of initiatives and contribution settings, involving considerations of task design and task complexity, contributor guidance, peer support, social encounter, and more.
The research contributes new empirical evidence that community-building approaches can have a great impact on sustained crowdsourcing engagement. The highest contributor retention rates were found for initiatives that foster collective experiences, for example through social encounters in offline settings. In particular, initiatives that organise regular mapathons have twice the retention rate of those that follow the same contribution process, but focus on online contributions. Task design and other aspects of the contribution process were found to affect contributor engagement as well, but their impact was comparatively low.
Investing in Research Engineers: Intel Collaborative Research Institute Sustainable Connected Cities
by Dr Duncan Wilson, Director
The Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities thrives on the coloration between world-class researchers in academic and those at the cutting edge of developing computing technology to connect and enrich the lives of every person on Earth, The partnership between Intel, UCL and Imperial is founded on the principle that bringing together a diverse cohort of researchers will lead to novel ways of thinking about how we can enhance the social, economic and environmental well-being of our cities,. At the heart of that research are the PhD’s and EngD’s who are developing insights into problems that are the foundation for the projects we deliver.
In our experience the Engineering Doctorate attracts researchers who enjoy the parallel worlds of developing thought leadership while also wanting to develop and deploy their ideas at scale and in a commercial context. From the Intel perspective this technology focus aligns directly with our strategic collaboration with the academic community. The commercial training offered through the programme complements the exposure the EngD research engineers obtain through working closely with an industrial partner. The training is not just theoretically taught but also becomes practically tested through working on real industrial projects.
At UCL we have the benefit of having London as our living laboratory. We are making a significant investment to deploy a city platform to enable researchers and engineers to test their ideas for a sustainable connected city. Achieving this vision will entail investigating, developing and deploying adaptive technologies that cab optimise resource efficiency, and enable new series that support and enhance the quality of life of urban inhabitants and city visitors. There are many fundamental technical, social and urban challenges and opportunities that need to be addresses to accomplish this vision. The Institute embraces an interdisciplinary reserach approach, combining methodologies from computer science, the social sciences, interaction design and architecture to improve how cities are managed and maintained in order to ensure and enhance citizen well-being. It is the intersection of these disciplines, approaches and methods that are the bread and butter of the corporate reserach laboratory and as such the fertile ground for the industrial research of the EngD.
An Engineering Doctorate is different. It produces a different kind of researcher. Standing with one foot in the corporate lab, the other in academic, and communicating with supervisors who exist in both. The can be tough, since different environments have different pressures which often have to be managed by the person in the middle. But that is where the strength of training is most important. The product of such an environment is a researcher with academic rigour who can also appreciate the practical constraints of a commercial environment. It is quite timely that I am typing this notes while also trying to find the next member of our team in London, and guess what, there are a couple of candidates who have been through the EngD process.