Category Archives: Staff profiles and activity

Publications, Staff profiles and activity

How mobile phones can simulate an epidemic

zombiGoldsmiths Data Science lecturer Katayoun Farrahi has published a new paper in PLOS ONE, an international scientific journal on primary research.

The paper, entitled Epidemic Contact Tracing via Communication Traces, propose a model of tracing physical interaction (and contagion) between people by using their mobile phone communication traces. The paper’s abstract explains:

“Traditional contact tracing relies on knowledge of the interpersonal network of physical interactions, where contagious outbreaks propagate. However, due to privacy constraints and noisy data assimilation, this network is generally difficult to reconstruct accurately. Communication traces obtained by mobile phones are known to be good proxies for the physical interaction network, and they may provide a valuable tool for contact tracing. Motivated by this assumption, we propose a model for contact tracing, where an infection is spreading in the physical interpersonal network, which can never be fully recovered; and contact tracing is occurring in a communication network which acts as a proxy for the first.

data-visualisation“We apply this dual model to a dataset covering 72 students over a 9 month period, for which both the physical interactions as well as the mobile communication traces are known. Our results suggest that a wide range of contact tracing strategies may significantly reduce the final size of the epidemic, by mainly affecting its peak of incidence. However, we find that for low overlap between the face-to-face and communication interaction network, contact tracing is only efficient at the beginning of the outbreak, due to rapidly increasing costs as the epidemic evolves.

Katayoun-FarrahiKatayoun Farrahi

“Overall, contact tracing via mobile phone communication traces may be a viable option to arrest contagious outbreaks.”

About the Authors
Katayoun Farrahi – Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London
Rémi Emonet – Department of Machine Learning, Laboratoire Hubert Curien, Saint-Etienne
Manuel Cebrian – Massachusetts Institute of Technology / University of California

Staff profiles and activity

Physical Computing lecturer blogs for Amazon

BrockCraft-tileA blog by Goldsmiths Physical Computing lecturer Brock Craft has won him ‘featured writer’ status on Amazon’s tech bookstore.

His blog Arduino and education – sizing up the landscape introduces the tiny computer that has been widely adopted in science, engineering, technology and mathematics education in high schools, as a way of teaching computational thinking skills.

Brock Craft is a specialist in Technology Enhanced Learning. He was a Partner at the design firm TinkerLondon, where he introduced the Arduino into the UK along with its creator, Massimo Banzi.

 

Events, Staff profiles and activity

Event: Sonic pattern and the textility of code

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

11am – 6pm Tuesday 13 May 2014
LimeWharf Cultural Innovation Hub & Artistic Laboratory, Vyner St, London E2 9DJ
Tickets £20 (£15 concessions) – buy here

How do patterned sound and threads allow us to sense the abstract and conceptualise the tactile?

A diverse panel talk about their work as weavers, knitters, live coders, dyadic mathematicians, generative musicians and digital makers. We will look for a rich view of technology as a meeting point of craft, culture and live experience.

The invited speakers will explore their own practice of making, process, language, material and output, providing a view of technology as a meeting point of craft, culture and live experience.

The discussion will be lead by Professor Janis Jefferies (Goldsmiths), Bronac Ferran and David Toop. Practitioners include Alessandro Altavilla, Felicity Ford, Berit Greinke, Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Alex McLean and Becky Stewart.

There will be audio-visual interludes through the day, including a screening of Ismini Samanidou and Scanner’s film Weave Waves and a short performance by Felicity Ford. The event will close with a live music performance from Leafcutter John, Matthew Yee-King and Alex McLean, exploring code, pattern and sound.

Curated by Karen Gaskill, Crafts Council. A collaboration between the Craft Council, ICSRiM (School of Music, University of Leeds), the Thursday Club (Goldsmiths), V&A Digital Futures and the Live Coding Research Network.

Made possible through funding and support by the Craft Council, Sound and Music, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Centre for Creative Collaboration.
These events are co-produced with Sound and Music as part of the 2014/15 Composer Curator programme.

Events, Staff profiles and activity

Major exhibition for Goldsmiths’ Professor of Computer Art

mutator_11

In April-May 2014 a major exhibition in Brussels celebrates the work of William Latham, Professor of Computer Art at Goldsmiths.

His first major exhibition outside the UK in over twenty years, Mutator 1 + 2 : Evolutionary Art includes his early hand-drawn works, large computer generated Cibachrome prints, video art and his most recent interactive projected imagery that explores and embodies evolutionary processes, physical and virtual space. William will also execute some large scale hand drawings in the iMAL space in Brussels.

Biography

William Latham was one of the first UK artists in the 1980s to create computer art, and he rapidly gained an international reputation as a pioneer in the field. His work blends organic imagery and computer animation, using software modelled upon the processes of evolution. Starting with a simple shape, Latham introduces random ‘mutations’ of a form in order to generate increasingly complex three-dimensional creations that resemble fantastical, futuristic organisms.

lathamFrom 1987 to 1993 William became a research fellow at the IBM UK Scientific Centre in Winchester UK and his Mutation work achieved world-wide recognition at SIGGRAPH. He co-authored the book Evolutionary Art and Computers and showed his organic artworks and films in major international touring exhibitions.

Based on his methodology for mutating and evolving forms, his Mutator software allows designers to ‘breed’ designs in the same way as Latham generates art, pulling us into the virtual laboratories of artificial life. The manipulation of the natural world by humans is a theme which runs though much of Latham’s work; in fact he likens himself to a gardener who breeds organic art by exploiting and amplifying mutations in order to create new, hybrid forms, a process he describes as “an evolution driven by aesthetics”.

From 1994 to 2003 William was CEO and founder of leading games developer Computer Artworks Ltd, which produced hit games including The THING (see clip below). During this time he also worked with UK rave bands producing organic graphics and videos.

From 2005 to 2006 William was Professor of Creative Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University and in 2007 he became Professor of Computer Art at Goldsmiths. At Goldsmiths he is working on research in collaboration with the Bioinformatics Department at Imperial College applying his evolutionary rule-based approach to the domain of protein folding, scientific visualization and gamification in collaboration with Goldsmiths’ Professor Frederic Leymarie.

This article was adapted from the Mutator 1 + 2 exhibition text.

Events, Publications, Staff profiles and activity

Book launch: Contemporary Sensorimotor Theory

sensorimotorWhy does a circle look curved and not angular? And why does red not sound like a bell?

To answer these questions, Goldsmiths’ Professor of Cognitive Computing Mark Bishop has co-edited the new book Contemporary Sensorimotor Theory.

Over the course of 16 essays, the book takes examples from human-computer interaction, children’s play, virtual reality, robotics and linguistics to analyse the philosophical foundations of sensorimotor theory – and introduce a radically new approach in cognitive science.

Mark Bishop and his co-editor Andrew Martin will launch the book at Goldsmiths’ New Academic Building at 7pm Monday 31 March 2014. All are welcome – email m.bishop@gold.ac.uk to book a place.

Mark Bishop is Professor of Cognitive Computing at Goldsmiths.

Staff profiles and activity, Women in Computing

Electronic music pioneer

As well as running the Creative Computing programme at Goldsmiths, Mick Grierson directs the Daphne Oram Collection, an archive of audio, code, photographs, scores and papers relating to the electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram.

Daphne Oram (1925 – 2003) was one of the central figures in the development of British experimental electronic music. As co-founder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, she is credited with the invention of a new form of sound synthesis – Oramics. Not only is this one of the earliest forms of electronic sound synthesis, it is noteworthy for being audiovisual in nature – i.e. the composer draws onto a synchronised set of ten 35mm film strips which overlay a series of photo-electric cells, generating electrical charges to control amplitude, timbre, frequency, and duration.

“The Oramics machine is a device of great importance to the development of British electronic music,” explains Mick Grierson. “It’s a great shame that Daphne’s contribution has never been fully recognised, but now that we have the machine at the Science Museum, it’s clear for all to see that she knew exactly how music was going to be made in the future, and created the machine to do it.”

 

News, Publications, Staff profiles and activity

‘Alan Turing: His Work and Impact’ wins award for academic publishing

Prof Mark Bishop has won a top award for academic publishing for his contribution to Alan Turing: his Work and Impact, which won the R.R. Hawkins award at the 2013 Prose Awards.

Extract:
In popular culture, the great English polymath Alan Turing is perhaps best remembered for his work on the BOMBE, the giant electro-mechanical devices that were used for Ultra secret intelligence work carried out at Bletchley Park in World War II. This work would help break the German Enigma machine’s encrypted war-time signals; work so valuable it subsequently led Churchill to reflect that “it was thanks to Ultra that we won the war”.

In my area of research – Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) – Turing is better known for the seminal reflections on machine intelligence outlined in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence.

This paper focussed on the core philosophical question: “can a machine think?” This is a question which, in its literal form, Turing famously described as being “too meaningless to deserve discussion”.

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