Geospatial Engineering @ Newcastle University

During the early summer of 2013, the UK Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (ITRC) underwent a mid-term review, approximately two and half years after the inception of the research programme, which coincided with the annual ITRC Assembly. The assembly and review gave all of those working within the consortium, and also invited guests and delegates, the opportunity to hear about the work accomplished during the initial half of the research programme. The 5 year research consortium is funded through an EPSRC Programme Grant, with the mid-term review offering the chance to discuss the future of the flexible funding available for the final two and half years of the programme.

The three day meeting was held at Chilworth Manor Hotel in Southampton, and was facilitated by a facilitation group, Dialogue Matters to help coordinate and focus a delegation of researchers, academics, stakeholders and partners. Monday offered the chance for the Expert Advisory Group (EAG) to review the documentation and work completed under the five different work streams. Whilst part of this review took place behind closed doors alongside the program’s principal and co-investigators, subsequently the EAG gave direct feedback to all of those attending the three day meeting. This session was then followed by an open floor discussion and questioning by researchers, PhD students and investigators from the program of the EAG panel. The utility of the EAG in particular was felt by the program during these discussions, and also via their continued guidance on the cycle 2 and 3 assessments due for release in January 2014 and in the autumn of 2015 respectively. Further to the feedback delivered, the post-lunch slot was dedicated to researchers and investigators funded through the program the chance to present some more specifics about the tasks undertaken during the first half of the program. This was particularly effective in getting everyone up to speed with what others within the consortium had been working on, and helped certainly to set the scene for discussions about future directions assigned to day two and three. Finally, a group of ITRC-affiliated PhD students presented some scoping research they had carried out to try to pull together a set of data on projects, research centres and institutes at the global scale who are also working on similar research as that conducted under the ITRC banner. Not only was the presentation interesting in the manner in which it was delivered, the data and information collected offered a great starting point for further development of the ever-growing research community, acting as a focal point for information about the community at large.

Day two began to offer the affiliated researchers and investigated across the many universities represented within the program, the opportunity to address some of the following questions:

• Where have we got to?
• What is happening in this field, in other projects and around the world?
• What externalities may adjust the way this research is conducted, or will influence the likely impact the research has e.g. changes in policy, education, funding, society, environment, markets etc)

Whilst discussions of these questions began immediately in the morning session to broaden the horizon of future possible directions, a selection of “seed” ideas or possible projects that were a priori selected as being potential key research directions were also considered. The opportunities to think more broadly about possible research directions for the final two and half years of the project and also consideration of ideas already identified as of interest, gave everyone the chance to give their opinion on what could or could not feasibly be achieved given the available remaining time and resource. From a personal perspective, I think this gave everyone a real sense of ownership of the future direction of the research and certainly helped to gauge the relative importance of the different tasks identified by researchers from wholly different backgrounds. Subsequently this session allowed researchers to consider new ideas and areas based on the knowledge gained during the first half of the program. The breadth of ideas was enormous, ranging from the need for autonomous analytics for infrastructure planning, provision, monitoring and recovery to the need for new systems to manage the proposed integration of unmanned aerial vehicles within commercially used airspace in the United States, currently being considered by FAA.

Whilst the majority of the second day was spent considering the future direction of program, the afternoon session gave an opportunity for those involved to take stock of the success of the mechanisms employed for internal communication within the consortium. As the consortium is spread over many research centres and universities, effective communication between them and within the consortium is critical to ensuring objectives are achieved. The qualitative review considered the utility of using social media to facilitate communication both internally and externally, such as the use of Twitter and Skype for external dissemination and internal discussions, whilst also appraising the use of the ITRC intranet for collaborative working, and assessing the state of the external facing ITRC website.

With Tuesday giving plenty of opportunity to widen the research agenda and look at possible future research directions that the consortium could move in to, as well as assessing what tasks are to be achieved within the remaining two and half years of the project, Wednesday’s agenda focussed on narrowing this scope. A series of research themes had been identified from Tuesday’s discussions, and researchers were invited to select a theme upon which to discuss what the key areas of interest within that theme might be. However, not only were ideas generated, but challenges to achieving success in these areas were also highlighted, to give an impression of the relative difficulty of each theme. The results of many of the discussions held on day two and three have certainly helped the principal and co-investigators of the program to coordinate what tasks and objectives are to be achieved within the final years of the program.

Overall the assembly and mid-term Review offered everyone involved in the program to take stock of the achievements to date, whilst recognising the significant challenges that lay ahead when trying to deliver on a program which is trying to understand the complex nature of infrastructure, how it is operated, and it’s likely resilience to impending changes in demography, economy and climate.

The following table offers a summary of those people who were involved in the three day meeting:

As the ITRC programme progresses and approaches the mid-term review stage, in June and July of 2013, the of the work stream 1 (WS1) infrastructure capacity and demand modelling teams are beginning to produce outputs from their next round of modelling. Furthermore, the parallel development of spatial infrastructure networks as part of work stream 2 (WS2), is beginning to raise some significant challenges in terms of appropriate and effective data dissemination, communication and interpretation. The underlying high-dimensionality nature of the data being produced as part of WS1 for example, coupled with the complexity of the networks generated as part of WS2 means the consortium as a whole needs to begin to think about appropriate mechanisms to visualise these data.  For example, some initial prototypes of possible visualisation tools are beginning to be developed, (see here), but rather than build and design tools from the perspective of one researcher, it was considered more appropriate to consult with, other similar projects who are visualising similar data, or will require the ability to visualise similar data in similar ways to that required of ITRC, and also a host of visualisation and design experts from around the UK to gain better perspectives.

An initial workshop, organised by ITRC members, Dr Alex Otto (ITRC WS1 investigator), Dr Greg McInerny (Senior Research Fellow, University of Oxford), Mr David Alderson (Researcher in GeoInformatics, Newcastle University), Dr Stuart Barr (Senior Lecturer in Geographic Information Science, Newcastle University) and Miriam Mendes (ITRC Programme Manager, University of Oxford), sought to bring together relevant researchers from the plethora of Adaptation and Resilience in a Changing Climate (ARCC) network projects and leading researchers and experts in the field of data visualisation and design. Prior to the workshop, a questionnaire was distributed to both the invited ARCC project representatives and the visualisation experts in an attempt to give the organising team a better centralised perspective of what the respective groups would want to hope to gain by attending the workshop. The responses were then studied to tease out any overlaps between visualisation challenges faced across the ARCC projects, to attempt to collate a set of discussion points upon which to focus discussions in the afternoon of the workshop. Prior to these more focussed discussion sessions, the workshop initially allowed the ARCC project representatives to briefly (in 5 minutes or less) explain the nature of the project in which they are working, but also describe and explain some of the visualisation challenges being faced within that project. The aim of this early session was to allow the visualisation experts time to understand the background of the projects themselves, and also the nature of some of the data being produced, such that the more focussed discussions taking place in the afternoon had a little context.

From the responses to the questionnaire, and also following the morning’s ARCC project overview session, a series of 5 discussion topics were devised, that attempted to encapsulate the common visualisation challenges across all the projects, and are listed below.

• Visualising multiple dimensions and scenarios;
  • Chair: Martino Tran (ITRC – University of Oxford)
  • Rapporteur: Craig Mills (Visualisation – UN)
• The spatial dynamics of infrastructure networks;
  • Chair: Scott Thacker (ITRC – University of Oxford)
  • Rapporteur: Martin Austwick (Visualisation – UCL)
• Temporal visualisation of infrastructure behaviour and response;
  • Chair: Sean Wilkinson (RESNET – Newcastle University)
  • Rapporteur: Min Chen (Visualisation – University of Oxford)
• Simplifying and communicating effectively complex model outputs;
  • Chair: Jason Dykes (Visualisation – City University, London)
  • Rapporteur: Scott Kelly (ITRC – Cambridge University)
• Multi-disciplinary co-production for infrastructure visualisation.
  • Chair: Simon Blainey (ITRC – University of Southampton)
  • Rapporteur: Jane Lewis (Reading e-Science Centre, University of Reading)

A chair and rapporteur, selected from the list of workshop attendees was devised such that each topic had a representative from the ARCC network, and from the visualisation community. Each topic was then discussed by attendees for about 10 minutes, with the chairs and rapporteurs capturing the salient points discussed around that particular topic. After 10 minutes of discussion the attendees subsequently moved on to the next discussion topic and a different table. Overall as a format for delivering break out sessions, this quick-fire, round-robin approach seemed to work well, allowing all attendees to discuss all the common discussion topics about visualisation, whilst at the same time having the discussions steered and reported by representation from both sides. The approach also seemed to help stimulate discussions between project representatives and visualisation experts, which was one of the objectives or organising and delivering the workshop. However further work is currently being undertaken to transform some of the excellent discussions in to a positioning paper with respect to visualising high dimensionality data for infrastructure planning and provision purposes. It is hoped that representatives from the projects, particularly those organising the workshop and on the ITRC side will be looking to further engage and collaborate with the visualisation community.  Watch this space…

Links to presentations split by those relevant to different communities are listed below:

• ARCC Projects presentations and speakers listed below
  • RESNET – Sean Wilkinson
  • Step-change – Miles Tight
  • Undermining Infrastructure – Jonathan Busch
  • Land of the MUSCos – Christof Knoeri
  • All-in-One – Tomasz Janus
  • Transforming Utilities’ Conversion Points – Liz Varga
  • ITRC – Alex Otto

• Visualisation / Designers presentations and speakers listed below:
  • Greg McInerny – Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford – Presentation
  • Min Chen – Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford – Presentation
  • Craig Mills – United Nations Environment Center – Presentation
  • Jane Lewis – Reading E-Science Centre, Reading University – Presentation
  • Jason Dykes – School of Informatics, City University London – Presentation

Full Attendee List

ARCC Project-affiliated attendees (* speaker on visualisation challenges)

Visualisation / Design Experts (presentations and speakers listed below):

Other invited attendees: