Andrew Hudson-Smith

• BSc, MSc, PhD, FRSA
• Managing Director at University College London

Purpose: In recent years, OpenGLAM and the broader open license movement have been gaining momentum in the cultural heritage sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine OpenGLAM from the perspective of end users, identifying barriers for commercial and non-commercial reuse of openly licensed art images. Design/methodology/approach: Following...

The paper describes a ‘work in progress’ to develop a system to enable users to engage with the historical and environmental story behind veteran trees in Hampstead Heath in the spirit of the Internet of Things. Unlike other ‘Internet of Trees’ projects, this study focuses on story telling rather than sensor networks. Building on previous work, con...

Although studies have demonstrated that OpenGLAM provides numerous benefits to participant institutions, such as the dissemination of collections and increased sponsorship opportunities (Kapsalis, 2016; Kelly, 2013), the movement’s adoption remains limited. For museums and galleries, the fear of losing image fees, poses as one of the main barriers...

The paper describes a ‘work in progress’ to develop a system to enable users to engage with the historical and environmental story behind veteran trees in Hampstead Heath in the spirit of the Internet of Things. Unlike other ‘Internet of Trees’ projects, this study focuses on story telling rather than sensor networks. Building on previous work, con...

Ever since the Rijksmuseum pioneered the OpenGLAM movement in 2011, releasing to the public domain images of artworks in its collection, several other museums have followed its lead, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Finnish National Gallery. Although studies have demonstrated that OpenGLAM provides numerous benefits to museums, rang...

Digital documentation has become integral to the preservation, analysis and communication of historical sites. New platforms are now being developed that involve complex 3D models and allow the analysis of spatial data. These include procedural modelling, a technique that enables the rapid development of ‘dynamic’ 3D environments, and generation of...

Virtual reality technology based corporates have been developing user-driven open markets for over a decade. The most noticeable initial player was Linden Lab, the service provider of Second Life that launched its metaverse world in 2003. The main features of the service were collaborative VR creation interfaces, individual asset management systems...

In the last decade significant resources have been invested for the digitisation of the collections of a large number of museums and galleries worldwide. In Europe alone, 10 million EUR is annually invested in Europeana (Europeana 2014). However, as we gradually move on from “the start-up phase” of digitisation (Hughes 2004), revenue generation and...

Privacy issues can be difficult for end-users to understand and are therefore a key concern for information-sharing systems. This paper describes a deployment of fifteen Bluetooth-beacon-enabled 'creatures' spread across London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which initiate conversations on mobile phones in their vicinity via push notifications. Pl...

The promise of IoT technologies is such that they represent as big a social and economic change as the invention of the Internet itself. From the way people consume media in their homes to structural changes in global employment through improved automation, IoT has the potential to touch all aspects of peoples everyday lives at domestic, national,...

Soft artificial intelligence (AI) is defined as non-sentient AI designed to perform close to human level in one specific domain. This is in contrast to “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) which solves the problem for human level intelligence across all domains. Soft AI is a reality now in the new generation of smart Internet of Things devices l...

The concept of Digital Twin is becoming increasingly popular with researchers and professionals in the AEC industries as a means of visualising, modelling and working with complex urban systems. This is achieved through the coupling of physical systems with comprehensive digital representations that automatically update to match the state of their...

Every day we find ourselves moving through a blend of material spaces and immaterial networks. This invisible layer created from the millions of the data streams and network connections that take place around us tends to get denser with the recent development and deployment of the IoT devices in the urban space. In our work we aim to explore how th...

This chapter introduces a range of analytics being used to understand the smart city, which depends on data that can primarily be understood using new kinds of scientific visualisation. We focus on short term routine functions that take place in cities which are being rapidly automated through various kinds of sensors, embedded into the physical fa...

We're in the middle of a data revolution that's providing new insights into cities, allowing us to better understand citizen expectations regarding "smart" buildings and cities. The articles in this special issue help explore what infrastructure is necessary to support smart environments, how citizens should interact with such environments, and how...

This paper discusses the use of procedural modeling for the development of flexible urban 3D models of urban areas and, by extension, historic stock. It suggests the potential contribution of digital tools in creating new, more accurate, ways of visualising and understanding the urban past, recording the present and informing the futures of cities....

In this paper we outline the methodological development of current research into urban community formations based on combinations of qualitative (volunteered) and quantitative (spatial analytical and geo-statistical) data. We outline a research design that addresses problems of data quality relating to credibility in volunteered geographic informat...

Interactions in the workplace have long been studied by the architectural research community, however, in the past, the majority of those contributions focused on single case studies. Drawing on a much larger empirical sample of 27 offices, this chapter aims at establishing a baseline of understanding how the physical structure of office buildings...

In this paper, we present how mobile electroencephalography, or mobile EEG, is becoming a relevant tool of urban studies, including among others, spatial cognition, architecture, urban design and planning. Mobile EEG is a research methodology that requires tightly controlled experiments and complicated analytical tools, but it is increasingly used...

Tyrell: Is this to be an empathy test? Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response? Fluctuation of the pupil. Involuntary dilation of the iris... Deckard: We call it Voight-Kampff for short. Design fiction is a broad term that occupies a space within the wider miscellany of speculative design approaches and is appearing as a nascent method f...

This paper explores the accessibility of the London Underground network. To do so, we visualize and analyse TfL Oyster Card and Disabled Freedom Pass Oyster card data. We compare census data of people with limited mobility with accessible station usage. We explore travel patterns and network load during a typical week. We propose a new Android app...

Charity badges and empathy (awareness) ribbons are common tokens of support for charities and other worthy causes. In this paper we revisit the concept of smart badges with the aim of developing digital equivalents of the charity badge/empathy ribbon. We describe the design of prototype low--cost digital empathy badges based around infra-red transc...

The collection, mining and analysis of social media are arguably one of the core examples of “big data” sets for the social sciences. The dynamic nature of the media makes it a new and emerging base for the analysis of human behaviour and brings new opportunities to understand groups, movements and society.Analysing the results of billions of conve...

Whilst empathy is considered an essential component of what it means to be human, it is frequently absent as a design objective when creating modern communication systems. This paper presents an approach to designing for, as opposed to with, empathy using the example of two design interventions to create embodied rituals reflecting prayers and worr...

This chapter introduces a range of analytics being used to understand the smart city, which depends on data that can primarily be understood using new kinds of scientific visualisation. We focus on short term routine functions that take place in cities which are being rapidly automated through various kinds of sensors, embedded into the physical fa...

Space Syntax research has shown how human behaviours in the workplace are shaped by spatial configuration; in turn, evidence-based design practices have highlighted ways in which this data can be used to inform tailor-made solutions in office design. Yet, existing research focuses on either single case studies or comparisons of a few cases on a sma...

The collection, mining and analysis of social media are arguably one of the core examples of “big data” sets for the social sciences. The dynamic nature of the media makes it a new and emerging base for the analysis of human behaviour and brings new opportunities to understand groups, movements and society. Analysing the results of billions of conv...

Whilst empathy is considered an essential component of what makes us human, it is arguably absent as a specific design element when creating modern communications. As such, this paper presents an approach to designing for empathy. We consider how design interventions related to a personal ritual within a church community may be extended and augment...

Whilst empathy is considered an essential component of what makes us human, it is arguably absent as a specific design element when creating modern communications. As such, this paper presents an approach to designing for empathy. We consider how design interventions related to a personal ritual within a church community may be extended and augment...

During DIS 2014 Experience Night, conference attendees experienced a thought-provoking set of interactive systems, artworks, and techno-crafts. We selected interactive works that explore the reemergence of craft in the design of interactive systems, the role of craft in democratizing design, and the role of makers in interactive technology design....

the past two decades, the Web has evolved from a system aimed primarily towards data access to a medium that fosters information contribution and interaction within large, globally distributed communities. Just as the Web evolved, so too did Web-based GeoComputation (GC), which we refer to here as the Geographic World Wide Web or the GeoWeb for sho...

Secondhand retail in the UK charity sector plays a number of important social and economic roles: charity shops are community focal points; money is generated for good causes; and goods are re-circulated that might otherwise be discarded as abject and unwanted. However, like much of the UK high street, the prosperity of charity shops is under signi...

An oft-cited criticism of our increasingly online world is that text based communications still dominate, offering limited opportunity for the development of empathy between users and possibly encouraging more critical and confrontational interactions. Whilst there are a wide range of design methods that enable designers to develop empathy for the...

Data, its collection and analysis is central to our understanding of place and space. The city is becoming a series of sensors, providing streams of information relating to its occupants' movements and use of space. These data streams, largely via the rise in the Internet of Things and social networks, are changing the way we view the city. At the...

Trend report about the use of Internet of Things technologies in Retail

The first Digital Personhood Network Meeting took place on the 6th & 7th of March 2014 with keynote presentations from Research Council staff, Professor Chris Hankin and Laura Hood from The Conversation, as well as updates on the five Digital Personhood sandpit projects. The sandpit projects cover a diverse range of Digital Personhood aspects, from...

The first Digital Personhood Network Meeting took place on the 6th & 7th of March 2014 with keynote presentations from Research Council staff, Professor Chris Hankin and Laura Hood from The Conversation, as well as updates on the five Digital Personhood sandpit projects. This document contains the feedback from the impact activities breakout sessi...

The proliferation of social media and software, such as building information modelling (BIM), has led to an unprecedented accumulation of data in the last few years, which can be tracked, tagged and scanned.With it, buildings and cities have been transformed into portals for information. Andrew Hudson-Smith, Director at the Centre for Advanced Spat...

In this chapter, we begin by surveying the development of computer graphics as it has influenced the development of the spatial representation of social and economic data, charting the history of computer cartography and geographic information systems (GIS) which have broadened into a wide array of forms for scientific visualisation. With the adven...

The interdisciplinary Tales of Things and electronic Memory (TOTeM) project investigates new contexts for augmenting things with stories in the emerging culture of the Internet of Things (IoT). Tales of Things is a tagging system which, based on two-dimensional barcodes (also called Quick Response or QR codes) and Radio Frequency Identification (RF...

As IoT (Internet of Things) technologies and infrastructures become more mature, opportunities for engagement with representations of digital object memories (DOM) in the real world increase. Digital object memories can provide added value and pave the way for new consumer-oriented IoT products and services. However, our research experience of empl...

For a long time, the second-hand retail market was the preserve of the charity shop. However, the advent of services like eBay has massively increased its prominence. In this paper we describe a novel Internet of Things-based approach to enhancing the second-hand retail experience by augmenting items with their provenance. After a discussion of the...

Emergent Internet of Things (IoT) based technologies offer the potential for new ways in engaging with places, spaces and objects. The use of mobile and tablet computing linked specifically to objects and memory, comment and narrative creation opens up a potentially game-changing methodology in user interaction above and beyond the traditional 'kio...

Many situations exist that require virtual crowds to be modelled via computer simulations on varying scales. Such simulations often have conflicting goals; the need for large and complex worlds with rich behaviours in agents, but at the same time, the need for fast performance provided by simpler agents with reasonable crowd authoring. Our goal in...

In recent years, public engagement is increasingly viewed as more than an ‘additional extra’ in academia. In the UK, it is becoming more common for research projects to embrace public engagement with the belief that it informs research, enhances teaching and learning, and increases research impact on society. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly...

In this position paper we provide an overview of the Tales of Things and Electronic Memory (TOTeM) project - an 'Internet of Things' initiative concerned with the memory and value of everyday objects. Tales of Things provides a platform for any object, with a focus on old objects, to be augmented with information about its history and people's inte...

There is a growing interest in relating agent-based models to real-world locations by combining them with geographical information systems (GIS) which can be seen with the increase of geosimulation models in recent years. This coincides with the proliferation of digital data both in the two and three dimensions allowing one to construct detailed an...

For many scientific disciplines, the continued progression of information technology has increased the availability of data, computation and analytical methodologies including simulation and visualisation. Geographical information science is no exception. In this article, we investigate the possibilities for deployment of e-infrastructures to infor...

There is a growing interest in relating agent-based models to real-world locations by combining them with geographical information systems (GIS) which can be seen with the increase of geosimulation models in recent years. This coincides with the proliferation of digital data both in the two and three dimensions allowing one to construct detailed an...

The term 'mash-up' refers to websites that weave data from different sources into new Web services. The key to a successful Web service is to gather and use large datasets and harness the scale of the Internet through what is known as network effects. This means that data sources are just as important as the software that 'mashes' them, and one of...

Applications of simulation modelling in social science domains are varied and increasingly widespread. The effective deployment of simulation models depends on access to diverse datasets, the use of analysis capabilities, the ability to visualize model outcomes and to capture, share and re-use simulations as evidence in research and policy-making....

This short paper reflects upon the temporal characteristics of the emerging phenomenon known as the Internet of Things. As objects become individually tagged with unique identities through the addition of small electronic chips or bar codes, their history is recorded and made available to others across a network. The advent of this ever-growing cat...

Mashups, composed of mixing different types of software and data, first appeared in 2004 and ‘map mashups’ quickly became the most popular forms of this software blending. This heralded a new kind of geography called ‘Neogeography’ in which non-expert users were able to exploit the power of maps without requiring the expertise traditionally associa...

Connections In Small Pieces Loosely Joined, David Weinberger identifies some of the obvious changes which the Web has brought to human relations. Social connections, he argues, used to be exclusively defined and constrained by the physics and physicality of the “real” world, or by geographical and material facts: it’s … true that we generally have...

New web technologies and task specific software packages and services are fundamentally changing the way we share, collect, visualise, communicate and distribute geographic information. Coupled with these new technologies is the emergence of rich fine scale and extensive geographical datasets of the built environment. Such technologies and data are...

The authors describe how we are harnessing the power of web 2.0 technologies to create new approaches to collecting, mapping, and sharing geocoded data. The authors begin with GMapCreator that lets users fashion new maps using Google Maps as a base. The authors then describe MapTube that enables users to archive maps and demonstrate how it can be u...

Urban models can be seen on a continuum between iconic and symbolic. Generally speaking, iconic models are physical versions of the real world at some scaled down representation, while symbolic models represent the system in terms of the way they function replacing the physical or material system by some logical and/or mathematical formulae. Tradit...

In 1995 technology analyst Gartner [1] developed a hype cycle model for the adoption of technology. The cycle comprises five stages from the initial technology trigger through to a final plateau of productivity along a with a peak of inflated expectations, a tough of disillusionment and the slope of enlightenment. The hype cycle is notable techniqu...

The applications of simulation modelling in social science domains are varied and increasingly widespread. The effective deployment of simulation models depends on access to diverse data sets, the use of analysis capabilities, the ability to visualise model outcomes, and to capture, share and re- use simulations as evidence in research and policy-m...

In this article, we explore the concepts and applications of Web 2.0 through the new media of NeoGeography and its impact on how we collect, interact and search for spatial information. We argue that location and space are becoming increasingly important in the information technology revolution. To this end, we present a series of software tools wh...