Feature: Facing the future
3 September 2007. By Ornella Garofalo.
These are just some of the questions that a series of multidisciplinary Wellcome Trust-funded projects, established in response to the Office of Science and Innovation's Foresight Cognitive Systems Project, are looking to answer.
In each of these four projects different research communities have come together to explore aspects of cognitive systems: natural or artificial information-processing systems, including those responsible for learning, decision-making and communication.
Professor Lars Chittka and colleagues at Queen Mary, University of London are using bumblebees to model complex decision-making in humans. The 'travelling salesman problem' - how a travelling salesman finds the best route between numerous places - is notoriously difficult to solve with computers. However, what can take a supercomputer a week to work out, bees manage with just 1 million neurons each time they forage for food.
So, researchers are using computer-controlled artificial flowers, video cameras and radio frequency identification tagging (the tracking system behind some travel cards, including the Oyster cards used in London) to see how bees learn the location of flowers and the best order to visit them in.
The researchers hope that their study will eventually enable people to find workable routes through complex logistical, transport and information networks - from busy roads to congested mobile phone networks.
Professor Tom Troscianko (University of Bristol) and Professor David Hogg (University of Leeds) are exploring ways to increase the effectiveness of control rooms that use closed-circuit television (CCTV).
Currently, there are models that can predict where people's eyes will move when they look at a particular scene. However, there is none dealing with how people view video, or how a person's task might affect where they look.
This three-year project will involve the study of CCTV operators in a simulated CCTV control room. Researchers will show operators previously unseen video sequences of UK urban streets. They will measure where on a bank of monitors the operators look, and will also note when the operators decide that an event is 'abnormal' or requires an intervention, such as calling the police.
The researchers will then use data on the operators' eye movements to 'teach' a computer system to distinguish between normal and abnormal events. In practice, most CCTV streams are not continuously monitored by operators, so this kind of automated system could be invaluable for alerting operators to the particular screens they should concentrate on at a given time.
Findings from this study could also be applied to other situations that require operators to show high concentration and so-called 'attentional switching', including air traffic control systems and power station control rooms.
Two further projects aim to expand our understanding of visual processing in the brain. Dr Joshua Solomon and Professor Michael Morgan (City University) aim to explore how so-called visual context can explain how we perceive simple objects. Dr George Mather (University of Sussex) is looking to develop a new model to explain how we process visual movement in the brain.
The four projects were supported by the Trust's Neuroscience and Mental Health funding stream, in response to a highlight notice set up three years ago. They were funded in partnership - a first of its kind - with the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council.
It is hoped that these awards will pave the way for joint funding of other unusual projects in the future.
