Projects

Current Research Projects

Twitter Project ... together with The Guardian: Twitter and the riots: how the news spread (published 8 Dec 2011)

Opinion Mining Tweets Rob Procter, Rachel Gibson, Andrew Chadwick (Royal Holloway), Sophia Ananiadou, Bill Black (NaCTeM), Andy Hudson-Smith, Steven Gray (UCL). methods@manchester: April 2011 – October 2011. The aim of this project is to explore the potential value to researchers of political behaviour of using text mining tools to extract the semantic content of twitter feeds, e.g. people, places, topics and opinions.

Exploiting a computer-based learning environment to meet training needs in mammography Rob Procter, Mark Hartswood. EPSRC KTA Secondment Scheme: February 2011 – October 2011. This project will demonstrate that the training technology we developed in the LEMI project can be integrated with existing commercial clinical environments and real clinical workflows. This is a necessary next step to commercial exploitation.

NeISS: National e–Infrastructure for Social Simulation Mark Birkin (Leeds), Rob Procter, Carole Goble, Iain Buchan, Paul Lambert (Stirling), Mike Batty, Andy Hudson-Smith (UCL), Dave De Roure (OeRC), Rob Allan (STFC), Neil Chue Hong (SSI). JISC: April 2009 – June 2012. Development of a production quality social simulation e-Infrastructure capable of being deployed in a variety of social research domains. The project will introduce social scientists to new ways of thinking about social problems, and provide new services, tools and research communities to support them.

3S - Developing Sustainability Pathways for Social Simulation Tools and Services Rob Procter, Mark Birkin (Leeds), Alex Voss (St Andrews). DSR/ESRC: October 2011 – March 2012. In collaboration with the NeISS project, the TALISMAN NCRM node and Doctoral Training Centres (DTC) White Rose and North West this project will look into sustainable technical and human infrastructure requirements to develop and evaluate a pilot module for a range of different social simulations.

National Centre for Text Mining Phase II Sophia Ananiadou, Rob Procter, John McNaught, Junichi Tsujii, Carole Goble, Douglas Kell. JISC: May 2008 – April 2012. NaCTeM provides text mining services in response to the requirements of the UK academic community.

Negotiating the Organizational and Policy Context for Successful Technology Adoption in the NHS Sue Llewellyn, Rob Procter, Gill Harvey. NIHR: October 2009 – October 2012. This project is a study of adoption processes and pathways for non-pharmaceutical technologies in the NHS. The aim is to achieve an in-depth understanding of barriers and enablers.

MiSS (MaDAM [Manchester Data Management] into Sustainable Service) Lorraine Beard (JRUL), Rob Procter, in collaboration with IT Services. JISC & University of Manchester: October 2011 – March 2013. MiSS will deliver a Research Data Management Infrastructure at the University of Manchester, including a Research Data Management Policy, together with a supporting Service and the necessary human infrastructure to provide for the Research Data Management needs across the institution. MiSS builds on the previous experience of the MaDAM project.

ATHENE Assistive Technologies for Healthy Living in Elders: Needs Assessment by Ethnography Trish Greenhalgh (QMUL), Rob Procter. Technology Strategy Board: June 2011 – May 2013. The ATHENE project is a partnership between universities, the NHS, the technology industry and the voluntary sector to develop better ways of designing and testing technologies for assisted living in older people.

Completed Research Projects

MaDAM Jan Wilkinson, Lorraine Beard, Chris Taylor, Rob Procter, Simon Hubbard, Alan Jackson. JISC: October 2009 – June 2011. The MaDAM project is capturing requirements and developing a pilot infrastructure as a first step in introducing a university-wide data management service for the University of Manchester. This encompasses data capture, data storage and data curation, and is designed to add value both to the full lifecycle of research projects and also by making data readily available for reuse. For its pilot the project is focusing on the working practices and needs of research groups in Life and Medical Sciences.

One VRE to Join Them All Tobias Schiebeck, Martin Turner, Rob Procter, Meik Poschen. JISC: April 2009 – March 2011. Using Portal Access Grid (PAG) to join VREs based on the JSR-168 standard in order to enable enhanced data and application sharing between communities that are already using separate VREs.

LEMI: A Distributed Intelligent Learning Environment for Mammographic Screening Rob Procter, in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh and UCL. EPSRC: June 2007 – November 2010. The aim of project is to deliver a working e-learning environment that radiologists in the NHS Breast Screening Programme can use, both as part of their initial training and for their continuing professional development. The research required to achieve this goal is, however, relevant to a much broader range of computer-based training tools.

EUAsiaGrid – Towards a common e-Science Infrastructure for the European and Asian Grids Alex Voss, Rob Procter, in collaboration with Marco Paganoni, Ludek Matyska, Yannick Legre, Rafael Saldana, Andrew Howard, Simon Lin, Peter Antonio Banzon, Royol Chitradon, Hing Yan Lee, Tran Van Lang, Basuki Suhardiman, Piyawut Srichaikul, Suhaimi Napis, Abdul Rahman, Ahmad Dahlan. EC: April 2008 – March 2010. Defining and implementing a policy to promote the gLite middleware developed in the EU EGEE project across Asian countries.

Use and Relevance of Web 2.0 Resources for Researchers Rob Procter, Robin Williams (University of Edinburgh). Research Information Network: December 2008 – December 2009. An investigation of the extent to which Web 2.0 tools represent useful means of communicating, sharing and disseminating research ideas and outputs for researchers across different disciplines, with a view to exploring implications for the future of scholarly communications.

e–Infrastructure for the Social Sciences Rob Procter, Peter Halfpenny, Rob Crouchley, Tom Rodden, Mike Batty, Mike Fraser, Mark Birkin, Bill Dutton, Pete Edwards. ESRC: January 2007 – December 2009. Building an e-Infrastructure, comprising advanced information and communication technology, to provide integrated access to resources for social science research, including datasets, tools, services and user environments.

eUptake: Barriers to the take-up of e-Infrastructure Services. Rob Procter, Peter Halfpenny, Alex Voss, in collaboration with Kings College, London and the National e-Science Centre. JISC: April 2007 – June 2009. The aim of this project was to address barriers to the wider adoption of e infrastructure.

eIUS: e-Infrastructure Use Cases and Service Usage Rob Procter, Peter Halfpenny, Alex Voss, in collaboration with Oxford University Computing Services. JISC: April 2007 – June 2009. The aim of the project was to articulate, through the publication of use cases and the contribution of domain and Service Usage Models (SUMs), how the research community across different disciplines are actually or planning to engage with e-infrastructure.

ADVISES: Adaptive Visualisation Tools for e-Science Collaboration Alistair Sutcliffe, Oscar deBriujn, Rob Procter, Jock McNaught, Iain Buchan. EPSRC: April 2006 – April 2009. This project is developing novel means of requirements capture, enabling adaptable collaborative visualisation environments to be constructed to match scientists’ tasks.

myExperiment: A Virtual Research Environment for Collaboration and Sharing of Experiments Carole Goble, Dave De Roure, Robert Stevens, Rob Procter. JISC: March 2007 – March 2009. The project developed myExperiment, a Virtual Research Environment which makes it easy for people to share experiments and discuss them.

CREW: Collaborative Research Events Pilot for National and Institutional VREs Martin Turner, Nikki Rogers, Rob Procter. JISC: March 2007 – March 2009. This project integrated Iugo and Memetic technologies to enable the capture of the scholarly collaboration that occurs at research events to create a lasting and rich research resource that is also valuable for training and awareness-raising in a variety of domains.

NeuroGrid. MRC: January 2005 – December 2007. The aim of this project was to enhance collaboration between clinical, imaging and e-Scientists to create a Grid-based network of neuroimaging centres and a neuroimaging toolkit.

AVROSS: Accelerating Transition to Virtual Research Organization in Social Science Rob Procter, in collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland, Empirica Gmbh, Bonn and National Opinion Research Centre, Chicago. EU: October 2006 – September 2007. The goal was to understand reasons behind the low level of adoption of e-Infrastructures in the social sciences to provide guidance on how e-Infrastructures may be better deployed and exploited, by the social sciences and humanities research communities.