Neil Ireson
Interests
My research interests can broadly be defined as knowledge acquisition from data. This has primarily focused on the use of Machine Learning, initially applied in the field of Natural Language Processing, developing techniques for Text Classification and Information Extraction from large-scale text repositories and Collective Intelligence from social media messages.
More recent work has focused on the understanding of individual and population movements. Modelling air-travel data, to identify mobility patterns indicative of criminal activity, such as drug and human trafficking; and using mobile device sensor data to understand how contextual factors (e.g., weather, journey purpose) influence mobility, for health and well-being.
This work is carried out within the Pervasive Computing Group at Sheffield University, under the direction of Dr Vita Lanfranchi.
Workshop/Conference Deadlines
Projects
Current
Investigating the social and environmental contexts of habitual walking ACTIVities in older adult DYADs: A feasibility study (The ActivDyad study)
This study aims to explore how feasible and acceptable it is to use digital technology to continuously assess physical activity in older adult couples, and to identify key social and environmental factors which influence physical activity through a range of questionnaires, digital technology (i.e. activity monitors, GPS) and an activity diary kept over one week.
Transforming Parkinson's disease clinical management with integrated digital health technologies
COVID-19 has reinforced the need for tools for remote patient management; ultimately these tools will transform future clinical care and research. Wearable technology (e.g. body worn devices, smartwatches) has the potential to address this need. In Parkinson’s (PD), motor symptoms (e.g. balance and mobility problems) are disabling and can be improved with medication (e.g. Levodopa). Levodopa is prescribed in multiple doses over the course of a day and therefore timing is critical for alleviating symptoms. Medication response can be highly variable across people with PD leading to fluctuating symptoms over the course of the day, compromising mobility and quality of life. Adhering to a complex medication regime is hard and understanding fluctuations in response to medication is almost impossible to evaluate through clinic visits, recall and diaries. Understanding medication adherence and its effect on motor function during everyday life would ensure effective patient management, by allowing clinicians to use this information to adapt medication regimes (dose and frequency) to provide optimal treatment. This project aims to collect data, over a week, with a wearable multi-component “system” for remote monitoring which uses mobility data obtained from the individual to improve management and optimise treatment effects in people with PD.
TENACITy
Travel intelligence provides an overview of passenger flows at the global level, exploiting data from a large variety of sources. However, the intelligence gained is not sufficient in several cases to fight terrorism or other forms of serious crime, due to limited or manual processes, reduced interaction among responsible authorities, etc. TENACITy envisions to address this challenge by providing game changing innovative technologies in travel data utilization, to achieve effective crime prevention, resulting in a world where criminals and terrorists are apprehended using new technologies and where victims are protected, establishing the travel security concept as a key enabler to the border management reform.
Mobilise-D
Connecting digital mobility assessment to clinical outcomes for regulatory and clinical endorsement (Mobilise-D) brings together clinicians, scientists, prominent academic centres, businesses, and the world’s largest pharmaceutical and medical industries to revolutionise assessment of mobility loss using digital technology, leading to a game changer for clinical trials and clinical management of mobility. Imagine being able to monitor your mobility and health with the help of small sensors worn on your body, coupled with personalized algorithms – and to do this on a daily basis, without the need to see your physician or go to a clinic.
Previous
SETA
SETA is set to create a technology and methodology that will address the challenges above and change the way mobility is organised, monitored and planned in large metropolitan areas. The solution will be based on the management of high-volume, high-velocity, multi-dimensional, heterogeneous, cross-media, cross-sectoral data and information which is sensed, crowdsourced, acquired, linked, fused, and used to model mobility with a precision, granularity and dynamicity that is impossible with today’s technologies. Such models will be used to provide always-on, pervasive services to citizens and business, as well as decision makers to support safe, sustainable, effective, efficient and resilient mobility. Differently from other initiatives that tend to focus only on transport optimisation in the inner city, we will focus on intelligent and sustainable mobility in entire metropolitan areas. A metropolitan area is a geographical and socio-economic region consisting of a densely populated urban core (the city) and its surrounding region, i.e. the counties that refer to the city as place of work or entertainment - an area that can be a hundred times bigger than the inner city. Intelligent and sustainable mobility encompasses the smarter, greener and more efficient movement of people and goods; it provides a radical change from transport as a series of separate modal journeys to an integrated, reactive, intelligent, mobility system.
FootballWhispers
Football Whispers is a new global football digital platform has launched as the world’s first transfer predictor, giving football fans around the world the inside track on player movements. The first of its kind, Football Whispers uses a complex algorithm that can predict the likelihood of multi-million-pound football transfers taking place. Rumoured football transfers are given a Football Whispers ‘Unique Index Score’ on a scale of 1 to 5 as an indication of how likely a transfer is to happen - the higher the number calculated the more likely the player is to move clubs. Using multiple data points, the algorithm looks at the volume of conversation (chatter), the authority of the sources and the recency of the story, as well as a host of other factors. The technology behind the platform is been developed in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science's Organisations, Information and Knowledge (OAK) research group and Klood Digital.
WeSenseIt
In order to harness environmental data and knowledge to effectively and efficiently manage water resources, WeSenseIt, will propose to develop ;a citizen observatory of water,which will allow citizens and communities to take on a new role in the information chain: a shift from the traditional one-way communication paradigm towards a two-way communication model in which citizens become active stakeholders in information capturing, evaluation and communication.
ReDites
Real Time, Detection, Tracking, Monitoring and Interpretation of Events in Social Media
RAnDMS
Realtime Analysis of Digital Media Streams
TRIDS
Tracking Realtime Intelligence in Data Streams
EIDC
Energy Initiatives in Deprived Communities
WeKnowIt
The main objective of WeKnowIt is to develop novel techniques for exploiting multiple layers of intelligence from user-contributed content, which together constitute Collective Intelligence, a form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition among many individuals, and that seem ingly has a mind of its own.
MultiMatch
On the web, cultural heritage content is everywhere, in traditional environments such as libraries, museums, galleries and audiovisual archives, but also in popular magazines and newspapers, in multiple languages and multiple media. The aim of the MultiMATCH project is to enable users to explore and interact with online accessible cultural heritage content, across media types and languages boundaries.
Environment Agency
Examining the use of NLP techniques to facilitate the Environment Agency's Horizon Scanning Process.
AKT Project
In accordance with the need to understand the process of knowledge use, the programme of AKT is based around six challenges to ease fundamental bottlenecks in the engineering and management of knowledge. Each of these bottlenecks occurs at a vital stage in the evolution of knowledge; Acquisition, Modelling, Reuse, Retrieval, Publishing and Maintenance. My work focused on the use of Machine Learning in Information Extraction for Knowledge Acquisition.
POESIA project
POESIA seeks to develop, test, evaluate and promote a fully open-source, and extensible, state of the art, filtering and catching software solution. POESIA will filter harmful content in several channels (Web, Email, News) combining innovative technologies to achieve more effective filtering than existing products. Filtering will cover a range of modes, including image filtering, natural language text filtering, URL, PICs and JavaScript filtering. The filter will initially be deployed in English, Italian and Spanish. To cover other European languages additional work is required and should be effectively possible because of the open-source model and the portability of the technical solutions.
Publications
2022
- Marcianò, V., S. Bertuletti, T. Bonci, C. Mazzà, N. Ireson, F. Ciravegna, S. Del Din, E. Gazit, and A. Cereatti. (2022) >A deep learning model to discern indoor from outdoor environments based on data recorded by a tri-axial digital magnetic sensor. Gait & Posture 97
- A Bevilacqua, L Alcock, B Caulfield, E Gazit, C Hansen, N Ireson, G Ifrim (2022) Automated Mobility Context Detection with Inertial Signals. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.08409
2021
- C Mazzà, L Alcock, K Aminian, C Becker, S Bertuletti, T Bonci, P Brown, et al. (2021) Technical validation of real-world monitoring of gait: a multicentric observational study. BMJ open 11 (12), e050785
2019
- F Ciravegna, J Gao, N Ireson, R Copeland, J Walsh, V Lanfranchi (2019) Active 10: Brisk walking to support regular physical activity. Proceedings of the 13th EAI International Conference on pervasive computing
2018
- Ciravegna F, Gao J, Ingram C, Ireson N, Lanfranchi V & Simanjuntak H (2018) Mapping Mobility to Support Crisis Management. Kees Boersma and Brian Tomaszewski, eds. Proceedings of the 15th ISCRAM Conference. Rochester, NY, USA, 20 May 2018 - 23 May 2018
- Mazumdar, S., Wrigley, S. N., Ireson, N., & Ciravegna, F. (2018). Harnessing location-based services for effective citizen observatories. International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, 13, 101-108.
2017
- Football Whispers: Transfer Rumour Detection. Neil Ireson and Fabio Ciravegna. International Semantic Web Conference 2017
2016
- Communicating with Citizens on the Ground: A Practical Study. Mazumdar, S., Ciravegna, F., Ireson, N., Read, J., Simpson, E., & Cudd, P. (2016). International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (IJISCRAM), 8(2), 50-69.
- Citizens Observatories for Effective Earth Observations: the WeSenseIt Approach. Suvodeep Mazumdar, Vita Lanfranchi, Neil Ireson, Stuart Wrigley, Clara Bagnasco, Uta Wehn, Rosalind McDonagh, Michele Ferri, Simon McCarthy, Hendrik Huwald, Fabio Ciravegna. Environmental SCIENTIST Journal. 2016
- Seeing through the Eyes of the Citizens during Emergencies. F. Ciravegna, S. Mazumdar, S.N. Wrigley, N. Ireson and P. Cudd. 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), May, Rio, Brazil.
- Decision Graphs: Managing Decisions for Emergencies. S. Mazumdar, N. Ireson, F. Ciravegna. Poster. 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), May, Rio, Brazil
- Understanding the barriers between citizens and authorities in environmental monitoring. F. Ciravegna, S. Mazumdar, N. Ireson, P. Cudd. 1st European Citizen Science Conference (ECSA), May, Berlin, Germany
- Citizens Observatories for Effective Earth Observations: the WeSenseIt approach. S. Mazumdar, N. Ireson, F. Ciravegna. 1st European Citizen Science Conference (ECSA), May, Berlin, Germany
- Geofence-driven Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science. S. Mazumdar, N. Ireson, F. Ciravegna. 1st European Citizen Science Conference (ECSA), May, Berlin, Germany
- Seeing through the eyes of citizens: an application for Occupational Therapists. F. Ciravegna, S.Mazumdar, N. Ireson. Insigneo Showcase Event 2016, Sheffield, UK
- Engaging Citizens and Communities for Emergencies. S. Mazumdar, S. Wrigley, N. Ireson, F. Ciravegna. International Conference on Citizen Observatories for Water Management (COWM), Venice, 7-9 June 2016
- Citizens Observatories for Earth Observations: the WeSenseIt approach. S. Mazumdar, N. Ireson, F. Ciravegna, 10th Geo European Projects Workshop – Citizens’ Observatories for environmental policy monitoring and development, Berlin, June 2016
2015
- Ireson Neil; Lanfranchi, Vitaveska; Mazumdar Suvodeep; Ciravegna Fabio
TRIDS: Real-time Incident Monitoring with Social Media
Proceedings of Semantics and Analytics for Emergency Response (SAFE) workshop at ISCRAM, 2015 - Suvodeep Mazumdar, Stuart N. Wrigley, Neil Ireson, Fabio Ciravegna
Geo-fence driven crowd-sourcing for Emergencies
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2015): 24-27 May, Kristiansand, Norway. 2015. - Supplementing remote sensing using geofenced crowdsourcing for improved situation awareness. S.N. Wrigley, S. Mazumdar, N. Ireson and F. Ciravegna. Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society (RSPSoc), National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO), Centre for Earth Observation Instrumentation and Space Technology (CEOI-ST) Joint Annual Conference 2015, 8-11 September, Southampton, UK.
2014
- Osborne, Miles, Sean Moran, Richard McCreadie, Alexander Von Lunen, Martin D. Sykora, Elizabeth Cano, Neil Ireson et al.
Real-time detection, tracking, and monitoring of automatically discovered events in social media.
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, 23rd-24th June 2014, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 37-42. - Lanfranchi, Vitaveska, Neil Ireson, Uta When, Stuart N. Wrigley, and Fabio Ciravegna.
Citizens’ observatories for situation awareness in flooding
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2014): 18-21 May 2014, pp. 145-154. 2014. - Mazumdar, Suvodeep; Lanfranchi, Vitaveska; Ireson, Neil; Ciravegna, Fabio
Visual Analysis of Real-time Social Media for Emergency Response
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Social Media and Linked Data for Emergency Response (SMILE 2014), Extended Semantic Web Conference 2014. Heraklion, Crete, 2014
2012
- Simon Tucker, Vita Lanfranchi, Neil Ireson, Gregoire Burel, Alfonso Sosa & Fabio Ciravegna
Straight to the Information I Need
Published in the 9th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2012), April 22-25, 2012, Vancouver, Canada
bibtex
2011
- Gentile, A.L., Cano, A.E., Dadzie, A.-S., Lanfranchi, V., Ireson, N.
Does Size Matter? When Small is Good Enough,
Published in the ESWC 2011 Workshop on Making Sense of Microposts (#MSM2011), pp.45-56.
2010
- Neil Ireson & Fabio Ciravegna
Toponym Resolution in Social Media
Published in the 9th International Semantic Web Conference, November 7-11, 2010, Shanghai, China.
bibtex
The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com - Symeon Papadopoulos, Ansgar Scherp, Neil Ireson, Ioannis Tsampoulatidis & Yiannis Kompatsiaris
Using Event Representation and Semantic Enrichment for Managing and Reviewing Emergency Incident Logs
Published in 2nd ACM International Workshop on Events in MultiMedia.
bibtex
- Neil Ireson & Gregoire Burel
Knowledge Sharing in eCollaboration.
Published in Proceedings of eGovernment Conference 2010, Lausanne, Switzerland, Aug 29 - Sep 2.
EGOV 2010, LNCS 6228, pp. 351–362, 2010.
bibtex
The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com
2009
- Clough, P., Ireson, N., & Marlow, J.
Extending Domain-Specific Resources to Enable Semantic Access to Cultural Heritage Data.
Journal Of Digital Information, 10(6), 2009.
bibtex - Vita Lanfranchi and Neil Ireson
User Requirements for a Collective Intelligence Emergency Response System.
The 23rd BCS conference on Human Computer Interaction
bibtex - Neil Ireson
Local Community Situation Awareness During an Emergency.
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE-DEST 2009)
bibtex - Alberto Lavelli, Mary Elaine Califf, Fabio Ciravegna, Dayne Freitag, Claudio Giuliano, Nick Kushmerick, Lorenza Romano, Neil Ireson
Evaluation of Machine Learning-based Information Extraction Algorithms: Criticisms and recommendations.
Language Resources and Evaluation, 42(4):361--393, 2009.
bibtex - Ansgar Scherp, Felix Schwagereit and Neil Ireson
Web 2.0 and Traditional Knowledge Management Processes.
KSM2009 1st Workshop on Knowledge Services & Mashups, at
5th Conference Professional Knowledge Management, 25-27 March 2009, Solothurn.
bibtex - A. Scherp, F. Schwagereit, N. Ireson, V. Lanfranchi, S. Papadopoulos, A. Kritikos, Y. Kompatsiaris, P. Smrz;
Leveraging Web 2.0 Communities in Professional Organisations.
W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, 15-16 January 2009, Barcelona.
bibtex
2008
- P. Clough, J. Marlow and N. Ireson
Enabling Semantic Access to Cultural Heritage: A Case Study of Tate Online.
Information Access to Cultural Heritage. ECDL 2008 Workshop, Aarhus Denmark, 18 September 2008
bibtex - Marlow, J., Clough, P., Ireson, N., Cigarrán Recuero, J., Artiles, J. and Debole, F.
The MultiMatch Project: Multilingual/Multimedia Access to Cultural Heritage on the Web
Museums on the Web Conference (MW2008): Proceedings, J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds). Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. 2008.
pdf without figures
bibtex
2007
- Ireson, N., Oomen, J. Capturing e-Culture: Metadata in MultiMatch DELOS-MultiMatch workshop, February 2007, Tirrenia, Italy
2006
- J. Iria, N. Ireson and F. Ciravegna
An Experimental Study on Boundary Classification Algorithms for Information Extraction using SVM.
EACL 2006 Workshop on Adaptive Text Extraction and Mining (ATEM 2006) 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics,
April 2006.
bibtex
2005
- Neil Ireson, Fabio Ciravegna, Marie Elaine Califf, Dayne Freitag, Nicholas Kushmerick and Alberto Lavelli
Evaluating Machine Learning for Information Extraction,
In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2005),
(Bonn, Germany, 7-11 August, 2005), vol. 119. ACM, New York, NY, 345-352.
bibtex - Neil Ireson and Fabio Ciravegna
Pascal Challenge: The evaluation of machine learning for information extraction.
Dagstuhl workshop on Learning for the Semantic Web
13-18 February 2005, Dagstuhl, Germany.
bibtex
2004
- Hepple M, Ireson N, Allegrini P, Marchi S, Montemagni S & Gomez Hidalgo JM
NLP-enhanced Content Filtering within the POESIA Project.,
LREC 2004.
bibtex
2001
- Cao YJ, Ireson N, Bull L & Miles R:
An Evolutionary Intelligent Agents Approach to Traffic Signal Control.
International Journal of Knowledge-based Intelligent Engineering Systems
5(4):279-289, 2001
bibtex
2000
- Ireson N, Cao YJ, Bull L & Miles R:
A Communication Architecture for Multi-Agent Learning Systems.
In S Cagnoni, et al. Real-World Applications of Evolutionary Computing: Proceedings of the EvoNet Workshops, 2000.
bibtex - Cao YJ, Ireson N, Bull L & Miles R:
Distributed Learning Control of Traffic Signals.
In S Cagnoni, et al. Real-World Applications of Evolutionary Computing: Proceedings of the EvoNet Workshops, 2000.
bibtex
pre 2000
- Cao YJ, Ireson N, Bull L & Miles R:
Design of a Traffic Junction Controller using Classifier System and Fuzzy Logic.
In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Computational Intelligence Theory and Applications, 1999.
bibtex - Ireson N & Fogarty TC: Evolving decision support models for credit control. In Biethahn, J and Nissen V, Evolutionary Algorithms in Management Applications: 264-276, 1995
- Fogarty TC, Ireson N & Bull L: Genetics based machine learning - applications in industry and commerce. In Rayward-Smith VJ, Applications of Modern Heuristic Techniques: 91-110, 1994
- Fogarty TC & Ireson N: Evolving Bayesian classifiers for credit control; a comparison with other machine learning methods. IMA Journal of Mathematics Applied in Business and Industry 5:63-75, 1994
- Fogarty TC, Ireson N & Battle S: Developing rule-based systems for credit card applications from data with the genetic algorithm. IMA Journal of Mathematics Applied in Business and Industry 4(1):53-59, 1992
- Gammack JG, Fogarty TC, Battle S, Ireson N & Cui J: Human-centred decision support: the IDIOMS system, AI & Society 6:345-366, 1992
- Fogarty TC, Ireson N & Battle S: Combining attributes and categorising attribute values for a Bayesian classifier for credit control. IMA International Conference on Control: Modelling, Computation, Information, 1992
Contact
Neil Ireson
Department of Computer Science
University of
Sheffield
Regent Court
211 Portobello
Sheffield S1 4DP
UK
Phone: +44 (0)114 222 1876
Fax: +44 (0)114 278 1810