The University of Liverpool has been chosen to lead the UK element of an international research project focusing on using a specific high-performance technique called particle filtering.
Particle filtering was invented in the UK almost 25 years ago and is particularly useful when attempting to extract information from scenarios involving multiple data sources, each of which has a different latency, time-resolution and accuracy of time-stamping.
Such scenarios will be explored in the project in each of several contexts. One context involves combining data from GPs, hospitals, social media and a high street retailer to detect flu outbreaks. Another involves exploiting the fact that sound and light travel at different speeds to estimate the range of distant noisy objects.
The project is funded by DSTL and is aligned with the `Technical Cooperation Program’ (TTCP), an international agreement that faciliates inter-governmental collaboration related to defence for the UK, US, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand governments.
The University of Liverpool was selected to be part of the collaboration alongside Syracuse University (USA), University of West Virginia (USA), McMaster University (Canada) and University of Technology Sydney (Australia). This is the first time that TTCP nations have coordinated the funding of research in this way.
Simon Maskell, Professor of Autonomous Systems in the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science, who is leading the project, said: “This is an exciting time, for Liverpool, for the UK and for particle filtering. Particle filters are a technique that have, for some time, been able to offer tangible benefit in multiple applied domains. However, to be the ambassador for the technique on a world stage and to be funded explicitly to use the technique as part of inter-governmental collaboration is a real honour.”
