An Update to the Minho Quotation Resource

The Minho Quotation Resource was originally released in 2012. It provided approximately 500,000 quotes from business leaders, analysts and politicians that spanned the period from 2008 to 2012. The original resource had several failings which include a large number of missing job titles and affiliations as well as unnormalised job titles which produced a large variation in spellings and formats of the same employment position. Also, there were numerous duplicate posts. This update has standardised the job title text as well as the imputation of missing job titles and affiliations. Duplicate quotes have been deleted. This update also provides some metaphor and simile extraction as well as an emotion distribution of the quotes. This update has also replaced an antiquated version of Lucene index with a JSONL format as well as a rudimentary interface that can query the data supplied with the resource. It is hoped that this update will encourage the study of business communication in a time of a financial crisis.

A Virtual Testbed for Critical Incident Investigation with Autonomous Remote Aerial Vehicle Surveying, Artificial Intelligence, and Decision Support

Autonomous robotics and artificial intelligence techniques can be used to support human personnel in the event of critical incidents. These incidents can pose great danger to human life. Some examples of such assistance include: multi-robot surveying of the scene; collection of sensor data and scene imagery, real-time risk assessment and analysis; object identification and anomaly detection; and retrieval of relevant supporting documentation such as standard operating procedures (SOPs). These incidents, although often rare, can involve chemical, biological, radiological/nuclear or explosive (CBRNE) substances and can be of high consequence. Real-world training and deployment of these systems can be costly and sometimes not feasible. For this reason, we have developed a realistic 3D model of a CBRNE scenario to act as a testbed for an initial set of assisting AI tools that we have developed.

A Virtual Environment with Multi-Robot Navigation, Analytics, and Decision Support for Critical Incident Investigation

Accidents and attacks that involve chemical, biological, radiological/nuclear or explosive (CBRNE) substances are rare, but can be of high consequence. Since the investigation of such events is not anybody's routine work, a range of AI techniques can reduce investigators' cognitive load and support decision-making, including: planning the assessment of the scene; ongoing evaluation and updating of risks; control of autonomous vehicles for collecting images and sensor data; reviewing images/videos for items of interest; identification of anomalies; and retrieval of relevant documentation. Because of the rare and high-risk nature of these events, realistic simulations can support the development and evaluation of AI-based tools. We have developed realistic models of CBRNE scenarios and implemented an initial set of tools.