This weeks Psst! : Michael Kriegel: Crowd-sourced Story Creation, Vallejo, Marta:Urban Growth: Effects on Urban Green Spaces and implications for pla

Thursday 17 Nov, 1:15PM, room: G45

Michael Kriegel: Crowd-sourced Story Creation

My PhD work is motivated by a vision of interactive storytelling, where a computer system can "spin" and improvise a story in real-time taking into account a user's input and by the observation that it is incredibly hard to realize such a system. Part of the problem is the vast amounts of knowledge representation involved in describing a story world in enough detail that a program can reason about it. In my PhD I am investigating how crowd-sourcing might help to address this by asking 1) How can we extract coherent knowledge about the story world from many individual example stories and 2) what kind of infrastructure supports the crowd-sourced collection of this material.


Vallejo, Marta:Urban Growth: Effects on Urban Green Spaces and implications for planning and policy


Abstract:
The total amount of urban surface throughout the world represents only a 1-2%. However the resources needed to fulfill the necessities of the residents of these areas require the transformation of the 20% of the terrestrial surface above all in agricultural landscapes. The analysis of land use change spatial patterns is a crucial factor in order to understand ecological and social dynamics.

A key element in the study of urban evolution patterns is the peri-urban landscapes. A peri-urban landscape is a transition zone where coexists different land types as agricultural, forestry with urban residences, industry, transportation and leisure areas. In long term peri-urban areas are transformed rapidly in build-up zones and consequently new peri-urban areas are generated around these new built areas from former rural ones. This process should be controlled by nature conservation plans and green belt legislations due to the fact that speed in land-cover change is associated with rapid shifts in biodiversity.

The application of a range of different planning processes and regulatory policies to protect these landscapes can lead us to keep track of evolution of multiple hypothetical scenarios. The analysis of the plausible implications of each of them can give support to experts and politicians to understand the driving forces of the system and elaborate guidelines to mitigate possible negative effects in biota and human beings.