Technical & Data Research
SOUNDSCALE is investigating what Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) can reveal about urban environments, as well as the limits and consequences of sensing at this scale.
In collaboration between the University of Southampton and the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), we conducted six weeks of fieldwork along fibre-optic routes from Southampton towards Reading and across London, making this one of the longest urban DAS data-collection campaigns of its kind. The fieldwork generated very large and complex datasets capturing vibrations across varied places and conditions. We are developing mathematical algorithms to interpret these signals and investigating how they can be combined with secondary sources, including public data on weather, traffic, air pollution, and other environmental and urban conditions. Bringing these datasets together creates opportunities for understanding what is happening around the fibre, but also raises methodological questions about differences in their timing, geographical coverage, and level of detail.
Following questions raised through the Citizens’ Panel, we are examining not only what these algorithms can detect, but also what they cannot detect, where uncertainty arises, and how sensing and analysis might be developed more responsibly. This includes investigating the fibre-optic infrastructure and the computing and storage required to process data at this scale. We consider fibre networks, datasets, algorithms, and computing resources as forms of infrastructure embedded in particular places, institutions, and environments. This brings engineering, mathematics, and data science together with wider questions raised across SOUNDSCALE about how emerging sensing technologies should be understood and governed.