Dear reader,
Welcome to the fourth issue of our Scent newsletter.
As spring is turning into summer, we would like to update you on some of our activities from the last few months. In this edition, we introduce the Scent Charter focusing on what Scent means to you and to others. We also describe how we are getting ready for the upcoming Scent pilots set to start in August and September. You’ll be able to get involved before you know it! In this issue, we also explain the role and function of our crowdsourcing tool in the big Scent picture. In addition, we give you an idea of the nature of our image analysis work and the opportunities it offers in terms of mapping the environment.
The Scent newsletter delivers regular updates on project progress, key developments, relevant events and ways to get involved, straight to your inbox. It is published four times per year, once every season. Remember to check out our website, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, subscribe to our YouTube channel and connect with us on LinkedIn.
Scent is a three-year project funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020, the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.
Enjoy the Scent of spring and stay tuned for details on how to join our activities!
The Scent team

The Scent partners are getting ready for the pilots!
Preparation for the Scent pilots in Kifisos and the Danube Delta is in full swing. The Scent team is busy creating the time plan and planning the drone flights, the workshops and the training and dissemination material as well as the user engagement strategies to create impact in both pilots.
In the Greek pilot area, the planning is coming along smoothly. The main points of interest, the detailed pilot map and the action plan of the volunteer workshops and the campaign dates are being refined. The associated volunteer workshops are being planned in terms of their locations, the agenda, training material, duration, catering, partner presence and other aspects. The user engagement strategies are being defined in terms of the specific target groups and the channels to reach them.
As far as the Danube Delta pilot is concerned, the planning is proceeding similarly to that in the Kifisos Pilot. The time plan has been set out and the drone flights and associated arrangements, the workshops and training and dissemination material and the user engagement strategies have been planned. The points of interest of the pilot area, the pilot map and a detailed action plan of the volunteer workshops and the campaign dates are close to being finalised.
Details on how to get involved will be shared on our website and across our social media platforms soon!


The CROWD platform is the key digital infrastructure of the Scent toolkit, connecting all applications and services and orchestrating their functionality in a purposeful manner. To find out more about it, we reached out to Dr Daniele Miorandi, CEO of U-Hopper and leader of the work on the design and development of CROWD. “We see ourselves as the ‘plumbers’ of the project: we need to build the pipes, connect and maintain them so that the system as a whole keeps working correctly. Under the hood, CROWD is quite a fat boy, counting currently more than 150,000 lines of code. While this is not a quality indicator per se, and while actually only 15% has been physically written by Scent team members, it gives you an idea of the complexity of the infrastructure we have been developing.”

CROWD plays a multifold role in the big Scent picture. On the one hand, it allows local authorities to configure and manage crowdsourcing campaigns, define points of interest where pictures and measurements are needed, and monitor in real-time the pictures collected by citizens and the issues reported. On the other hand, it manages the complete lifecycle of citizen-generated images. Once a citizen takes a relevant picture using the Scent Explore app, the picture is sent to CROWD. CROWD stores a copy of the image on the cloud and makes it available to the Scent artificial intelligence ‘heart’ (the SIE), which uses advanced machine learning techniques to automatically understand what is in the image. The annotations are fed back to CROWD, which is in charge of deciding whether the ‘quality’ of the annotations is sufficient. If not, the image is made available for being further annotated, this time by people, through the CAPTCHA plugin or the Scent Collaborate app.
“One fundamental aspect of CROWD is its ability to combine artificial intelligence and human intelligence in a holistic way. When users upload a picture, they can describe what they see in the picture. We then use AI, provided by our partner IBM, to double-check whether the users are accurate or whether they miss something relevant for Scent. But if there are inconsistencies, or the machine just isn’t sufficiently sure about what’s there, we revert to humans for checking whether what the initial user and the machine said was right. This combination of artificial and collective intelligence is a distinctive factor of Scent, and something that puts us in a unique position with respect to alternative solutions,” Dr Miorandi explains.

The current prototype will be used this summer in the first wave of piloting activities. “There are still a bunch of things to be fixed, but we are confident our engineers and software guys will sort them out by the end of June, well in time for making it for the pilots in Romania and Greece“, Dr Miorandi adds.
Want to know more about CROWD? Interested in using it for your own project? Get in touch with us at https://scent-project.eu/contact-us


Scent researchers are building Deep Neural Network models for analysing the environment.
These models can automatically detect natural objects and scenes like the ones in the example below.
Analysing these kinds of natural images is very challenging, even for the modern computer vision systems.
First, the boundaries of natural scene-objects are not so well defined and quite subjective. We can for instance all point at the river bank set in stone, but can we define its location more accurately?
Second, the visual variability of these objects is huge and labelled examples are scarce. Modern vision systems use sophisticated deep neural network models requiring a large number of labelled examples to train.
In Scent, we are developing methods to achieve the same or better results while requiring significantly less examples.
Reducing the training effort for our models will also allow them to improve continuously, after they are deployed in the field, making them better and better as they are being used.
Having the ability to analyse the community photos taken in various locations over a geographical region will allow for mapping the environment in this region.
One of the cool applications of this would be feeding these maps into sophisticated geophysical models that will for example be able to predict (and help to prevent) flooding or other natural disasters.



ECSA 2018
European Citizen Science Association conference 2018
3-5 June 2018
Geneva, Switzerland

Open Science & the Humanities Conference 2018
21 June 2018
Barcelona, Spain

HIC 2018
13th International Hydroinformatics Conference
1-6 July 2018
Palermo, Italy

Scent plenary
4-6 July 2018
Santorini, Greece

ESOF 2018
EuroScience Open Forum
9-14 July
Toulouse, France

HORIZON 2020 PROJECTS ON CITIZEN SCIENCE
Interested in H2020 projects on citizens’ observatories? Have a look at what our fellow H2020 citizens’ observatories projects GROW, LandSense and GT2.0 are up to.
GROW Observatory


|
LandSense


|
GroundTruth 2.0


|

SCENT PARTNERS


This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688930.
Scent Scientists Develop a New Game to Enable Citizens Monitor the Environment
/0 Comments/in News, Project News /by Linda HenrikssonScientists across Europe have developed a new augmented reality game to enable and encourage citizens to monitor their local environments. Read more →
Newsletter #4 – Spring 2018
/0 Comments/in Newsletters /by webmasterNewsletter #4
Spring 2018
Dear reader,
Welcome to the fourth issue of our Scent newsletter.
As spring is turning into summer, we would like to update you on some of our activities from the last few months. In this edition, we introduce the Scent Charter focusing on what Scent means to you and to others. We also describe how we are getting ready for the upcoming Scent pilots set to start in August and September. You’ll be able to get involved before you know it! In this issue, we also explain the role and function of our crowdsourcing tool in the big Scent picture. In addition, we give you an idea of the nature of our image analysis work and the opportunities it offers in terms of mapping the environment.
The Scent newsletter delivers regular updates on project progress, key developments, relevant events and ways to get involved, straight to your inbox. It is published four times per year, once every season. Remember to check out our website, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, subscribe to our YouTube channel and connect with us on LinkedIn.
Scent is a three-year project funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020, the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.
Enjoy the Scent of spring and stay tuned for details on how to join our activities!
The Scent team
What does Scent mean to you?
We invite you to participate in the shaping of the Scent Charter. We would like to capture your associations with the project, your Scentiments. To contribute to the Scent charter, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook to find calls for submission to the Scent Charter. Choose one or several words you associate with Scent and send it to us using the hashtag #ScentCharter.
The Scent Charter is a dynamic, changing and evolving set of principles, attributes and associated key words that represent the essence of Scent and the participation of you, the public, in achieving the project aims. The Charter takes the form of a “word cloud” which is revised and re-presented on a regular basis based on input and submissions from all stakeholders including you. We use the three leaves icon from the project logo as the shape to be formed from the words. For more information, see: https://scent-project.eu/about-scent/scent-charter
The image below represents our initial Scent Charter cloud. Let’s shape it together!
The Scent partners are getting ready for the pilots!
Preparation for the Scent pilots in Kifisos and the Danube Delta is in full swing. The Scent team is busy creating the time plan and planning the drone flights, the workshops and the training and dissemination material as well as the user engagement strategies to create impact in both pilots.
Details on how to get involved will be shared on our website and across our social media platforms soon!
The CROWD platform is the key digital infrastructure of the Scent toolkit, connecting all applications and services and orchestrating their functionality in a purposeful manner. To find out more about it, we reached out to Dr Daniele Miorandi, CEO of U-Hopper and leader of the work on the design and development of CROWD. “We see ourselves as the ‘plumbers’ of the project: we need to build the pipes, connect and maintain them so that the system as a whole keeps working correctly. Under the hood, CROWD is quite a fat boy, counting currently more than 150,000 lines of code. While this is not a quality indicator per se, and while actually only 15% has been physically written by Scent team members, it gives you an idea of the complexity of the infrastructure we have been developing.”
CROWD plays a multifold role in the big Scent picture. On the one hand, it allows local authorities to configure and manage crowdsourcing campaigns, define points of interest where pictures and measurements are needed, and monitor in real-time the pictures collected by citizens and the issues reported. On the other hand, it manages the complete lifecycle of citizen-generated images. Once a citizen takes a relevant picture using the Scent Explore app, the picture is sent to CROWD. CROWD stores a copy of the image on the cloud and makes it available to the Scent artificial intelligence ‘heart’ (the SIE), which uses advanced machine learning techniques to automatically understand what is in the image. The annotations are fed back to CROWD, which is in charge of deciding whether the ‘quality’ of the annotations is sufficient. If not, the image is made available for being further annotated, this time by people, through the CAPTCHA plugin or the Scent Collaborate app.
“One fundamental aspect of CROWD is its ability to combine artificial intelligence and human intelligence in a holistic way. When users upload a picture, they can describe what they see in the picture. We then use AI, provided by our partner IBM, to double-check whether the users are accurate or whether they miss something relevant for Scent. But if there are inconsistencies, or the machine just isn’t sufficiently sure about what’s there, we revert to humans for checking whether what the initial user and the machine said was right. This combination of artificial and collective intelligence is a distinctive factor of Scent, and something that puts us in a unique position with respect to alternative solutions,” Dr Miorandi explains.
The current prototype will be used this summer in the first wave of piloting activities. “There are still a bunch of things to be fixed, but we are confident our engineers and software guys will sort them out by the end of June, well in time for making it for the pilots in Romania and Greece“, Dr Miorandi adds.
Want to know more about CROWD? Interested in using it for your own project? Get in touch with us at https://scent-project.eu/contact-us
Scent researchers are building Deep Neural Network models for analysing the environment.
These models can automatically detect natural objects and scenes like the ones in the example below.
Analysing these kinds of natural images is very challenging, even for the modern computer vision systems.
First, the boundaries of natural scene-objects are not so well defined and quite subjective. We can for instance all point at the river bank set in stone, but can we define its location more accurately?
Second, the visual variability of these objects is huge and labelled examples are scarce. Modern vision systems use sophisticated deep neural network models requiring a large number of labelled examples to train.
In Scent, we are developing methods to achieve the same or better results while requiring significantly less examples.
Reducing the training effort for our models will also allow them to improve continuously, after they are deployed in the field, making them better and better as they are being used.
Having the ability to analyse the community photos taken in various locations over a geographical region will allow for mapping the environment in this region.
One of the cool applications of this would be feeding these maps into sophisticated geophysical models that will for example be able to predict (and help to prevent) flooding or other natural disasters.
ECSA 2018
European Citizen Science Association conference 2018
3-5 June 2018
Geneva, Switzerland
Open Science & the Humanities Conference 2018
21 June 2018
Barcelona, Spain
HIC 2018
13th International Hydroinformatics Conference
1-6 July 2018
Palermo, Italy
Scent plenary
4-6 July 2018
Santorini, Greece
ESOF 2018
EuroScience Open Forum
9-14 July
Toulouse, France
HORIZON 2020 PROJECTS ON CITIZEN SCIENCE
Interested in H2020 projects on citizens’ observatories? Have a look at what our fellow H2020 citizens’ observatories projects GROW, LandSense and GT2.0 are up to.
SCENT PARTNERS
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688930.
Scent mid-term review meeting in Brussels
/0 Comments/in News, Project News /by Linda HenrikssonLooking back, looking ahead
On Thursday 17th May 2018 the Scent consortium, the European Commission Project Officer and the external reviewer gathered for the project’s mid-term review meeting in the heart of the EU. The Scent project team presented the work conducted in the first 18 months and outlined the next steps and plans for future activities. Read more →
Scent at Nordic Game 2018
/0 Comments/in News, Project News /by Linda HenrikssonScent partner XTeam Software Solutions srls took part in the annual Nordic Game conference held in Malmö, Sweden on 23-25 May 2018. Nordic Game is a leading game conference in Europe and serves as a venue for developers, publishers, and financial backers to meet, network and catch up on the latest news in the world of gaming. This year, Nordic Game hosted over 2,000 professionals in the field. Read more →
WeObserve launches its first Communities of Practice
/0 Comments/in News, Related News /by Linda HenrikssonAre you interested in citizen science and citizens’ observatories? Join a WeObserve Community of Practice!
The WeObserve project will launch its first three Communities of Practice at the Citizen Science Workshop Day of the 2nd International ECSA Conference at the University of Geneva on 6th June 2018.
Read more and register for the CoP launch workshop here: https://www.weobserve.eu/launch-weobserve-communities-practice/
Scent Spotlight series – Kinga Cîmpan, Romanian Ornithological Society
/0 Comments/in News, Project News /by Linda HenrikssonIn today’s Spotlight feature we are pleased to introduce the Romanian Ornithological Society (SOR) and Kinga Cîmpan, Ecologist at SOR.
SOR is an independent non-governmental organisation founded in 1990. It is Romania’s largest wildlife conservation charity aiming to conserve and study wild bird species, their habitats and sites in Romania. SOR strives to increase people’s awareness of environmental sustainability and works for the protection of biodiversity and bird fauna. As the Romanian partner of BirdLife International, SOR carries out its policy and strategy with a joint global target: conservation of birds and their habitats. Read more →
Meet the Scent Explore gaming characters!
/0 Comments/in News, Project News /by Linda HenrikssonOur partners from XTeam are making good progress on the development of the Scent Explore gaming app. The app will be launched this summer, and you can already have a sneak peek at the game by checking out the cute animal characters:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIsYktdt5p8RJUwCMA_ESFg
Scent plenary meeting in Trento
/0 Comments/in News, Project News /by Linda HenrikssonThe latest Scent plenary meeting was held on 20–22 March in Trento, Italy. The three-day project meeting was hosted by Trento-based project partner U-Hopper on their brand-new Impact Hub premises. 20 partners representing all 10 partner organisations gathered in the Alpine town to discuss project progress, exchange ideas and agree on next steps. Read more →
Newsletter #3 – Winter 2018
/0 Comments/in Newsletters /by webmasterNewsletter #3
Winter 2018
Dear reader
Welcome to the third issue of our Scent newsletter! We hope you have had a great winter so far. This Winter 2018 issue is published exactly halfway through the project. It includes recent highlights and focuses in particular on our online presence, our involvement in bringing citizen science to the mainstream and on our latest work on hydrodynamic and hydrological models.
The Scent newsletter delivers regular updates on project progress, key developments, relevant events and ways to get involved, straight to your inbox. It is published four times per year, once every season. Don’t forget to check out our website, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, subscribe to our YouTube channel and connect with us on LinkedIn.
Scent is a three-year project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020, the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.
Enjoy reading this newsletter and have a magnifiScent rest of the winter!
The Scent team
Have you seen the new communications resources on our website?
A range of dissemination material has been added to our site as an Information pack available for you to download and use across your own dissemination activities and channels. The elements included in the pack form a cohesive entity of resources developed to help partners and other stakeholders raise awareness about and interest in the project. They facilitate systematic and effective on-brand communication by stakeholders including citizen led communities, networks and associations.
You can browse through the selection of Scent logo variations, graphics, design material and brand guidelines in the Downloads section.
You may also be interested in the Scent journal articles, conference abstracts and conference posters published so far. You will find them in the Publications section.
Rising trends in Citizen Science have led to the development of Citizen Observatories (COs) for environmental monitoring, an initiative widely supported by the European Commission under FP7 and H2020.
WeObserve is a new H2020 EC-funded project launched on 1st December 2017. The project aims to improve coordination between the currently existing COs as well as to promote related activities at regional, European and international level. WeObserve is a Coordination and Support Action which tackles three key challenges that COs and community-based environmental initiatives are facing: awareness, acceptability and sustainability.
To achieve these objectives, the WeObserve project brings together a strong consortium of 7 partners, built upon the four H2020 CO projects, namely Ground Truth 2.0, GROW, LandSense and Scent, with strong ties to a wide range of networks (ECSA), users and stakeholders, such as GEO and Copernicus and CREAF, which have active roles within the project.
The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and I-Sense group, takes part in the WeObserve consortium and is responsible for all the dissemination, communication and outreach activities of the project. More specifically, ICCS aims to:
On December 12th – 13th 2017, the project coordinator IIASA hosted the project kickoff meeting with EC presence in Luxemburg, Austria. The key objectives of the meeting included securing partner consensus on the vision, mission and operational plan for WeObserve, as well as defining roles, expectations and the project timeline.
Join WeObserve on social media and discover more!
The hydrodynamic and hydrological models of Scent are ready.
The models are built with available data and without citizen observatories contributions. The models are computational representations of water dynamics in the project’s case studies: the Danube Delta and the Kifisos catchment. The models will be enhanced with crowdsourced data after the Scent field campaigns and the value of citizen contributions will be assessed for the case of floods. In the Danube Delta, specifically in the Sontea-Fortuna pilot area, two hydrodynamic models were set up in order to simulate the complex network of channels and lakes in the area: one 1D model and one 1D/2D model.
In addition to cross-sectional data in the canals, lake bathymetry and the topography of the 2D areas, it was necessary to define the amount and variation in time of the flow entering and leaving the Danube Delta, as well the roughness of the terrain. The conceptual representations of the models are given in the following figures.
Conceptual representation of a HEC-RAS model
Conceptual representation of a HEC-HMS model
In the Kifisos catchment, the pilot area is the upstream region of Athens city, where many hydrological components of the water cycle are more influent. Therefore, a combination of models was set up: a hydrological model connected to a hydrodynamic model at the end of the basin. The first model represents the rainfall-runoff process of extreme rainfall events:
The area was sub-divided into 21 sub-basins to describe its spatial variability. Elements such as land cover, soil texture and rivers’ length were used in the model. For the hydrodynamic model, a fully 2D model was developed.
The models were developed using the USACE HEC-RAS (hydrodynamic) and HEC-HMS (hydrological) software. Several representations of these main models were developed to test different aspects of the case studies and for calibration and validation.
Initial work has also been done to define the best pathways for collecting data with citizens during the campaigns, such that collected data is potentially useful to the modelling effort. Next, the work on hydrodynamic and hydrological models will focus on researching techniques to integrate crowdsourced data into flood models and, further on, by doing this integration – hopefully achieving enhanced models.
Find us on YouTube! In our latest video, Scent partner Ioana Popescu, Associate Professor of Hydroinformatics at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education describes the institute, the Scent project and the role of the institute in the project.
Check out this and our other videos and subscribe to our channel here.
Scent plenary meeting
The 5th Scent consortium meeting
20-22 March 2018
Trento, Italy
RSCy2018
Sixth International Conference on Remote Sensing and Geo-Information of the Environment
26-29 March 2018
Paphos, Cyprus
EGU General Assembly 2018
European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2018
8-13 April 2018
Vienna, Austria
Deltas and Wetlands
The 26th Scientific Symposium Deltas and Wetlands 2018
16-20 May 2018
Tulcea, Romania
EUSEA Annual Conference 2018
Annual Conference organised by the European Science Engagement Association
17-18 May 2018
Madrid, Spain
HORIZON 2020 PROJECTS ON CITIZEN SCIENCE
Interested in H2020 projects on citizens’ observatories? Have a look at what our fellow H2020 citizens’ observatories projects GROW, LandSense and GT2.0 are up to.
SCENT PARTNERS
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688930.
Scent Charter
/0 Comments/in About Scent /by webmasterThe Scent Charter is a dynamic, changing and evolving set of principles, attributes and associated key words that represent the essence of Scent and the participation of you, the public, in achieving the project aims.
The Charter takes the form of a “word cloud” which is revised and re-presented on a regular basis based on input and submissions from all stakeholders including you. To contribute to the Scent charter, follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/SCENT_EU) or on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ScentEU/) to find calls for submission to the Scent Charter. Our aim is to capture the associations that you have with the project at any given time. The combination, recurrence and “weight” of words will undoubtedly ebb and flow at any given moment, so that the cloud as it appears today may be substantially different when viewed one week later.
To get the ball rolling, we present below our initial Scent Charter cloud.
We look forward to your input to shape the its next incarnation.