King's College London

Over the past two decades or so we have witnessed the wide-spread deployment of surveillance technologies, in particular CCTV, throughout many major cities and towns and the development of operation centres to oversee and manage incidents and events. Alongside these initiatives has been a growing in developing systems that enable and support automatic recognition of incidents and events.

Focusing in particular on rapid urban transport, in this project we examine the practices through which personnel discover and identify problems and events and the ways in which they deploy interactional organisation to resolve or at least ameliorate difficulties that arise in managing the travelling public.

We address such matters as:

• how personnel select and scrutinise CCTV data to discover, anticipate and identify events and rely upon a knowledge of familiar ecologies and routine behaviours;
• the ways in which personnel deploy organisation to (re)configure the behaviour of staff and passengers;
• the design and deployment of innovative systems to enhance problem recognition.
• Data consists of video-recordings of operations centres in the UK and mainland Europe augmented by field studies and interviews of staff, management and system developers.