Awaiting Public Project Summary

Glasgow presents unique opportunities to integrate new developments and city systems to deliver more efficient services, promote investment and jobs, tackle climate change and generate new revenue streams for the city. We aim to develop a City Management System integrating urban services and infrastructure (transport, water, energy), using multiple data sources, enabling the city to be understood in new ways and making integrated data available through a City Observatory. We will integrate low carbon energy systems - seeing the city’s resources, infrastructure, energy demand and investment as a whole. We will promote commercialisation of new technologies by engaging with academic institutions and businesses. We aim to make Glasgow a better place to live, work, learn and invest. The 2014 Commonwealth Games will provide world-wide visibility of our integrated approach.

This project emerges from a need, identified during the AHRC-funded 'Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus' project, for educational resources on metaphor in English targeting secondary school learners and teachers. In the final stages of that project, the team worked closely with a group of school teachers and other education professionals to establish the form that materials should take to best address learners' needs. The main public output of Mapping Metaphor is a 'Metaphor Map', which shows through an interactive visualisation what the vocabulary of English reveals about the metaphorical connections that speakers and writers have made between semantic areas over the entire history of English (from Anglo-Saxon times to the present, a period of thirteen centuries). Recent research in linguistics has firmly established that underlying the metaphors visible in text and speech (e.g. linguistic expressions like 'He gave me the cold shoulder', 'Small dogs have fiery temperaments', 'She was burning with embarrassment') are so-called 'conceptual metaphors', systematic connections between distinct areas of meaning (all three examples above instantiating the metaphor EMOTION IS HEAT). The Metaphor Map has a dynamic web-based interface that enables users to explore metaphors at different levels of specificity. A top-level view shows metaphor connections between 37 generic-level categories (e.g. The World, Animals, Physical sensation, Mental capacity). A drill-down view shows connections between c.400 readily-understood, basic-level categories (e.g. Atmosphere and weather, Reptiles, Taste, Imagination). Users click to view 'Metaphor cards' which display further details, including example words, date information and direction of transfer. The Map also links directly to specific entries in the Historical Thesaurus of English (HT), allowing users to move seamlessly between the resources. The HT (http://historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/) contains 793,742 word forms and provides the Map's source data: the HT draws on the complete 2nd edn of the Oxford English Dictionary and, for the period c.700-1150 AD, A Thesaurus of Old English (Roberts & Kay 1995). The metaphorical connections displayed in the Map have been identified by the Mapping Metaphor project team through a labour-intensive and entirely bottom-up, evidence-driven methodology. We have identified c.20,000 connections between semantic categories, which underlie many tens of thousands of lexical items with metaphorical senses. The aim of the follow-on project is to create resources for use by teachers and learners of English Language and Literature at secondary-school level, both in the classroom and in self-study. The initial focus is on the senior phase of the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (S4-S6); some materials will also be suitable for use in the earlier stages (S1-S3). Within the project's scope we will also investigate the potential for use of our materials in the UK more broadly. With input from teachers and learners in focus groups and testing sessions, we will create a range of freely available materials: (1) worksheets on metaphor in literary and journalistic texts; (2) a set of interactive online activities focusing on specific areas of meaning in which metaphor is especially productive (e.g. how are concepts like LOVE, ANGER, DEATH expressed metaphorically); (3) downloadable lesson notes for teachers; (4) an educationally-targeted version of the Map with new online instructions, incorporating information pages on topics including metaphor in text, metaphor and language change, and metaphor in literature, and an annotated bibliography of web and print materials on metaphor, aimed at secondary schools; (5) an App to enable learners to interact with the Map on tablets and mobile devices. The resources will be promoted in the first instance through talks at educational events and links on relevant websites.

Our aim in SAM is to develop a computer-based tool which can measure parent-child Attachment across the population in a cost-effective way. The National Children's Bureau states that "secure attachment promotes health and wellbeing" while the Early Childhood Forum advocates "the right of children to [...] form secure, long lasting attachment relationships [...] which shape their future capacities for wellbeing". When the problem is neglected, the consequences are dire: children who have abnormal family attachments are at much higher risk of aggressive behaviours. By early adulthood, individuals with aggressive behaviour cost society 10 times more than their peers and have a mortality rate almost 10 times higher, in part due to increased risk of suicide and violent behaviour, but also due to physical problems such as coronary heart pathologies. Identifying Attachment problems early, at a population level, would be of significant benefit to society and drastically reduce the costs of dealing with the resulting issues. Large-scale screenings of Attachment insecurity should be routine among children. The problem is that Attachment assessment methods are expensive and time-consuming. MCAST (Manchester Child Attachment Story Task) is the standard method used in middle childhood. During MCAST administration, assessors show vignettes to the child, using a dolls-house, which portray mildly stressful situations. They are then asked to act out what happens in the rest of the story using dolls that represent both the child and a caregiver. The way the child completes the story and their behaviour during the test provides the cues necessary to assess their Attachment status. Each MCAST takes 30 minutes to administer and a further two hours to be transformed into a usable medical record. Furthermore, professionals must attend expensive courses followed by lengthy reliability training to use MCAST, so accredited Attachment assessors are a rare commodity. This means that MCAST cannot be applied on a large scale, as needed to make a significant impact on population health and wellbeing. Our goal is to make large-scale Attachment screening possible by reducing time and costs required for MCAST assessment. Our approach consists of automating the key steps of MCAST to 1) reduce the time needed to complete the test (higher efficiency) and, 2) allow the involvement of personnel with no MCAST training (lower costs). We also expect the automation of MCAST to provide new insights into Attachment and its observable, machine detectable behavioural markers, enabling better future measurement of Attachment. We will develop a computer-based tool which can be used to measure Attachment across the population in a rapid, cost-effective way to support MCAST assessors. The children will be guided through the story vignettes by an on-screen avatar. The detailed movements and positions of the dolls in space will be captured in real time. We will also record speech sounds from the children to analyse prosody and vocalisations. Using these data, we will develop novel algorithms to categorise Attachment patterns automatically and rapidly, locating each child in one of the four Attachment categories (Secure; Insecure Resistant-Ambivalent; Insecure Avoidant and Insecure Disorganised/Disorientated) with a level of confidence. To do this, we will develop novel techniques based on Social Signal Processing (SSP), in which Vinciarelli is a leading expert With SAM, the screening sessions and preliminary data analysis can be done without the presence of trained MCAST assessors; they would only be needed if a child was tagged as being in one of the problem categories, where a standard MCAST assessment would be undertaken, allowing large-scale population screening of Attachment patterns for the first time. The development of SAM and the rapid screening of Attachment in large groups will create a paradigm shift in the treatment of child psychiatric disorders.

This project seeks to complement and to extend traditional public awareness activities by bringing together schools and universities in the context of an engineering focus. Using Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) as a pilot study, this will involve staff and students from schools and universities working together to create exciting and innovative programmes for school children, supported by world leading engineering research groups. In universities the focus will be on collaboration to redesign first year university programmes to build more closely on the experiences of young people as they move from school to university. To embed ideas in the education system, the project will work with policy makers, local and national, to develop policy implications from research and practice for the school university interface more generally. A primary objective of the project is to secure permanent awareness of engineering as a valued profession within the school community and through this, to increase the participation rates of young people embracing engineering as a career. Centred initially within the Scottish Education system, the findings will be disseminated through the provision of e- learning courses and information packages, ensuring uptake on a UK national basis.