Public opinion on complex scientific topics can have dramatic effects on industrial sectors (e.g. GM crops, fracking, global warming). In order to realise the industrial and societal benefits of Autonomous Systems, they must be trustworthy by design and default, judged both through objective processes of systematic assurance and certification, and via the more subjective lens of users, industry, and the public. To address this and deliver it across the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) programme, the UK Research Hub for TAS (TAS-UK) assembles a team that is world renowned for research in understanding the socially embedded nature of technologies. TASK-UK will establish a collaborative platform for the UK to deliver world-leading best practices for the design, regulation and operation of 'socially beneficial' autonomous systems which are both trustworthy in principle, and trusted in practice by individuals, society and government. TAS-UK will work to bring together those within a broader landscape of TAS research, including the TAS nodes, to deliver the fundamental scientific principles that underpin TAS; it will provide a focal point for market and society-led research into TAS; and provide a visible and open door to engage a broad range of end-users, international collaborators and investors. TAS-UK will do this by delivering three key programmes to deliver the overall TAS programme, including the Research Programme, the Advocacy & Engagement Programme, and the Skills Programme. The core of the Research Programme is to amplify and shape TAS research and innovation in the UK, building on existing programmes and linking with the seven TAS nodes to deliver a coherent programme to ensure coverage of the fundamental research issues. The Advocacy & Engagement Programme will create a set of mechanisms for engagement and co-creation with the public, public sector actors, government, the third sector, and industry to help define best practices, assurance processes, and formulate policy. It will engage in cross-sector industry and partner connection and brokering across nodes. The Skills Programme will create a structured pipeline for future leaders in TAS research and innovation with new training programmes and openly available resources for broader upskilling and reskilling in TAS industry.

StoryFutures China brings together two of the world's leading cultural institutions - The National Gallery in the UK and Shanghai Science and Technology Museum in China - to research, prototype and develop immersive storytelling experiences that both enhance visitor experiences on-site as well as allow for the Gallery and the Museum to take experiences to the audience, wherever they are in the world. This groundbreaking collaboration will create two audience-facing immersive prototypes, one at each location, that are specifically designed to speak to local audiences as well as travel to their counterpart institution in the UK or China. In so doing, StoryFutures China will facilitate a new level of cultural exchange between the two countries by promoting an approach to visitor experiences that has the international visitor in mind as much as the nation's citizenry. Themed around a concern with "art in science" and "science in art and", this collaboration will enhance and translate artworks and historical artefacts for visitors by using immersive technologies to provide additional layers of informational depth and emotional engagement by revealing the stories behind some of each countries' national treasures. This project addresses major challenges for both the UK's and China's creative and cultural industries by examining how the disruptive capabilities of immersive technologies can be harnessed to produce new audience experiences, business models and cultural value that can drive economic growth in both countries. It draws on the unique strength and position of the successful StoryFutures project, funded by the UK's Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, including a well-established collaborative model with The National Gallery, to promote an open innovation approach to developing immersive storytelling prototypes that respond to clearly identified audience behaviours and needs. By utilising StoryFutures' open innovation framework, this project will introduce novelty into large organisations' supply chains, develop new business models and create immersive prototypes that can be experienced and tested by thousands of visitors to promote better understandings and cultural exchange between countries. Moreover, the prototypes will stand as "use cases" for future collaborations between the UK and China and, within each country, represent scalable opportunities for the growing visitor experience economy at cultural and commercial institutions. In so doing, the project underscores the role of cultural institutions in promoting growth and innovation in the wider creative economy. By focusing on the themes of "art in science" and "science in art", StoryFutures China develops an area of major concern in both museums and art galleries, brokering a relationship that is collaborative rather than competitive. By bringing together cultural institutions from across sectors, the project will promote best practice and knowledge exchange in how best to harness the disruptive technologies of AR, MR and VR for visitor experiences and how to reach audiences away from the physical location of each institution. The project draws on the world-class research in design at Brunel, storytelling and audience insight at Royal Holloway and the long-standing expertise in the immersive tech by Shanghai Foremost Group. In particular, it builds on the success of the Virtual Veronese prototype developed by StoryFutures and The National Gallery: the insights from this project revealed that whilst an experience could uniquely blend the physical and the digital for visitors on site in the use of AR, the potential for VR was to take the Gallery to the audience wherever they may be.

Even more than text, images are critical in engaging (digital) audiences with cultural heritage, to illustrate stories, present collections, explore old manuscripts and documents, or illuminate colourful parts of our history. Presenting or sharing small groups of images is technologically straightforward, but as the quality, size and quantity of images increase, implementation and delivery rapidly becomes more complicated. For example, it can be problematic and costly to download gigabyte-sized images on a mobile network. The complexity increases as users combine images from different institutions or countries. There are also many IPR and technological concerns when memory institutions are asked to provide high resolution copies of their images for collaborative projects. The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) continues to be developed to help solve these and many more issues. It provides a standard framework for institutions to present their own content in a consistent, trackable manner, using freely available software. IIIF resources from multiple institutions can be virtually combined (without sending images to each other) to provide shared presentations, allowing users to explore huge zoomable images on different devices without needing to copy or download whole images. However, though well described, setting up and re-using IIIF resources can still be complex, particularly for smaller institutions or individual researchers. In addition, better understanding of how to deploy IIIF to combine virtual collections across institutions and how to support more diverse audiences is needed. This research project will assess current use of IIIF systems across the sector and gather requirements and ambitions for further development via a series of targeted workshops and surveys. These will be used to produce a landscape report and to inform the design and development of a small selection of working IIIF technology pilot demonstrations. A: Working with and presenting datasets and research outputs from different institutions, focusing on resources created within a separate ongoing research project on Tudor/Jacobean portraits. B: Examining how IIIF resources can be used as supplementary information to support and enrich online publications or exhibitions. C: Demonstrating how individual non-technical researchers can create new aggregated IIIF presentations based on existing resources (overcoming a significant barrier to its adoption). This work will involve specific user analysis, with different potential use communities, in order to feed user needs and feedback into the resulting report. The project will also explore what new IIIF tools/services are needed in the sector and how they might be created, used and maintained. An important premise is to involve both tech and non tech people, to develop use cases as well as defining tools. Workshops 1: Showcase and discuss current best practice. Explore how IIIF resources are currently used for research and public engagement (and by whom), identify available resources/tools, and how people would like to use these in the future. 2: Discuss the potential of shared IIIF services. Explore what IIIF related services are available or could be useful/required for institutions or researchers new to IIIF to present public/private images via IIIF, considering shared image repositories, improved image servers, training & knowledge requirements etc. 3: Developing practical IIIF solutions. A practical workshop and discussion designed to create working examples of aggregating, using and presenting IIIF resources, and develop use cases showing how end users can exploit these tools. 4: Towards a National Collection: Developing a road map for the future. A shared workshop bringing together work from the proposed PID and Linked data projects and others, to develop a clear proposal of how the outcomes of these might be used in developing and maintaining a digital National Collection

GLoW3 seeks to interrogate, understand and foreground women, non-binary and trans (W, NB and T) contributions to the conceptualisation, commercialisation and creative potential of Web 3.0 screen-based media. The term 'Web 3.0' accounts for a range of concepts, frameworks, technologies and ideals. It encompasses concepts such as worldbuilding and the metaverse; data-driven frameworks known as the Semantic Web and the Internet of Things (IoT); technologies such as blockchain and immersive realities (including AR, VR and XR); as well as ideals such as decentralisation and the democratisation of the internet. The promise and potential of Web 3.0 has yet to be realised and this is a critical moment of transition where the future is being shaped by public media discourse dominated by hyperbole and rhetoric drawn from a narrow representation of voices and perspectives. At the advent of any technological screen-based transitionary moment, women have been at the forefront as lead experimenters and innovators - pioneering in spaces where technology and creativity collide. We can see this in the now excavated histories of women innovating in early film production and computer technologies. What these histories also reveal is that as the technology becomes established and commodified, women's histories are rapidly erased as narratives of male pioneers dominate. Contributions made by NB and T people are not acknowledged. GLoW3 seeks to intervene in and disrupt these normative processes and capture the history as it happens. It will do so through a synchronic analysis focussing on W, NB and T people who are currently working at the highest levels of influence and at the cutting-edges of creative innovation in screen-based media at the frontiers of Web 3.0. GLoW3 involves the direct collaboration with these individuals who originate from a diverse range of global contexts (including UK, Europe, North America, Australia and Africa) and will draw on their expertise and experiences through a programme of engagement which also aims to develop their own global leadership capabilities. The project is made up by three key intersecting strands of enquiry into Web 3.0 driven screen-based media: conceptualisation, commercialisation and creativity. The conceptual enquiry will inform new research which will deepen understandings of the concepts of the metaverse and worldbuilding, asking critical questions such as what does worldbuilding mean in a global context? What role does hyberbole play in shaping new screen-based technologies and what are the contributions of W, NB and T in shaping, influencing and leading these narratives? The commercial dimension of Web 3.0 is built on blockchain technologies. This branch of enquiry will seek to critically examine these through specific W, NB and T-led initiatives, examining how these technologies have impacted upon the realities of their experiences in different global contexts and the complex implications of distributing creative output as Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) including upon labour practices and the environment. The creative strand will examine the affordances of the emerging media forms of web 3.0 through an artist-in-residence scheme which will target marginalised artists, culminating in a ground-breaking hybrid, multi-sited exhibition: 'Women of Web 3.0: innovators, worldbuilders and leaders' in collaboration with National Gallery and Gazelli Art House. The exhibition, launching on International Women's Day 2024, will bring together new and existing digital artwork from creators across the world innovating at the leading edges of emerging media using Web 3.0 technologies which fuse the physical with the digital. GLoW3 seeks to make the concepts and practices of Web 3.0 accessible to a diverse range of audiences in highly engaging ways and to amplify and encourage participation of W, NB and T individuals in the processes and practices of screen-based technological innovation.

The conservation, preservation and interpretation of our cultural heritage requires a multi-disciplinary approach, bringing together experts in the fields of science and the arts and humanities. Analysis of the materials of our cultural heritage collections has a vital role in understanding how and why they were made and used, their conservation history, the origin and mechanisms of material decay, and how deterioration has affected appearance and perception. It is part of a responsible modern approach to conservation. \n\nMicrosamples from paintings and objects are often prepared as cross-sections to examine their highly revealing microstructure and stratigraphy. The distribution of materials within the layer structure, or even within an individual layer, reflects the working practices of the artist/maker, the changes that have been initiated by environmental conditions, pollutants or the passage of time, as well as the use and conservation history, including interventions by restorers. The distribution helps to differentiate between original materials and later restorations or additions, as well as deterioration products, which is crucial when undertaking conservation treatments and interpreting the original appearance of the object. It is also important in understanding the causes of decay, informing decisions on storage and display of objects. Although analysis of inorganic components in a cross-section is reasonably straightforward, this is not the case for organic materials, which are very difficult to characterise with the techniques currently available to heritage scientists.\n\nThe project will develop the application of micro-ATR-FTIR spectroscopic imaging combined with data processing using multivariate methods to the analysis of cross-sections from cultural heritage paintings and objects. Other conventional IR spectroscopic techniques are of proven value in the field but this emerging technique is the only one that has the potential to become a routine and rapid method to simultaneously characterise both organic and inorganic materials directly (at a molecular level) on cross-sections, at the same time as determining their distribution with the necessary high spatial resolution. This would greatly improve analysis of organic surface coatings or components, understanding of which is crucial for solubility behaviour during cleaning of objects. It will ensure that advice from heritage scientists on the care and conservation of collections is based on the best possible data, improving conservation practice and our ability to preserve our national collections for future generations. \n\nThe spectroscopy expertise at Imperial College London (host organisation) will be combined with expertise in the heritage field at the National Gallery and the British Museum (project partners). The postdoctoral researcher, hosted at Imperial College London, will develop the methodology of ATR-FTIR imaging on test samples, before applying it to a wide range of samples from real objects (involving time working at the partner institutions). This will demonstrate the versatility of the technique and at the same time generate new information which can answer unsolved questions about the objects and paintings studied that cannot be obtained using current techniques. The new skills that the postdoctoral researcher will develop during the research, and the experience gained from working in a leading spectroscopic imaging group as well as two prominent cultural heritage institutions, will increase capacity in heritage science. Interaction with curators and conservators will ensure that their needs influence the development of the research and that the new insights gained into the objects studied can directly improve the way in which the National Gallery, the British Museum and other institutions charged with the care of cultural heritage interpret, study and present their collections to the public.