The digitalisation of manufacturing is a key enabler in the UK Government drive to raise the level of industrial productivity to match and exceed leading competitors. Whilst basic digital technology applications in manufacturing are not new, there are two key trends that predicate the timeliness of the proposed research: (1) manufacturing organisations are increasingly seeing information as a key strategic addition to their product offerings; (2) major innovations in computer science, control and informatics have created new opportunities for major breakthroughs in manufacturing. One of the critical challenges is how to support the digital manufacturing transformation of SMEs and introduce new methods of production that take into account the latest control, communication and AI technologies in a sector characterised by limited capital investment and research potential. Whilst there is significant body of knowledge in this area it is mostly focused on relatively expensive solutions which are often unaffordable to SMEs? This project will therefore address a common concern that recent developments in digital manufacturing are unlikely to accessible by SMEs owing to the associated capital cost of upgrading industrial computing and communication environments. The project proposes a radically different approach to the digital evolution of a manufacturing operation by focussing predominantly on non industrial solutions to industrial automation and information challenges. It will seek to exploit very low cost commercially available technologies for mobile computing, sensing, AI and tackle the challenges associated with integrating these safely and securely into a small scale manufacturing environment. As well as conventional research activities, the project will more radically involve student hackathons as a means of stimulating low cost software development, will use an in-house technology transfer organisation to access SME organisations, and engage directly with the High Value Manufacturing catapult demonstration network as a means of reaching the maximum number of potential users. Stretch targets for the programme include the introduction of low cost product tracking, exploiting emerging industrial IoT platforms and AI-based flexible control using commercially available AI and voice recognition development environments. The project will supplement the traditional research and development approaches with some innovative implementation development activities in which (i) undergraduate and graduate students in both engineering and computer science and integrated via a series of hackathons and software and hardware development competitions (ii) a series of workshops will be targeted at local start up and SME IT communities to engage them directly in the development of applications and products (iii) by working directly with technology transfer organisations to ensure that not only the final message but also the starting rationale for the work fully engages the SME manufacturing community.

In the planning process for high rise buildings, it is common practice to carry out physical or numerical simulations of the wind flow around such buildings, in order to establish the acceptability or otherwise of these wind conditions for a range of pedestrian activities such as sitting, slow walking, rapid walking etc. It is less common to assess the wind conditions in terms of pedestrian safety in high winds, and the safety of cyclists and light high sided vehicles is never usually considered. The need for such considerations has become tragically obvious in a recent incident in Leeds, where a pedestrian was killed after a lorry blew over due to winds around a new high rise structure. When pedestrian safety is considered, this is usually in terms of a simple wind speed criterion that does not take into account human behaviour and does not allow for a proper risk analysis. This project will consider these issues with a view to establishing a robust methodology for calculating the risk of a pedestrian, cyclist or high sided vehicle accident in high wind conditions around high rise building. Full scale measurements will be carried out around a high rise building on the University of Birmingham campus to measure the turbulent nature of the flow around such buildings, since it is these highly turbulent flows that are of relevance to the issue of safety rather than the mean wind flows. Wind tunnel tests and CFD calculations will be carried out of the same building to assess the adequacy of these techniques for predicting the highly turbulent flows of relevance to the problem under discussion. Trials will then be carried out using instrumented volunteers of a range of age and size, who will walk or cycle around the structure during windy periods, and their behaviour will be assessed both quantitatively and qualitatively, in order to develop probability distributions of the wind speed at which incipient instability of pedestrians occurs. In addition measurements will be made of the cross wind forces on scale models of typical high rise vehicles using the University of Birmingham moving model TRAIN rig, with highly turbulent cross wind conditions, again to develop probability distributions of wind speeds for incipient instability. The probability distributions thus obtained will then be used, with wind speed probability distributions, to develop a calculation methodology to determine the variation of accident risk around high rise structures.

Synthetic Biology is a growing field of science that combines Biosciences, Chemistry, Physics, Information Technology and Engineering, and involves the redesigning end engineering of organisms for functional purposes, for example to produce valuable substances (e.g. medicines) or gain new functions (e.g. sensing and responding to something in the environment). Synthetic Biology aspires to tackle grand challenges surpassing what is possible through traditional technologies: it has wide-ranging applications in healthcare, environmental protection, energy, agriculture, computing, advanced chemicals and materials. Synthetic Biology has grown significantly in the UK over the past decade, thanks to a >£400M investment via the Synthetic Biology for Growth Programme. One of the key investments has been the SynBioCDT: the first UK CDT in Synthetic Biology funded in 2014 by the EPSRC and BBSRC and run by the Universities of Oxford, Bristol and Warwick. The SynBioCDT trained 79 excellent PhD students selected from >650 applicants, and attracted support from industrial, academic and public-facing partners. Our graduate students have gone on to work within the bioeconomy and have established disruptive start-ups. The term "Engineering Biology" has been recently adopted to highlight the essential transition of Synthetic Biology into a mature Engineering discipline. The recent UKRI National Engineering Biology Programme (NEBP) sets the UK ambition for the field and encompasses the capabilities that can support the exploitation of Engineering Biology for economic and public benefit. The Universities of Bristol and Oxford aim to establish a new CDT in Engineering Biology, the EngBioCDT, to train the academic and industrial Engineering Biology leaders of tomorrow, and to equip them with skills needed to contribute toward scalable, robust, and transformative engineering of biomimetic and biological systems. The EngBioCDT builds on our experience with the SynBioCDT and will address the NEBP requirement for a new generation of biological engineers able to translate cutting-edge science into real-world impact; it will support the EPSRC focus area 'Frontiers in Engineering and Technology'. The EngBioCDT will enable cohesive cohorts of students to gain expertise in the design, modelling and engineering of biological components and systems; to understand broad concepts ranging from biomolecular interactions to cell function; and to augment the Engineering Biology approach with robotics, automation and AI. Students will obtain advanced skills in programming and engineering; implement biological design across scales; place research in the context of both basic and applied science; and become cognisant of challenges such as process development and scale-up in biotechnology. Students will undertake both group and individual projects before starting their doctoral project. The EngBioCDT will take advantage of the expertise provided by the two Universities and our industrial partners, which will all be catalysts for inter-University and inter-sector training and research. Students will also have superb opportunities to engage with leading international academics, for example through an annual Summer School, and by participating in international conferences and workshops. The environment is exceptional. Bristol hosted BrisSynBio, one of six UKRI-funded Synthetic Biology Research Centres, and now hosts the Bristol BioDesign Institute and the Bristol Centre for Engineering Biology; the CDT Director is a EPSRC Fellow. Oxford, which led the SynBioCDT, received three fellowships and a programme grant in Engineering Biology, and offers vibrant translational opportunities. The applicants provide expertise in graduate training and many of them have previously worked together effectively. Our pool of >70 supervisors reflects the truly multidisciplinary nature of Engineering Biology, and includes internationally renowned researchers.

The current AI paradigm at best reveals correlations between model input and output variables. This falls short of addressing health and healthcare challenges where knowing the causal relationship between interventions and outcomes is necessary and desirable. In addition, biases and vulnerability in AI systems arise, as models may pick up unwanted, spurious correlations from historic data, resulting in the widening of already existing health inequalities. Causal AI is the key to unlock robust, responsible and trustworthy AI and transform challenging tasks such as early prediction, diagnosis and prevention of disease. The Causality in Healthcare AI with Real Data (CHAI) Hub will bring together academia, industry, healthcare, and policy stakeholders to co-create the next-generation of world-leading artificial intelligence solutions that can predict outcomes of interventions and help choose personalised treatments, thus transforming health and healthcare. The CHAI Hub will develop novel methods to identify and account for causal relationships in complex data. The Hub will be built by the community for the community, amassing experts and stakeholders from across the UK to 1) push the boundaries of AI innovation; 2) develop cutting-edge solutions that drive desperately needed efficiency in resource-constrained healthcare systems; and 3) cement the UK's standing as a next-gen AI superpower. The data complexity in heterogeneous and distributed environments such as healthcare exacerbates the risks of bias and vulnerability and introduces additional challenges that must be addressed. Modern clinical investigations need to mix structured and unstructured data sources (e.g. patient health records, and medical imaging exams) which current AI cannot integrate effectively. These gaps in current AI technology must be addressed in order to develop algorithms that can help to better understand disease mechanisms, predict outcomes and estimate the effects of treatments. This is important if we want to ensure the safe and responsible use of AI in personalised decision making. Causal AI has the potential to unearth novel insights from observational data, formalise treatment effects, assess outcome likelihood, and estimate 'what-if' scenarios. Incorporating causal principles is critical for delivering on the National AI Strategy to ensure that AI is technically and clinically safe, transparent, fair and explainable. The CHAI Hub will be formed by a founding consortium of powerhouses in AI, healthcare, and data science throughout the UK in a hub-spoke model with geographic reach and diversity. The hub will be based in Edinburgh's Bayes Centre (leveraging world-class expertise in AI, data-driven innovation in health applications, a robust health data ecosystem, entrepreneurship, and translation). Regional spokes will be in Manchester (expertise in both methods and translation of AI through the Institute for Data Science and AI, and Pankhurst Institute), London (hosted at KCL, representing also UCL and Imperial, leveraging London's rapidly growing AI ecosystem) and Exeter (leveraging strengths in philosophy of causal inference and ethics of AI). The hub will develop a UK-wide multidisciplinary network for causal AI. Through extended collaborations with industry, policymakers and other stakeholders, we will expand the hub to deliver next-gen causal AI where it is needed most. We will work together to co-create, moving beyond co-ideation and co-design, to co-implementation, and co-evaluation where appropriate to ensure fit-for-purpose solutions Our programme will be flexible, will embed trusted, responsible innovation and environmental sustainability considerations, will ensure that equality diversity and inclusion principles are reflected through all activities, and will ensure that knowledge generated through CHAI will continue to have real-world impact beyond the initial 60 months.

The uneven ways that civil liberties, work, labour and health have all been impacted over the last 18 months as we have all turned to digital technologies to sustain previous ways of life, has not only shown us the extent of inequalities across all societies as they are cut through with gender, ethnicity, age, opportunities, class, geolocation; it has also led many organisations and businesses across all three sectors to question those values they previously supported. Capitalising on this moment of reflection across industry, the public and third sectors; we explore the possibility of imagining and building a future that takes different core values and practices as central, and works in very different ways. As the roles of organisations and businesses across all industry, the public and third sectors changes, what is now taken up as core values and ethos will be crucial in defining the future. INCLUDE+ will build a knowledge community around in/equalities in digital society that will comprise industry, academia, the public and third sectors. Responding to the Equitable Digital Society theme, we ask how we can design, co-create and realise digital services and infrastructures to support inclusion and equality in ways that enable all people to thrive. Focusing on the three connected strands of wellbeing, precarity, and civic culture; we address structural inequalities as they emerge through our research, investigating them through whole system approaches that includes the generation of outputs that comprise of new systems, services and practices to be taken up by organisations. More than this, our knowledge community will be underpinned by empirical, co-curation and participatory led research that will produce real interventions into those structural inequalities. These interventions will be taken up by organisations, responded to and considered, enabling the wider knowledge community to critically assess them in relation to the values they purport to promote. Fed by secondments and supported through smaller exploratory and escalator funds, our knowledge community will not only grow through traditional networking activities such as workshops, annual conferences, academic outputs and further funding; it will also grow through the development of interdisciplinary methods, knowledge exchange practices, and mentorship, which the secondment package will promote. In so doing, we structure our N+ around participatory research practices, people development and knowledge exchange, aiming to grow our network through the development and growth of people and good practice. INCLUDE+ is led by a highly experienced cross-disciplinary team incorporating Management and Business Studies, Computing, Social Sciences, Media and Communication and Legal Studies. Each Investigator brings vibrant international networks; active research projects feeding the Network+; and long experience of impact generation across policy and research. With support from organisations like the International Labour Organisation, Law Commission, Cabinet Office, and Equality and Human Rights Commission as well as the existing DE community, we will develop from and with existing research, extend this work and impact beyond it. Our partner organisations cut across industry, the public and third sectors and include (for example) Lego; NHS AI Lab; Space2; mHabitat; Leeds, Cambridgeshire and Swansea Councils; PeopleDotCom; Ditchley; 5Rights; EAMA; DataKind and IBM. We have designed the Network+ to enable a whole system approach that is genuinely exciting and innovative not just because of scalability, transference and scope, but also because of the commitment to people development, knowledge exchange and interdisciplinary practice that will also shape future research