Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

In recent years service industries have become a fast growing sector in world economies. Services now accounts for more than 50 percent of the labour force in Brazil, Russia, Japan and Germany, as well as 75 percent of the labour force in the United States and the United Kingdom. IT services in particular have risen rapidly and the worldwide IT service industry is expected to increase in value from US$ 635 billion in 2005 to US$ 780 billion in 2008. While recent decades have witnessed the 'industrialization' of services, and increasing awareness that services are often innovative, it is clear that the business processes of many services are poorly understood, and there remains a great deal of craft-like organization in some service industries. Increasing numbers of commentators suggest that the services industry lacks the rigor of traditional manufacturing and engineering disciplines. The growth in services is changing the way companies organize themselves, creating a skills gap which requires people to have knowledge in business and information technology, as well as the human factors that go into a successful services operation. These two driving forces/the need for new service skills and more scientific rigor to the practices of services/have led some leading universities and thought leaders in the business world to propose a new academic discipline in services. Significantly, such an idea has recently received substantial backing from IBM and a number of other major IT corporations, but the idea extends beyond IT systems services and encompasses general notion of services and business. However, currently there is no international or even national collaboration on Services Science, Management and Engineering (SSME). Although a number of UK universities, are interested in SSME, there is no UK network or community to build this new area.The aim of this proposal is therefore to create a new network that brings together academic researchers in the UK who recognize the need for multidisciplinary services oriented research and education and who will help develop the wider SSME agenda within the UK. The proposed network/hence called SSMEnetUK/will pioneer this new field by developing a shared understanding of goals and opportunities for research, education, and practice around the SSME agenda and to bring together the results of the researchers into a cohesive research collaboration and education programme that can benefit the associated networks and communities. SSMEnetUK is timely because of the worldwide growth in services provision, and the increasing international attention being paid to the science of services. The US, China and Japan are all leading on this agenda. It is important for UK competitive advantage that researchers and industry partners collaborate to enhance its capabilities as a leading service provider. By bringing together the network of networks working in the area, the impact will be major, establishing and promoting the UK as a focal point for services science research and education.The founding members of SSMEnetUK will consist of leading researchers from a range of disciplines, including computing, engineering, business, management, social science, and design; together with key industry leaders from IBM, HP and BT and CEOs from two smaller service companies UXonline and Abacus Billing Ltd. Founding members are from Oxford University, University of Manchester, King's College London, Durham University, University of Essex, University of Newcastle upon Tyne and Warwick Business School.The objectives of the network will be met through a series of case studies, meetings and workshops and the production of reports, research papers and the harnessing of a rich set of research and educational resources for wider dissemination.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Large-scale distributed systems, such as the Internet, broadband wireless at home and mobile phone networks, raise many challenges for the design and engineering of the underlying infrastructure. Such systems crucially depend on robust and efficient communication and coordination protocols that ensure that the overall system is self-organising, timely and energy-efficient, possibly in the presence of unreliable network services and malicious or uncooperative agents. New protocols for distributed coordination are being introduced to manage the limited resources. They increasingly often rely on randomisation, which plays an important role in achieving de-centralisation, and resource awareness, for example adapting to the power level. The combination of randomness and nondeterminism that arises from the scheduling of distributed components introduces complex behaviours that may be difficult to reason about. Assuring correctness, dependability and quality of service of such distributed systems is thus a non-trivial task that necessitates a rigorous approach, and methods for quantitative evaluation of such systems against properties such as ``the probability of battery level dropping below minimum within 5 seconds is guaranteed to be below 0.01 in all critical situations'', are needed. Theoretical foundations of such quantitative analysis have been proposed, with some implemented in software tools and evaluated through case studies. However, no tools and techniques can directly address real programming languages endowed with features such as random choice and timing delays.This proposal is to further develop the foundations for reasoning about probabilistic systems to enable quantitative analysis of real programming languages. The research will involve extending the successful quantitative probabilistic model checker PRISM (www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~dxp/prism/) via predicate abstraction, and develop additional enhancements to the PRISM toolkit in collaboration with the extensive user community. The resulting techniques will also be relevant for other domains in which probabilistic model checking has proved successful, e.g. performance analysis, planning and systems biology.

Dramatic progress has been made in the past few years in the field of photonic technologies, to complement those in electronic technologies which have enabled the vast advances in information processing capability. A plethora of new screen and projection display technologies have been developed, bringing higher resolution, lower power operation and enabling new ways of machine interaction. Advances in biophotonics have led to a large range of low cost products for personal healthcare. Advances in low cost communication technologies to rates now in excess of 10 Gb/s have caused transceiver unit price cost reductions from >$10,000 to less than $100 in a few years, and, in the last two years, large volume use of parallel photonics in computing has come about. Advances in polymers have made possible the formation of not just links but complete optical subsystems fully integrated within circuit boards, so that users can expect to commoditise bespoke photonics technology themselves without having to resort to specialist companies. These advances have set the scene for a major change in commercialisation activity where photonics and electronics will converge in a wide range of systems. Importantly, photonics will become a fundamental underpinning technology for a much greater range of users outside its conventional arena, who will in turn require those skilled in photonics to have a much greater degree of interdisciplinary training. In short, there is a need to educate and train researchers who have skills balanced across the fields of electronic and photonic hardware and software. The applicants are unaware of such capability currently.This Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) proposal therefore seeks to meet this important need, building upon the uniqueness of the Cambridge and UCL research activities that are already focussing on new types of displays based on polymer and holographic projection technology, the application of photonic communications to computing, personal information systems and indeed consumer products (via board-to-board, chip to chip and later on-chip interconnects), the increased use of photonics in industrial processing and manufacture, techniques for the low-cost roll-out of optical fibre to replace the copper network, the substitution of many conventional lighting products with photonic light sources and extensive application of photonics in medical diagnostics and personalised medicine. Many of these activities will increasingly rely on more advanced systems integration, and so the proposed DTC includes experts in computer systems and software. By drawing these complementary activities together, it is proposed to develop an advanced training programme to equip the next generation of very high calibre doctoral students with the required expertise, commercial and business skills and thus provide innovation opportunities for new systems in the future. It should be stressed that the DTC will provide a wide range of methods for learning for students, well beyond that conventionally available, so that they can gain the required skills. In addition to lectures and seminars, for example, there will be bespoke experimental coursework activities, reading clubs, roadmapping activities, secondments to collaborators and business planning courses.Photonics is likely to become much more embedded in other key sectors of the economy, so that the beneficiaries of the DTC are expected to include industries involved in printing, consumer electronics, computing, defence, energy, engineering, security, medicine and indeed systems companies providing information systems for example for financial, retail and medical industries. Such industries will be at the heart of the digital economy, energy, healthcare and nanotechnology fields. As a result, a key feature of the DTC will be a developed awareness in its cohorts of the breadth of opportunity available and a confidence that they can make impact therein.