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SUMMARY Working with and across the four selected Demonstrators, Digital Catapult (DC) proposes a project to undertake a programme of activity over 2.5 years which will support the Demonstrator projects by: facilitating co-working and shared learning, providing and/or convening technical support where required, opening up engagement with and opportunities for the startup and scale up ecosystem and helping them make the most of the Demonstrator programme, and supporting a programme of showcasing and dissemination in order to increase impact. The project will be a collaboration between DC and UKRI, which will help to meet the objectives set out in the Industrial Strategy, aiming to consolidate the country's position as a global creative powerhouse. The total cost of the project for core activities will be: £898,282. It is proposed that contractual management and oversight of this project will be overseen by a Project Board, chaired by UKRI and including the relevant senior and operational staff from DC and UKRI. This Project Board meetings will sit alongside the formal oversight mechanism with a nominated Monitoring Officer, and will provide for senior level 'steer' of the project. It is assumed that a similar mechanism will be put in place between UKRI and each of the Demonstrators to oversee contractual delivery of those contracts. DC will not be represented at those meetings.

The UK's screen and performance sectors realise huge international impact and have long led the way globally in making use of a broad range of technologies to create and distribute content, and to attract, delight and inspire audiences. Our objective, as the UK's Insight and Foresight Unit for Creative R&D, is to work with the CoSTAR Labs, AHRC and other partners to foster and support an environment in which the UK remains a world leader in the Creative Industries. Recognising the convergence of advanced production technologies in multiple Creative Industries sub-sectors - in particular in Film, TV, Games and Live Performance - we will work across the Creative Industries, including studios (large and small), technology companies, creative companies, trade bodies, and investors. Formed as a unique consortium combining Goldsmiths, University of London, BFI (British Film Institute), Edinburgh University and Loughborough University, as the IFU we will be an industry partner, think tank and policy unit. We will conduct research, including our longitudinal industry tracker in collaboration with the AHRC's Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC), and we will commission regular research reports. We will be highly connected with industry, and commercially minded from inception. The IFU's distinctive raison d'etre will be to capture, interrogate, synthesise and visualise data from the Creative Industries, to generate insight and foresight primarily for the Creative Industries themselves, liaising closely with industry partners, and understanding their needs and concerns. Working with the CoSTAR network, and the wider sector, we will: · Support market development for CoSTAR and the wider sector, by collecting, synthesising and analysing multiple data types and sources to provide new forms of intelligence, insight and foresight, to inform research, innovation and investment; · Assist sector actors in understanding the opportunities and impacts of emerging technologies, and in planning and investing on the basis of a robust evidence base; · Deepen and exchange knowledge, insight and foresight on the development of advanced technologies in and for the Creative Industries, through a programme of events and, reports, and a dynamic digital dashboard of industry intelligence; and · Provide robust research and intelligence in a dynamic and agile way, anticipating and responding to the needs of industry and other collaborators and partners. We will create a feedback loop between commercial collaborators, research and policy makers, encouraging data-sharing that will allow creative partners to use data-led approaches and insights to enable them to: · Review and evaluate past performance, track current activity, and inform future investment. · Critically inform R&D challenges and technology adoption, and help assess ROI. · Understand changing market and audience needs. · Investigate key questions relating to the carbon impact of sector activities. · Inform the skills needs and EDI impacts and opportunities across the sector. Our role in the CoSTAR network is to capture and disseminate a body of industry knowledge, trends and needs - providing a lens into the future. We will be an impartial evaluator of what works and what does not work through collation, integration, analysis and synthesis of primary and secondary data. We will embody our values: industry-engaged, authoritative, trusted, dynamic and curious. We will be measured on the extent to which the data, intelligence, information, reports, events and activities we deliver contribute towards future investment in creative R&D that is sustainable and equitable, and which demonstrably contributes towards the UK sustaining its position as a world leader in the Creative Industries.

Towards an Equitable Social VR Social Virtual Reality (SVR) constructs a digital parallel to the physical world, enabling remote social engagement mediated by modern immersive Virtual Reality (VR) technology. This social engagement is not strictly limited to conventional social interaction, but has also recently expanded to include activities such as remote participation in training, work, and service delivery. This digital parallel world offers significant opportunities for greater inclusion of individuals who are currently marginalised by the physical world, thereby widening access to the Digital Economy. SVR is a rapidly emerging technology and its pace of adoption has accelerated in the global pandemic. However, to date, there has been limited research examining the accessibility and inclusion requirements of SVR for users who currently face digital access barriers due to a disability or age-related capability loss. As a society, we sit at a critical juncture where concepts of inclusion and accessibility can be embedded into SVR while the technology is still in its formative stage. Towards an Equitable Social VR addresses the need to ensure that SVR platforms are accessible and inclusive for people with disabilities and older people, thus allowing for the potential of the platforms in contributing to the quality of life of these population groups to be realised in full. The project will undertake a programme of R&D with the aim of delivering the SVR Inclusion Framework: a collection of formalised guidance and tools serving to facilitate equal participation in SVR for disabled and older users. The project will take into account the whole spectrum of capability loss manifestations, including vision, hearing, mobility, dexterity, and neurodiversity aspects of cognition (learning difficulties) and mental health, as well as the co-occurrence of capability loss.

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), machine type communications (MTC), cloud computing and many other applications, the wireless network will become far more complex, while at the same time far more essential than ever before. Given the above exponential growth in both connectivity and complexity of the wireless systems and the unprecedented demands on latency, capacity, ultra-reliability and security, the network is becoming analytically intractable. Naturally, human-driven physical layer (PHY) design approaches rooted on mathematical models of communications systems and networks which drive today's network architectures are being surmounted by the sheer complexity of the emerging network paradigms. Hardware imperfections, that are inevitable with the employment of low-cost MTC sensors and transmitters, will drastically increase the volatility of the network, and theoretically driven solutions typically relying on generic and highly inaccurate models cannot address this as they are highly sub-optimal in practice. The above challenges necessitate new data-driven approaches to the design of communications systems, as opposed to traditional system-model driven designs that are becoming obsolete. Towards the diverse communication paradigms of MTC of the future, there is an urgent need to address reliable and adaptive links detached from mathematical models, and instead based on data-driven approaches. This visionary project will address these fundamental challenges by developing new Neural Netowrk architectures tailored for wireless communications, and new transceiver architectures based on data-driven training. Our research will address the development of a) a communications specific DL framework, b) DL-inspired PHY solutions and, c) proof-of-concept verification of the proposed solutions. LeanCom will be performed with Huawei, NEC Europe, Duke University, The Digital Catapult and CommNet and aspires to kick-start an innovative ecosystem for high-impact players among the infrastructure and service providers of ICT to develop and commercialize a new generation of learning-based networks. The implementation, experimentation and testing (within WP3) of the proposed solutions serves as a platform towards commercialisation of the results of LeanCom, aiming towards an impact of a foundational nature for the UK's digital economy.