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.

The remarkable success of the internet is unquestioned, touching all aspects of our daily lives and commerce. This success is fundamentally underpinned by the tremendous capacity of unseen underground and undersea optical fibre cables and the technologies associated with them. Indeed, the initial surge in web usage in the mid-1990s coincides with the commissioning of the first optically amplified transatlantic cable network, TAT12/13 allowing ready access to information otherwise inaccessible. In parallel with the consistent exponential increase (quadrupling every 4 years) in broadband access rates, optical transceivers used in the core of the communications network have typically grown in bandwidth at the same rate, excepting a small and temporary downturn associated with the introduction of coherent technologies. Today, just as broadband demands begin to outstrip the capabilities of the incumbent technology (twisted pair copper cables) requiring new technology (optical fibre) to be deployed, bandwidth demands in the core network are exceeding the capabilities of single carrier modulation. In this project we will develop low cost all optical techniques to continue to expand the bandwidth of the transceivers which power the internet. Our all optical solution has the potential to be compact, suiting applications both within data centres operated by the likes of Google, Facebook and Microsoft and within the core international networks. The solution will address important challenges at such high bandwidths, such as synchronisation, noise and digital signal processing. If successful EEMC2 will deliver a transponder with more than an order of magnitude more capacity than those commercially available, equivalent of a Gb broadband connection rather than 70 Mb.

National infrastructure (NI) systems (energy, transport, water, waste and ICT) in the UK and in advanced economies globally face serious challenges. The 2009 Council for Science and Technology (CST) report on NI in the UK identified significant vulnerabilities, capacity limitations and a number of NI components nearing the end of their useful life. It also highlighted serious fragmentation in the arrangements for infrastructure provision in the UK. There is an urgent need to reduce carbon emissions from infrastructure, to respond to future demographic, social and lifestyle changes and to build resilience to intensifying impacts of climate change. If this process of transforming NI is to take place efficiently, whilst also minimising the associated risks, it will need to be underpinned by a long-term, cross-sectoral approach to understanding NI performance under a range of possible futures. The 'systems of systems' analysis that must form the basis for such a strategic approach does not yet exist - this inter-disciplinary research programme will provide it.The aim of the UK Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium is to develop and demonstrate a new generation of system simulation models and tools to inform analysis, planning and design of NI. The research will deal with energy, transport, water, waste and ICT systems at a national scale, developing new methods for analysing their performance, risks and interdependencies. It will provide a virtual environment in which we will test strategies for long term investment in NI and understand how alternative strategies perform with respect to policy constraints such as reliability and security of supply, cost, carbon emissions, and adaptability to demographic and climate change.The research programme is structured around four major challenges:1. How can infrastructure capacity and demand be balanced in an uncertain future? We will develop methods for modelling capacity, demand and interdependence in NI systems in a compatible way under a wide range of technological, socio-economic and climate futures. We will thereby provide the tools needed to identify robust strategies for sustainably balancing capacity and demand.2. What are the risks of infrastructure failure and how can we adapt NI to make it more resilient?We will analyse the risks of interdependent infrastructure failure by establishing network models of NI and analysing the consequences of failure for people and the economy. Information on key vulnerabilities and risks will be used to identify ways of adapting infrastructure systems to reduce risks in future.3. How do infrastructure systems evolve and interact with society and the economy? Starting with idealised simulations and working up to the national scale, we will develop new models of how infrastructure, society and the economy evolve in the long term. We will use the simulation models to demonstrate alternative long term futures for infrastructure provision and how they might be reached.4. What should the UK's strategy be for integrated provision of NI in the long term? Working with a remarkable group of project partners in government and industry, we will use our new methods to develop and test alternative strategies for Britain's NI, building an evidence-based case for a transition to sustainability. We will analyse the governance arrangements necessary to ensure that this transition is realisable in practice.A Programme Grant provides the opportunity to work flexibly with key partners in government and industry to address research challenges of national importance in a sustained way over five years. Our ambition is that through development of a new generation of tools, in concert with our government and industry partners, we will enable a revolution in the strategic analysis of NI provision in the UK, whilst at the same time becoming an international landmark programme recognised for novelty, research excellence and impact.

As the centenary of the First World War approaches we can no longer draw upon the testimony of first-hand witnesses. Historians now more than ever need to scrutinise anew primary sources to develop fresh interpretations. This project considers in unprecedented depth the crucial role of innovative telecommunications in battlefront strategy, a topic previously devolved solely to signals historians. Hitherto, little scholarly attention has been paid to the (open or secret) patenting of such new communications devices, their strategic value in combat, or the sometimes enormous profits they generated. The capacity of military units to communicate securely, i.e. without interception, has underpinned successful combat strategy for centuries, and the First World War was no exception. The vulnerability of telecommunications was well illustrated by the British interception of the Zimmerman telegram from Germany in 1917. Yet in contrast to the popular Second World War stories of Bletchley Park's interception and breaking of Enigma codes, these issues have not been systematically explored in any public or academic history of First World War Britain. While recent historians (such as Gary Sheffield) have certainly reasserted the inventiveness and adaptability of the British forces during the First World War, such revisionist accounts have not extended to the inventive production and use of telecommunications, nor to the issues of intellectual property that they involved. A fortiori these issues are not covered in any military or civilian museum exhibits, nor in extant online teaching resources. Inroads have recently been made, however, by Gooday's AHRC project (2007-10) 'Owning and Disowning Invention' in understanding how intellectual property systems operated in the First World War. This Follow-On project will work in collaboration with the Oxford Museum of History of Science, and three project partners (Institution of Engineering and Technology, Porthcurno Telegraph Museum and BT Archives) to create public-facing resources on four specific themes: i) battle strategy in the First World War at times depended in important ways both on innovative (if risky) use of civilian-originated telecommunications (telegraph, telephone, radio) and on new combat-inspired technologies such as the Fullerphone, developed in 1915-16, in order accomplish secure communications in the face of innovative enemy techniques of interception. ii) patterns of innovation in First World War telecommunications need to be understood within the patent system for managing intellectual property rights. These extend both to the rights of the state over those of civilian and military patentees, and the pressure put on the management of that system by the priorities of war. Only by this means can we understand how the Fullerphone was produced for the British and other armies as the subject of a secret patent in 1916. iii) there was a subtly differentiated range of rewards available for militarily useful innovations in telecommunications: patent royalties, government purchase, promotion, medals or post hoc awards from the Royal Commission etc. The Fullerphone acts once again as an ideal case study, since most of such rewards were accrued by its inventor, Algernon Clement Fuller. iv) after the Great War difficult questions arose regarding the legitimate profit from wartime manufacture. The project resources focus on an important yet little studied case: the Marconi company's long legal dispute with the State over mass wartime 'infringement' of its wireless telegraphy patent rights, the large settlement from which funded the creation of the Cable and Wireless Co. This proposal is modelled on the PI's recent AHRC-funded Knowledge Transfer Project partnered with the Thackray Museum in Leeds, "Patently Innovative: Re-interpreting the history of industrial medicine" AH/I027339/1, also drawing on 'Owning and Disowning Invention'.

Over the next twenty years, the automotive and aerospace sector will undergo a fundamental revolution in propulsion technology. The automotive sector will rapidly move away from petrol and diesel engine powered cars towards fully electric propelled vehicles whilst planes will move away from pure kerosene powered jet engines to hybrid-electric propulsion. The automotive and aerospace industry has worked for the last two decades on developing electric propulsion research but development investment from industry and governments was low until recently, due to lag of legislation to significantly reduce greenhouse gases. Since the ratification of the 2016 Paris Agreement, which aims to keep global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius, governments of industrial developed nations have now legislated to ban new combustion powered vehicles (by 2040 in the UK and France, by 2030 in Germany and similar legislation is expected soon in China). The implementation of this ban will see a sharp rise of the global electric vehicle market to 7.5 million by 2020 with exponential growth. In the aerospace sector, Airbus, Siemens and Rolls-Royce have announced a 100-seater hybrid-electric aircraft to be launched by 2030 following successful tests of 2 seater electric powered planes. Other American and European aerospace industries such as Boeing and General Electric must also prepare for this fundamental shift in propulsion technology. Every electric car and every hybrid-electric plane needs an electric drive (propulsion) system, which typically comprises a motor and the electronics that controls the flow of energy to the motor. In order to make this a cost-effective reality, the cost of electric drives must be halved and their size and weight must be reduced by up to 500% compared to today's drive systems. These targets can only be achieved by radical integration of these two sub-systems that form an electric drive: the electric motor and the power electronics (capacitors, inductors and semiconductor switches). These are currently built as two independent systems and the fusion of both creates new interactions and physical phenomena between power electronics components and the electric motor. For example, all power electronics components would experience lots of mechanical vibrations and heat from the electric motor. Other challenges are in the assembly of connecting millimetre thin power electronics semiconductors onto a large hundred times bigger aluminium block that houses the electric motor for mechanical strength. To achieve this type of integration, industry recognises that future professional engineers need skills beyond the classical multi-disciplinary approach where individual experts work together in a team. Future propulsion engineers must adopt cross-disciplinary and creative thinking in order to understand the requirements of other disciplines. In addition, they will need an understanding of non-traditional engineering subjects such as business thinking, use of big data, environmental issues and ethical impact. Future propulsion engineers will need to experience a training environment that emphasises both deep subject knowledge and cross-disciplinary thinking. This EPSRC CDT in Power Electronics for Sustainable Electric Propulsion is formed by two of UK's largest and most forward thinking research groups in this field (at Newcastle and Nottingham Universities) and includes 16 leading industrial partners (Cummins, Dyson, CRRC, Protean, to name a few). All of them sharing one vision: To create a new generation of UK power electronics specialists, needed to meet the societal and industrial demand for clean, electric propulsion systems in future automotive and aerospace transport infrastructures.