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'.

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.

This project promotes public awareness of women's historical participation in engineering so as to support the UK's Women's Engineering Society (WES) centenary commemorations in 2019. We aim especially to support the WES centenary programme theme of 'Remembering the Past'. The WES centenary comes at a time when recruitment of women to engineering positions in the UK is exceptionally challenging, with women only constituting 11% of UK engineers, compared to 47% on average for other professions, and associated challenges in diversity. This situation is exacerbated by the remarkably resilient - yet inaccurate view - that women's place in engineering has no real historically-embedded position. So like WES we will deploy stories of women's past work in engineering to help normalise the expectation that women today can also become professional engineers for a full career, working against unhelpful myths that women have been systematically excluded from engineering in the past. Our project will complement WES's centenary activities by focusing upon women's participation in engineering well prior to WES's foundation, and the long-term ramifications thereof into the WES era, in activities that draw upon the PI's AHRB/AHRC supported outputs Domesticating Electricity (2008), and co-authored Patently Contestable (2013). We thus aim to i) enhance public understanding of women active in British engineering before WES's foundation in 1919, and indeed before World War 1 ii)show how WES's role in promoting women in engineering drew significantly upon that 'pre-history' iii) highlight how women's historic work in engineering becomes more visible if we reject individualist myths that it was accomplished only by individual (male) heroes iv) show the value of longer term historical evidence in addressing the current concern about UK women's comparatively low participation rate in engineering: in redeeming this situation there is in fact a long tradition of women's participation to build upon, rather than any new ground to break. Our primary activity will be a series of lectures across the UK followed by discussion and with audiences. This will raise awareness of women working in pre-First World War engineering using stories from Domesticating Electricity's exploration of spousal support roles, especially Alice Gordon, contrasted with Caroline Haslett as an example of an independent engineer. These lectures will take place in museums, libraries, universities, and Heritage Open Days. Our second major activity will be to create an 'Electrifying Women' blog and social media profile which will be at the heart of a social media campaign run by project members. Blog posts will highlight both particular cameos of other women working in electrical engineering before WES Our third activity, inspired by our previous collaboration with the IET and WES, is to organise with a professional Wikimedian (Alice White) dedicated wikithons to create, enhance and promote pages for the women involved in engineering before the rise of the Women's Engineering Society. Our fourth activity is to run creative writing sessions as follow-up events for lectures, with audiences enabled thereby to explore fresh ways of bringing to life the rarely documented work of engineering spouses e.g. through fictional diaries that extrapolate from extant fragmentary sources. Our fifth activity is to set up a project website of resources and links to help meet all the objectives outlined above to facilitate further engagement in creative activities that can promote better historical understanding among a wide-range of audiences both inside academia and in the wider public sphere. Our sixth activity will be to support a group of Theatre and Performance Students at the University of Leeds in producing a musical theatre production titled 'Electrifying Women', devised using our project materials. A recording of the performance will be shared on Youtube.

Healthcare systems world-wide are struggling to cope with the demands of ever-increasing populations in the 21st-century, where the effects of increased life expectancy and the demands of modern lifestyles have created an unsustainable social and financial burden. However, healthcare is also entering a new, exciting phase that promises the change required to meet these challenges: ever-increasing quantities of complex data concerning all aspects of healthcare are being stored, throughout the life of a patient. These include electronic health records (EHRs) now active in many hospitals, and large volumes of data being collected by patient-worn sensors. The resulting rapid growth in the amount of data that is stored far outpaces the capability of clinical experts to cope. There is huge potential for using advances in computer science to use these huge datasets. This promises to improve healthcare outcomes significantly by allowing the development of new technologies for healthcare using the data - this is an area that promises to develop into a major new field in medicine. Making sense of the complex data is one of the key challenges for exploiting these massive datasets. This programme aims to establish a new centre focussed on developing the next generation of predictive healthcare technologies, exploiting the EHR using new methods in computer science. We describe a number of healthcare themes which demonstrate the potential to improve patient outcomes. This will be achieved in collaboration with a consortium of leading clinicians and healthcare companies. The primary aim is to develop the "Intelligent EHR", which will have applications in creating "early warning systems" to predict patient problems (such as heart failure), and to help doctors know which drug or treatment would best be used for each individual patient - by interpreting the vast quantities of data available in the EHR.

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.