More than half of the world's population now resides in cities, and global urbanisation continues at a steady pace. This trend exacerbates mobility issues, with the average UK citizen losing 115hrs annually to traffic congestion, with an estimated annual cost to the economy of more than £8bn. Furthermore, urban traffic poses a significant health threat and is a major contributor to greenhouse gases. Currently deployed traffic control techniques are unable to cope with the increased traffic demand and the highly unpredictable post-pandemic traffic patterns, as they rely on simplified traffic models and operate in a purely reactive mode. The use of Artificial Intelligence, coupled with the wide availability of data, large-scale interconnectivity, and emerging modes of transport such as Connected Autonomous Vehicles, can trigger a shift from reactive to proactive urban traffic control. By leveraging new and complementary AI approaches, the proposed line of research aims to design and develop an urban traffic management and control framework with a holistic view of the controlled region's conditions. This framework will enable proactive actions to prevent environmental and mobility issues, while also supporting effective operations to mitigate observed problems.

Over half of the world's population now lives in cities, and global urbanisation continues at a steady pace. As this trend continues, mobility is becoming an increasingly critical problem. In the UK alone, the cost of congestion reached nearly £8 billion in 2018 in lost time and fuel consumption, and has become a major health threat. At the same time, new modes of transport, such as Connected Autonomous Vehicles, and new business models (e.g., Mobility as a Service) are disrupting the transportation sector. The traffic control industry has to reinvent itself to operate in a world of decentralised control (vehicles making decisions), ubiquitous sensor information, increasing urbanisation pressure, and large-scale interconnectivity. Artificial Intelligence provides a range of approaches that can leverage the growing volume of available data, and the knowledge gained by traffic authorities in the past decades, to support urban mobility. In particular, the proposed line of research aims at designing and creating an autonomic urban traffic management and control framework. The autonomic framework will have the capability to self-manage and self-configure, and will have an holistic view of the condition of the controlled region to proactively act to prevent environmental and mobility issues, or react to mitigate observed problems.

Stalking is included in the governments national strategy on violence against women and girls, whilst people of all genders can be victims, the majority of victims are women and the majority of perpetrators are men. Research nationally has identified a whole range of negative effects on stalking victims' psychological and physical health and has established a link to domestic murder, making prevention and early intervention particularly important. Stalking offences were introduced into law in England and Wales ten years ago in 2012, there has been a large increase in reports of stalking across West Yorkshire in the last two years, including in the Kirklees district, but convictions for stalking offences are low. There is no recent research on stalking in West Yorkshire nor any specialist support provision for victims, despite research showing such support brings about much better outcomes in terms of victims health and well being and in the criminal justice system (Suzy Lamplugh Trust 2022). Secure Societies Institute (SSI) at the University of Huddersfield are carrying out an action research project which will bring the issue of stalking from the margins to the centre in policy, practice addressing violence against women and girls in the West Yorkshire region. We are carrying out an action research project focused on the Kirklees district of West Yorkshire, which involves the voices of women who have been victims of stalking. Our main partners in the project are West Yorkshire Police, West Yorkshire Violence Reduction Unit (West Yorkshire combined Authority), Safer Kirklees and Pennine Domestic Abuse Partnership. Action research is committed to supporting change, improving The main strands to the project are; a. Setting up a new stalking knowledge and research hub linked to the Secure Societies Institute at the University of Huddersfield. b. Reviewing police data on stalking and investigative decision making in stalking cases to inform improvements to policing responses. c. Scoping current support for victims of stalking and review best practice for stalking victims/survivors internationally. d. Consulting/involving women who have been victims of stalking about their experience of support and views on improving support. e. Producing a model for a stalking support provision, produced with victims of stalking their advocates, domestic and sexual abuse services, women's and girls services and other organisations. We will share practice and academic learning from the project across West Yorkshire via the hub. We will also share learning via the established multi-agency and community networks that the university and our partners, West Yorkshire Police, West Yorkshire Violence Reduction Unit, Safer Kirklees and Pennine Domestic Abuse Partnership are active within. Also we will share learning nationally.

Sound, Craft, Vision, Place will draw together a team of researchers from the arts and humanities to assist the promotion, development and provision of innovative outreach activities to encourage community groups to explore and articulate their heritage for themselves, and to stimulate projects for HLF funding. The project themes emphasise the importance of oral history, music, art and design, and digital media at the University of Huddersfield, and our ability to draw on expertise beyond the humanities to provide tools that will attract community interest and prompt project ideas. Community groups themselves will be encouraged to specify the kinds of research areas and methods where collaboration or help would be welcomed. We are especially keen to involve those who have encountered barriers to enjoying the heritage, and an important part of our project will be the role to be played by local and virtual communities in the interpretation of their own backgrounds and surroundings, including web- and digital-based activity to encourage virtual volunteering as a communal activity, undertaken both by people who are connected by place and/or by shared experiences and interests. Among our partners will be the National Coal Mining Museum for England, English Heritage, the Royal Armouries, as well as local community groups, with all of whom we shall be working to develop ideas for projects involving free access to archive materials.

The project aims to create a prototype multi-sensor device, and undertake fundamental enabling research, for the location of underground utilities by combining novel ground penetrating radar, acoustics and low frequency active and passive electromagnetic field (termed quasi-static field) approaches. The multi-sensor device is to employ simultaneously surface-down and in-pipe capabilities in an attempt to achieve the heretofore impossible aim of detecting every utility without local proving excavations. For example, in the case of ground penetrating radar (GPR), which has a severely limited penetration depth in saturated clay soils when deployed traditionally from the surface, locating the GPR transmitter within a deeply-buried pipe (e.g. a sewer) while the receiver is deployed on the surface has the advantage that the signal only needs to travel through the soil one way, thereby overcoming the severe signal attenuation and depth estimation problems of the traditional surface-down technique (which relies on two-way travel through complex surface structures as well as the soil). The quasi-static field solutions employ both the 50Hz leakage current from high voltage cables as well as the earth's electromagnetic field to illuminate the underground infrastructure. The MTU feasibility study showed that these technologies have considerable potential, especially in detecting difficult-to-find pot-ended cables, optical fibre cables, service connections and other shallow, small diameter services. The third essential technology in the multi-sensor device is acoustics, which works best in saturated clays where GPR is traditionally problematic. Acoustic technology can be deployed to locate services that have traditionally been difficult to discern (such as plastic pipes) by feeding a weak acoustic signal into the pipe wall or its contents from a remote location. The combination of these technologies, together with intelligent data fusion that optimises the combined output, in a multi-sensor device is entirely novel and aims to achieve a 100% location success rate without disturbing the ground (heretofore an impossible task and the 'holy grail' internationally).The above technologies are augmented by detailed research into models of signal transmission and attenuation in soils to enable the technologies to be intelligently attuned to different ground conditions, thereby producing a step-change improvement in the results. These findings will be combined with existing shallow surface soil and made ground 3D maps via collaboration with the British Geological Society (BGS) to prove the concept of creating UK-wide geophysical property maps for the different technologies. This would allow the users of the device to make educated choices of the most suitable operating parameters for the specific ground conditions in any location, as well as providing essential parameters for interpretation of the resulting data and removing uncertainties inherent in the locating accuracy of such technologies. Finally, we will also explore knowledge-guided interpretation, using information obtained from integrated utility databases being generated in the DTI(BERR)-funded project VISTA.