The work plan of the project covered the following activities:The teaching of the Politics of the European Union module. This was a year long module between October and May that was taught in the academic years 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19. The students who took the module came from a range of subject disciplines, including Politics, International Relations, History and International Business. The module provided the students with a range of innovative teaching approaches. This included an EU simulation exercise as a significant component of the assessment (40% of the total grade) as well as providing students with an engagement with primary documents through a document review exercise that was worth 20% of the module mark. The remaining 20% comprised a long essay that addressed a policy topic. The assessment mix of the module was designed to ensure that students were provided with a theoretical and practical grasp of EU policy-making and were able to apply this within the context of a simulation exercise.To assist students in their study of the subject matter, they were supported by a Virtual Learning Environment platform that included relevant resources such as learning materials, reading lists, links to websites, podcasts and audio recordings of lectures, as well as material that I had obtained copyright permission for, most notably my own book on the COmpanion to the EU.To support the communication and engagement aspect of the work programme, a website was made available which highlighted the work of the programme: https://www.dmu.ac.uk/Study/Business-and-Law/Undergraduate-modules/Jean-Monnet-Module.aspxThe module also supported the research of the project leader, Alasdair Blair, into European integration and teaching. This included a focus on the dynamics of simulation exercises where students were surveyed on an annual basis to ascertain the significance of their experience. This work has also assisted my role as editor of European Political Science, which is the leading professional journal relating to the study of European Politics and is published by the European Consortium for Political Research.To enable students, staff and members of the public to gain a full understanding of the role of the EU policy-making environment, the module also supported the EP to Campus programme which resulted in visits by former MEPs across each year of the planned activity.The former MEPs also took part in a public facing EU Question Time event.To enable a wider engagement with local schoolchildren, a masterclass was held each year which provided students aged between 15-18 with an understanding of the EU.Finally, students took part in annual study trips to the EU institutions in Brussels.

In real world decision-making, such as public security, social choice or recommender systems, we have a large body of data from various networked heterogeneous information sources or individuals that often conflict with each other and provide inconsistent knowledge. It is a challenging task to yield an optimal consensus decision, given the range of individual decisions obtained in terms of these knowledge sources. This research proposal aims to create a novel mathematical and computational framework for trust based social choice in networks and with uncertain knowledge by merging multiple individuals’ preferences in an adaptive manner to reduce the disagreements among them, and automatically seek a decision or provide a recommendation with a maximal consensus. To achieve our goal, we propose to bring together, for the first time, four previously disparate strands of research: social network analysis, fuzzy preference modelling, multiple attribute group decision-making and game theoretic modelling of malicious users. As a showcase the proposed framework will be incorporated to an e-health recommender platform to increase healthy lifestyle in cancer survivors. Both the fellow and the host researcher have extensive research experience in decision support system under uncertainty, e-health platforms and software and mobile development. With the foundational theory already in place, and given the growing interest in decision support systems and social networks, the time is right for pursuing this research. Being executable, this model will pave the way for an entirely new form of automated decision-support under uncertainty and incomplete information in dynamic environments and, at the same time will greatly expand the fellow knowledge and skill set, and help her to develop into a leading independent researcher. The proposed application has great outreach/commercialisation potential and contributes towards the H2020 Health, Demographic Change and Wellbeing challenge.

This is a project for higher education student and staff mobility between Programme Countries and Partner Countries. Please consult the website of the organisation to obtain additional details.

This is a higher education student and staff mobility project, please consult the website of the organisation to obtain additional details.

UVMICROCAT uses an innovative catalytic mesh assisted by a combination of UV and microwave technology for fast and effective treatment of large volumes of wastewater for water re-use. The project proposes an environmentally-friendly, totally innovative method for the treatment of toxic and recalcitrant contaminants in wastewater by enhancing the rate of a novel heterogeneous catalytic treatment process using microwave energy and ultraviolet radiation. The modified PAN catalysts developed at DMU has eliminated the need for iron removal post treatment and has broadened the pH range of application, whilst enabling continuous flow processes favoured by industry. In recent years, several reports have demonstrated the use of microwave and ultraviolet radiation to promote the oxidative degradation of bio-refractory wastes due to their advantages of speeding up the reaction, high-efficiency with no pollution to the environment. Nevertheless the use of microwaves in catalysis and in the water and wastewater industry remains at laboratory scale and therefore requires further in depth research. The major challenges in the water/wastewater industries are centered on the poor penetration depth of microwaves. In the project, we propose to design a UV and microwave assisted reactor which overcomes this scale-up problem. The design of the scalable microwave reactor will not only add new knowledge to the sector but open up new areas of industrial application for microwaves.