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Google (United States)

Country: United States

Google (United States)

58 Projects, page 1 of 12
  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/S021892/1
    Funder Contribution: 4,986,850 GBP

    The Centre's themes align with the 'Towards A Data Driven Future' and 'Enabling Intelligence' priority areas, meeting the needs identified by UKRI to provide a highly skilled - and in demand - workforce focused on ensuring positive, human-centred benefits accrued from innovations in data driven and intelligence-based systems. The Centre has a distinct and methodologically challenging "people-first" perspective: unlike an application-orientated approach (where techniques are applied to neatly or simplistically defined problems, sometimes called "solutionism"), this lens will ensure that intense, multi-faceted and iterative explorations of the needs, capabilities and values of people, and wider societal views, challenge and disrupt computational science. In a world of big data and artificial intelligence, the precious smallness of real individuals with their values and aspirations are easily overlooked. Even though the impact of data-driven approaches and intelligence are only beginning to be felt at a human scale, there are already signs of concern over what these will mean for life, with governments and others worldwide addressing implications for education, jobs, safety and indeed even what is unique in being human. Sociologists, economists and policy makers of course have a role in ensuring positive outcomes for people and society of data-driven and intelligence systems; but, computational scientists have a pivotal duty too. Our viewpoint, then, will always see the human as a first-class citizen in the future physical-digital world, not perceiving themselves as outwitted, devalued or marginalised by the expanding capabilities of machine computation, automation and communication. Swansea and the wider region of Wales is a place and community where new understandings of data science and machine intelligence are being formed within four challenging contexts defined in the Internet Coast City Deal: Life Science and Well-being; Smart Manufacturing; Smart and Sustainable Energy; and Economic Acceleration. Studies commissioned by the City Deal and BEIS evidence the science and innovation strengths in Swansea and region in these areas and indicate how transformational investments in these areas will be for the region and the UK. Our Centre will, then, immerse cohorts in these contexts to challenge them methodologically and scientifically. The use of data-driven and intelligence systems in each of the four contexts gives rise to security, privacy and wider ethical, legal, governance and regulatory issues and our Centre also has a cross-cutting theme to train students to understand, accommodate and shape current and future developments in these regards. Cohort members will work to consider how the Centre's challenge themes direct and drive their thinking about data and intelligence, benefitting from both the multidisciplinary team that have built strong research agendas and connections with each of the contexts and the rich set of stakeholders that are our Centre has assembled. Importantly, a process of pivoting between challenge themes will be applied: insights, methods and challenges from one theme and its research projects will be tested and extended in others with the aim of enriching all. These, along with several other mechanisms (such as intra- and inter-cohort sandpits and side projects) are designed to develop a powerful bonding and shaping "cohort effect". The need for and value of our Centre is evidenced by substantial external industrial investment we have have secured: £1,750,000 of cash and £4,136,050 in-kind (total:£5,886,050). These partners and stakeholders have helped create the vision and detail of the proposal and include: Vint Cerf ("father of the internet" and Vice President of Google); NHS; Pfizer; Tata Steel; Ford; QinetiQ; McAfee; Ordnance Survey; Facebook; IBM; Microsoft; Fujitsu; Worshipful Company of IT Spiritual and Ethical Panel; and, Vicki Hanson (CEO, Association of Computing Machinery).

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/J017728/1
    Funder Contribution: 6,219,060 GBP

    SOCIAM - Social Machines - will research into pioneering methods of supporting purposeful human interaction on the World Wide Web, of the kind exemplified by phenomena such as Wikipedia and Galaxy Zoo. These collaborations are empowering, as communities identify and solve their own problems, harnessing their commitment, local knowledge and embedded skills, without having to rely on remote experts or governments. Such interaction is characterised by a new kind of emergent, collective problem solving, in which we see (i) problems solved by very large scale human participation via the Web, (ii) access to, or the ability to generate, large amounts of relevant data using open data standards, (iii) confidence in the quality of the data and (iv) intuitive interfaces. "Machines" used to be programmed by programmers and used by users. The Web, and the massive participation in it, has dissolved this boundary: we now see configurations of people interacting with content and each other, typified by social web sites. Rather than dividing between the human and machine parts of the collaboration (as computer science has traditionally done), we should draw a line around them and treat each such assembly as a machine in its own right comprising digital and human components - a Social Machine. This crucial transition in thinking acknowledges the reality of today's sociotechnical systems. This view is of an ecosystem not of humans and computers but of co-evolving Social Machines. The ambition of SOCIAM is to enable us to build social machines that solve the routine tasks of daily life as well as the emergencies. Its aim is to develop the theory and practice so that we can create the next generation of decentralised, data intensive, social machines. Understanding the attributes of the current generation of successful social machines will help us build the next. The research undertakes four necessary tasks. First, we need to discover how social computing can emerge given that society has to undertake much of the burden of identifying problems, designing solutions and dealing with the complexity of the problem solving. Online scaleable algorithms need to be put to the service of the users. This leads us to the second task, providing seamless access to a Web of Data including user generated data. Third, we need to understand how to make social machines accountable and to build the trust essential to their operation. Fourth, we need to design the interactions between all elements of social machines: between machine and human, between humans mediated by machines, and between machines, humans and the data they use and generate. SOCIAM's work will be empirically grounded by a Social Machines Observatory to track, monitor and classify existing social machines and new ones as they evolve, and act as an early warning facility for disruptive new social machines. These lines of interlinked research will initially be tested and evaluated in the context of real-world applications in health, transport, policing and the drive towards open data cities (where all public data across an urban area is linked together) in collaboration with SOCIAM's partners. Putting research ideas into the field to encounter unvarnished reality provides a check as to their utility and durability. For example the Open City application will seek to harness citywide participation in shared problems (e.g. with health, transport and policing) exploiting common open data resources. SOCIAM will undertake a breadth of integrated research, engaging with real application contexts, including the use of our observatory for longitudinal studies, to provide cutting edge theory and practice for social computation and social machines. It will support fundamental research; the creation of a multidisciplinary team; collaboration with industry and government in realization of the research; promote growth and innovation - most importantly - impact in changing the direction of ICT.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/L015242/1
    Funder Contribution: 5,039,180 GBP

    Quantum technologies promise a transformation of measurement, communication and computation by using ideas originating from quantum physics. The UK was the birthplace of many of the seminal ideas and techniques; the technologies are now ready to translate from the laboratory into industrial applications. Since international companies are already moving in this area, there is a critical need across the UK for highly-skilled researchers who will be the future leaders in quantum technology. Our proposal is driven by the need to train this new generation of leaders. They will need to be equipped to function in a complex research and engineering landscape where quantum physics meets cryptography, complexity and information theory, devices, materials, software and hardware engineering. We propose to train a cohort of leaders to meet these challenges within the highly interdisciplinary research environment provided by UCL, its commercial and governmental laboratory partners. In their first year the students will obtain a background in devices, information and computational sciences through three concentrated modules organized around current research issues. They will complete a team project and a longer individual research project, preparing them for their choice of main research doctoral topic at the end of the year. Cross-cohort training in communication skills, technology transfer, enterprise, teamwork and career planning will continue throughout the four years. Peer to peer learning will be continually facilitated not only by organized cross-cohort activities, but also by the day to day social interaction among the members of the cohort thanks to their co-location at UCL.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/L016036/1
    Funder Contribution: 4,764,820 GBP

    The EPSRC Collaborative Doctoral Training Centre in Science and Engineering in Arts, Heritage and Archaeology (CDT SEAHA) will create a sustainable world-leading training hub producing leaders in the cutting-edge domains of measurement and sensing, materials characterisation, interaction technologies, digital technologies and new ventures. The graduates from the programs will not only create new scientific and engineering knowledge and fill skills gaps in these domains but have a deep understanding of the ethical, practical, economic and social imperatives of the deployment of this knowledge in the arts, Heritage and Archaeological sectors. University College London, University of Oxford and University of Brighton will work as a team bringing together highly complementary supervisory capacities in order to fill the skills gap in the cycle of data creation, data to knowledge and knowledge to enterprise by pushing the state-of-the-art in metrology, sensing, spectroscopy, materials characterisation, modelling, big data mining, crowd engagement, new interaction technologies, digital technology and business skills. Partnering with globally renowned (national and international) heritage organisations representing a world class, broad range of forms of heritage and the arts, the student cohorts will be trained and developed in fully engaged cross-disciplinary environments, challenged by research questions addressing complex materials and environments. The most advanced scientific tools and approaches, some to be developed in collaboration with the Diamond Light Source and the National Physical Laboratory, will be deployed to answer questions on its origin, date, creation, conservation and composition of objects and materials. In addition to the fundamental physical science approach, the students will, in an innovative cohort approach to training and development, explore ways of engaging with presentation and visualisation methods, using pervasive mobile, digital and creative technologies, and with qualitative and participatory methods. This approach will engage the sensors and instrumentation industrial domain, as well as creative industries, both high added value industries and major contributors to the UK economy. The CDT will have a transformative effect on public institutions concerned with heritage interpretation, conservation and management, generating substantial tourism income. Without the CDT, some of the most dynamic UK sectors will lose their competitive edge in the global arts and heritage market. The CDT was created with the close involvement of a number of stakeholders crucially contributing to the development of the training programme based on the cohort teaching approach. The added value of this approach is in that creativity is unleashed through the promotion of excellence in a series of cohort activities, in which the Partner institutions intensively collaborate in teaching, placements, supervision, networking and organisation of public engagement events. The particular added value of this CDT is the high potential for engagement of the general public with science and engineering, while promoting responsible innovation conscious of ethical and social dimensions of arts, heritage and archaeology. The CDT SEAHA builds on the highly successful AHRC/EPSRC Science and Heritage Programme at UCL which mobilised the UK heritage science sector and repositioned it at the forefront of global development. The CDT will represent a step-change in capacity building; it will propel a young generation of cross-disciplinary scientists and engineers into highly challenging but hugely interesting and rewarding careers in the heritage sector, in SMEs, and public institutions and equip them with translational and transferrable skills that will enable them to thrive in the most complex research and entrepreneurial environments.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: NE/X00239X/1
    Funder Contribution: 100,740 GBP

    Volcanic eruptions in marine settings pose a diverse range of hazards, both directly and indirectly caused by the eruption. In January 2022 the partially-submerged Tongan volcano Hunga Tonga - Hunga-Ha'apai experienced one of the most powerful volcanic events seen in decades, generating a tsunami that caused damage both locally and on shorelines thousands of km away, breaking the only seafloor telecommunications cables that connect Tonga to the rest of the world and causing $90.4M of damage, equivalent to 18.5% of Tonga's Gross Domestic Product. The damage to the cable both severely hampered efforts to contact and assist Tonga in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and the time of writing (16th Feb 2022) had not yet been repaired; effectively meaning that 105,000 Tongan citizens have had to rely on low bandwidth, high latency satellite communication for over a month. Both the local tsunami and the cable break were unusual. First, while local tsunami waves ran up to 15m in some parts of Tonga, this near field tsunami was smaller and caused less damage than similar events elsewhere e.g. smaller 2018 Anak Krakatau volcanic-tsunami. Second, while the explosive event at the volcano occurred at 04:14 UTC the seabed cable faults did not occur until 05:40 UTC, 90 minutes later. This proposal will examine whether these events were caused by secondary submarine landslides or other process and will characterise their locations, dynamics and magnitudes. In order to address these important questions we will collect new high-resolution multibeam bathymetric data in April 2022 over the region to compare with existing high-resolution data from before the eruption. This comparison will allow us to identify seafloor changes caused by Hunga Tonga -Hunga Ha'apai, map their locations and extents and calculate the volumes of material added or mobilised during this event. This study will also provide a new baseline from which future larger studies of this potentially paradigm-shifting eruption can be based and the products generated will help to constrain the boundary conditions for future tsunami modelling. In order for data to be accurate and useful they must be collected as soon as is feasible after the eruption. The seafloor is extremely dynamic (as shown by repeat surveys at smaller offshore volcanoes), large volumes of material can be deposited over short timescales and existing shallow sediments can be remobilised by waves and storms. This opportunity is unique both because of the scale of the event and because of the high-quality data available to study it (pre-existing bathymetry, cooperation from cable operators, well constrained eruption timings and processes) and also takes advantage of extending a scheduled research cruise nearby, significantly reducing the associated costs and CO2 outputs. Cable companies can share data from the faults and repair, but their vessels are not equipped with multibeam sonars required to perform detailed seafloor surveys; hence the causes of faults, the nature of the eruptive event are unclear and cannot be addressed by satellite data either. Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai is far from unique; there are numerous similar volcanoes both in the Tofua Arc and worldwide. However, very few of these are monitored and most are poorly surveyed; hence the risk they pose is unclear. This timely project will provide the first detailed time-lapse surveys for such a large offshore eruption, and thus enables major step changes in understanding the dynamics of extremely large eruptions, and how they generate secondary hazards, via tsunami or breaking critical seabed telecommunication cables that carry >99% of all digital traffic globally. Time is of the essence; performing a rapid response survey (by extending an already scheduled cruise that will travel close to the area) will provide robust answers to fundamental questions about submarine volcanic eruptions and their linked hazards.

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