Analysis and diagnosis, the core elements of sensing, are highlighted by almost every initiative for health, environment, security and quality of life. Sensors have advanced to an extent that they are sought for many applications in manufacturing and detection segments, and their cost advantages have boosted their utility and demand. The pillars of sensor research are in highly diverse fields and traditional single-discipline research is particularly poor at catalysing sensor innovation and application, as these typically fall in the 'discipline gaps'. Furthermore, the underpinning technology is advancing at a phenomenal pace. These developments are creating exciting opportunities, but also enormous challenges to UK academia and industry: Traditional PhD programmes are centred on individuals and focused on narrowly defined problems and do not produce the skills and leadership qualities required to capitalise on future opportunities. Industry complains that skills are waning and sensors are increasingly being treated as 'black boxes' without an understanding of underlying principles. We propose to establish the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Sensor Technologies and Measurement to address these problems head on. The CDT will provide a co-ordinated programme of training in research-, team-, and leadership-skills to future generations of sensor champions. The CDT will build on the highly successful CamBridgeSens research network which was previously funded by the EPSRC under its discipline-bridging programme and which has transformed the culture in which sensor research is being carried out at our University, breaking down discipline barriers, and bringing together world-leading expertise, infrastructure and people from more than 20 Departments. The CDT will now extend this culture to the training of future sensor researchers to generate a virtual super department in Cambridge with more than 70 PIs. The programme will be underpinned by a consortium of industrial partners which is strongly integrated into the CDT and through its needs and engagement will inform the direction of the programme. In the first year of their 4 year PhD programme, student cohorts will attend specialised lectures, practicals and research mini-projects, to receive training in a range of topics underpinning sensor research, including physical principles of sensor hardware, acquisition and interpretation of sensory information, and user requirements of sensor applications. Team-building aspects will be strongly emphasised, and through an extended sensor project treated as a team challenge in the first year of their programme, the students will together, as a cohort, face a problem of industrial relevance and learn how to address a research problem as a team rather than individually. The cohorts will be supported by a mix of academic and industrial mentors, and will receive business, presentation and project-management skills. During years 2 to 4 of their PhD course, students will pick a PhD topic offered by the more than 70 PIs participating in the programme. Each topic on offer will be supervised by at least two academics from different departments/disciplines and may include industrial partners in the CDT. Throughout, we will create strong identities for the sensor student cohorts through a number of people-based activities that maximise engagement between researchers, research activities and that bridge gaps across disciplines, Departments and research cultures.

The resilience of building and civil engineering structures is typically associated with the design of individual elements such that they have sufficient capacity or potential to react in an appropriate manner to adverse events. Traditionally this has been achieved by using 'robust' design procedures that focus on defining safety factors for individual adverse events and providing redundancy. As such, construction materials are designed to meet a prescribed specification; material degradation is viewed as inevitable and mitigation necessitates expensive maintenance regimes; ~£40 billion/year is spent in the UK on repair and maintenance of existing, mainly concrete, structures and ~$2.2 trillion/year is needed in the US to restore its infrastructure to good condition (grade B). More recently, based on a better understanding and knowledge of microbiological systems, materials that have the ability to adapt and respond to their environment have been developed. This fundamental change has the potential to facilitate the creation of a wide range of 'smart' materials and intelligent structures. This will include both autogenous and autonomic self-healing materials and adaptable, self-sensing and self-repairing structures. These materials can transform our infrastructure by embedding resilience in the components of these structures so that rather than being defined by individual events, they can evolve over their lifespan. To be truly self-healing, the material components will need to act synergistically over the range of time and length scales at which different forms of damage occur. Conglomerate materials, which comprise the majority of our infrastructure and built environment, form the focus of the proposed project. While current isolated international pockets of research activities on self-healing materials are on-going, most advances have been in other material fields and many have focussed on individual techniques and hence have only provided a partial solution to the inherent multi-dimensional nature of damage specific to construction materials with limited flexibility and multi-functionality. This proposal seeks to develop a multi-faceted self-healing approach that will be applicable to a wide range of conglomerates and their respective damage mechanisms. This proposal brings together a consortium of 11 academics from the Universities of Cardiff, Bath and Cambridge with the relevant skills and experience in structural and geotechnical engineering, materials chemistry, biology and materials science to develop and test the envisioned class of materials. The proposed work leverages on ground-breaking developments in these sciences in other sectors such as the pharmaceutical, medical and polymer composite industries. The technologies that are proposed are microbioloical and chemical healing at the micro- and meso-scale and crack control and prevention at the macro scale. This will be achieved through 4 work packages, three of which target the healing at the individual scales (micro/meso/macro) and the fourth which addresses the integration of the individual systems, their compatibility and methods of achieving healing of recurrent damage. This will then culminate in a number of field-trials in partnership with the project industrial collaborators to take this innovation closer to commercialisation. An integral part of this project will be the knowledge transfer activities and collaboration with other research centres throughout the world. This will ensure that the research is at the forefront of the global pursuit for intelligent infrastructure and will ensure that maximum impact is achieved. One of the primary outputs of the project will be the formation and establishment of a UK Virtual Centre of Excellence in Intelligent Construction Materials that will provide a national and international platform for facilitating dialogue and collaboration to enhance the global knowledge economy.

What will the UK's critical infrastructure look like in 2030? In 2050? How resilient will it be? Decisions taken now by policy makers, NGOs, industrialists, and user communities will influence the answers to these questions. How can this decision making be best informed by considerations of infrastructural resilience? This project will consider future developments in the UK's energy and transport infrastructure and the resilience of these systems to natural and malicious threats and hazards, delivering a) fresh perspectives on how the inter-relations amongst our critical infrastructure sectors impact on current and future UK resilience, b) a state-of-the-art integrated social science/engineering methodology that can be generalised to address different sectors and scenarios, and c) an interactive demonstrator simulation that operationalises the otherwise nebulous concept of resilience for a wide range of decision makers and stakeholders.Current reports from the Institute for Public Policy Research, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Council for Science and Technology, and the Cabinet Office are united in their assessment that achieving and sustaining resilience is the key challenge facing the UK's critical infrastructure. They are also unanimous in their assessment of the main issues. First, there is agreement on the main threats to national infrastructure: i) climate change; ii) terrorist attacks; iii) systemic failure. Second, the complex, disparate and interconnected nature of the UK's infrastructure systems is highlighted as a key concern by all. Our critical infrastructure is highly fragmented both in terms of its governance and in terms of the number of agencies charged with achieving and maintaining resilience, which range from national government to local services and even community groups such as local resilience forums. Moreover, the cross-sector interactions amongst different technological systems within the national critical infrastructure are not well understood, with key inter-dependencies potentially overlooked. Initiatives such as the Cabinet Office's new Natural Hazards Team are working to address this. The establishment of such bodies with responsibility for oversight and improving joined up resilience is a key recommendation in all four reports. However, such bodies currently lack two critical resources: (1) a full understanding of the resilience implications of our current and future infrastructural organisation; and (2) vehicles for effectively conveying this understanding to the full range of relevant stakeholders for whom the term resilience is currently difficult to understand in anything other than an abstract sense. The Resilient Futures project will engage directly with this context by working with relevant stakeholders from many sectors and governance levels to achieve a step change in both (1) and (2). To achieve this, we will focus on future rather than present UK infrastructure. This is for a two reasons. First, we intend to engender a paradigm shift in resilience thinking - from a fragmented short-termism that encourages agencies to focus on protecting their own current assets from presently perceived threats to a longer-term inter-dependent perspective recognising that the nature of both disruptive events and the systems that are disrupted is constantly evolving and that our efforts towards achieving resilience now must not compromise our future resilience. Second, focussing on a 2030/2050 time-frame lifts discussion out of the politically charged here and now to a context in which there is more room for discussion, learning and organisational change. A focus on *current resilience* must overcome a natural tendency for the agencies involved to defend their current processes and practices, explain their past record of disruption management, etc., before the conversation can move to engaging with potential for improvement, learning and change.

Rapidly developing digital technologies, together with social and business trends, are providing huge opportunities for innovation in product and service markets, and also in government processes. Technology developments drive socioeconomic and behavioural changes and vice versa, and the rate of change in these makes tracking and responding to high-speed developments a significant challenge in public and private sectors alike. Agile governance and policy-making for emerging technologies is likely to become a key theme in strategic thinking for the public and private sectors. Particular trends that are challenging now, and will increasingly challenge society include developments in technologies on the outskirts of the internet. These include Artificial Intelligence, not just in the cloud but in Edge computing, and in Internet of Things devices and networks. Alongside and in conjunction with this ecosystem, is Distributed Ledger Technology. Together this ensemble of technologies will enable innovations that promote productivity, like peer-to-peer dynamic contracts and other decision processes, with or without human sight or intervention. However, the ensemble's autonomy, proliferation and use in critical applications, makes the potential for hacking and similar attacks very significant, with the likelihood of them growing to become an issue of strategic national importance. To address this challenge, and to preserve the immense economic and productivity benefits that will come from the successful deployment and application of digital technologies 'at the edge', a focused initiative is needed. Ideally, this will use the UK's current platform of experience in the safe and secure application of the Internet of Things. The contributors to this platform include PETRAS partners, and several other centres of excellence around the UK. It is therefore proposed to build an inclusive PETRAS 2 Research Centre with national strategic value, on the established and successful platform of the PETRAS Hub. This will inherit its governance and management models, which have demonstrated the ability to coordinate and convene collaboration across 11 universities and 110 industrial and government User Partners, but will importantly step up its mission and inclusivity through open research calls for new and existing academic partners. PETRAS 2 will maintain an agile and shared research agenda that views social and physical science challenges with equal measure, and covers a broad range of Technology Readiness Levels, particularly those close to market. It will operate as a virtual centre, providing a magnet for collaboration for user partners and a single expert voice for government. User partner engagement is likely to be strong following the successes of the current PETRAS programme, which has raised over £1m in cash contributions from partners during 2018. The new PETRAS 2 'Secure Digital Technologies at the Edge' methodology will inherit the best of PETRAS, including open calls to the UK research community and a partnership-building fund that allows a responsive approach to opportunities that emerge from existing and new user and academic partnerships. PETRAS 2 will be driven by sectoral cybersecurity priorities while retaining a discovery research agenda to horizon-scan and develop understanding of new threats and opportunities. The scope of projects and the associated Innovate UK SDTaP demonstrators, spans early to late TRLs and aims to put knowledge into real user partner practice. Furthermore, the development of many early career researchers through PETRAS 2 research activities should lead to a step change in our national capability and capacity to address this highly dynamic area of socio-technical opportunity and risk.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) involves capturing carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by power stations and other industrial processes and storing it in underground geological formation. The aim of this project is to gain an enhanced understanding of the impact of dynamic behaviour of carbon capture and storage using novel adsorbents. The proposed research involves development of advanced sorbents and numerical models to simulate the process of large scale CO2 capture and safe storage under variable power load (i.e. CO2 flow rate).