Every day millions of citizens do something creative, from knitting and genealogy to photography and choirs. These creative citizens, some organised in groups and networks, some not, are the bedrock of the creative economy. As such, they underpin the intangible assets of the "knowledge economy" upon which the UK depends for its prosperity. At present, there is much that we do not know about our creative citizens. Why do they do what they do? What is the value of their creativity, to them as individuals and to their communities? How is their potential changed by the emergence of communications technologies which permit on-line social networking? Does inequality of digital access undermine this new creative citizenship? Are today's creative citizens capable of providing more local and flexible services, previously delivered by more remote public and private sector organisations? If their work is valued, what interventions and policies would facilitate their growth? This research seeks to answer these questions by examining three manifestations of creative citizenship: - hyperlocal publishing groups, writing neighbourhood news most often as a blog site have started to emerge in scores of communities around the UK, sometimes in response to the scaling back of traditional media; - community-led design, which is increasingly deployed as a means of ensuring that new buildings and other products reflect the needs, creativity and aspirations of the people who will use them; - creative practitioner communities, which take many forms: here we explore the value-creation that arises between relatively formal communities of this kind and the growing highly informal networks of individual creative citizens, many built around online communications platforms. Our aim in studying these cases is to generate data and insight about each case, but also to answer the more general questions set out above: what is the value of their work, to these citizens as individuals, to their communities and to wider civic goals? The background to our interest in creative citizenship arises from the way that on-line communications have enabled inviduals and small groups of individuals to engage more frequently, deftly and in greater depth with many types of organisation. Today, many companies design their products and services in close dialogue with users: this is routine for, say, video games developers, but it is also increasingly true of "smart" manufacturers of cars, toys and other consumer-focused industrial products, using Web2.0 technology. This shift from a "user pays" to a "user makes" approach supports the possibility of a growth in smaller-scale, more flexible and voluntary community services. Nesta, one of our partners in this project, has a laboratory for public service design based upon these principles. Glass-House Community Led Design, another partner, specialises in connecting designers and the widest possible range of stakeholders. The research will produce:- - improved data on the value, scale and potential of UK hyperlocal publishers and how they interact with traditional media; plus working with our partner (Talk About Local) sharp insights into the conditions likeliest to support the development of successful hyperlocals and the tools needed to achieve this; - understanding the value, potential and practicalities of community-led design, with a particular focus upon understanding the potential and limitations of digital media; - an evaluation of everyday, "at home" creative citizenship which provides an indication of its scale and potential, along with insight into the most effective ways of providing gateways between the work of these lone or loosely networked creative citizens and more formal organisations and structures. Our findings will be of value to policy-makers concerned with the development of the UK creative economy, along with strong communities of place and interest.

The increasing popularity of smartphones and other mobile devices, where the end user has access to a host of rich multimedia functionality, means that the current mobile network architecture is struggling to meet surging data demands. Smartphone ownership in the UK alone has risen from 38% of the population in early 2010 to 60% in 2013 with the ONS reporting that over 32% of adults now access the Internet using their smartphone every day. This figure is expected to grow significantly in the coming years with Cisco predicting that worldwide demand for mobile data traffic will outstrip fixed data, reaching 11.2 Exabytes per month by 2017. Although the global rollout of 4G networks is well underway, it is unlikely that that 4G alone will be able to service the growing data requirements of mobile users. Furthermore, while voice, data, and compressed streaming media are now the norm, it is future social networking applications which will undoubtedly present mobile network designers and operators with their greatest challenge. Both Google and Samsung, through their Glass and Galaxy Gear based concepts respectively, have given us a glimpse of some of the exciting new pervasive technologies that will push the boundaries on the maximum rate at which data can be communicated over mobile networks. For example, using Google Glass, users will no longer just shop and download compressed audio and video, instead they will be immersed into a completely new augmented reality in which they can share their immediate perception and senses with friends and colleagues in the cloud. While this technology will revolutionise social networking it will add further stress to already overburdened mobile networks. To avoid future congestion caused by this huge influx of data, a major change in the way mobile networks are setup and operated is required. However, considerable academic, industrial and regulatory challenges remain and this is the focus of the proposed research programme. To help overcome the future "communications bottleneck" in mobile systems, this project proposes a new paradigm for ultra-high capacity mobile networks by simultaneously and jointly addressing the bandwidth problem and the dynamic network management issues associated with device-to-device communications. Combining the complementary expertise of research teams in Queens University Belfast and Cardiff University, this project will focus on understanding and exploiting incentivised, multimode user equipment operating as an ultra-high capacity underlay network featuring real-time opportunistic adaptive routing all overseen by a context aware mobile network infrastructure.

National infrastructure provides essential services to a modern economy: energy, transport, digital communications, water supply, flood protection, and waste water / solid waste collection, treatment and disposal. The OECD estimates that globally US$53 trillion of infrastructure investment will be needed by 2030. The UK's National Infrastructure Plan set out over £460 billion of investment in the next decade, but is not yet known what effect that investment will have on the quality and reliability of national infrastructure services, the size of the economy, the resilience of society or its impacts upon the environment. Such a gap in knowledge exists because of the sheer complexity of infrastructure networks and their interactions with people and the environment. That means that there is too much guesswork, and too many untested assumptions in the planning, appraisal and design of infrastructure, from European energy networks to local drainage systems. Our vision is for infrastructure decisions to be guided by systems analysis. When this vision is realised, decision makers will have access to, and visualisation of, information that tells them how all infrastructure systems are performing. They will have models that help to pinpoint vulnerabilities and quantify the risks of failure. They will be able to perform 'what-if' analysis of proposed investments and explore the effects of future uncertainties, such as population growth, new technologies and climate change. The UK Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (ITRC) is a consortium of seven UK universities, led by the University of Oxford, which has developed unique capability in infrastructure systems analysis, modelling and decision making. Thanks to an EPSRC Programme Grant (2011-2015) the ITRC has developed and demonstrated the world's first family of national infrastructure system models (NISMOD) for analysis and long-term planning of interdependent infrastructure systems. The research is already being used by utility companies, engineering consultants, the Institution of Civil Engineers and many parts of the UK government, to analyse risks and inform billions of pounds worth of better infrastructure decisions. Infrastructure UK is now using NISMOD to analyse the National Infrastructure Plan. The aim of MISTRAL is to develop and demonstrate a highly integrated analytics capability to inform strategic infrastructure decision making across scales, from local to global. MISTRAL will thereby radically extend infrastructure systems analysis capability: - Downscale: from ITRC's pioneering representation of national networks to the UK's 25.7 million households and 5.2 million businesses, representing the infrastructure services they demand and the multi-scale networks through which these services are delivered. - Upscale: from the national perspective to incorporate global interconnections via telecommunications, transport and energy networks. - Across-scale: to other national settings outside the UK, where infrastructure needs are greatest and where systems analysis represents a huge business opportunity for UK engineering firms. These research challenges urgently need to be tackled because infrastructure systems are interconnected across scales and prolific technological innovation is now occurring that will exploit, or may threaten, that interconnectedness. MISTRAL will push the frontiers of system research in order to quantify these opportunities and risks, providing the evidence needed to plan, invest in and design modern, sustainable and resilient infrastructure services. Five years ago, proposing theory, methodology and network models that stretched from the household to the globe, and from the UK to different national contexts would not have been credible. Now the opportunity for multi-scale modelling is coming into sight, and ITRC, perhaps uniquely, has the capacity and ambition to take on that challenge in the MISTRAL programme.

Understanding human behaviour and how it shapes organisations, communities and societies is needed to address global challenges such as the environmental, economic and health crises that we face now and in the future. Currently, behavioural research is not well coordinated in the UK. It also doesn't always ask the right research questions, involve people with the best skills, make good use of existing data, take advantage of innovative research methods or produce findings that can be used to make positive changes. The Behavioural Research UK Leadership Hub (BR-UK) will change this. BR-UK brings together a team from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that includes experienced researchers from many different backgrounds and partners from government, the wider public sector, charities and businesses. We will work with communities to better understand behaviour and conduct research to improve lives and livelihoods. BR-UK will deliver a detailed work programme for the first 18 months. At the same time, we will expand our initial plans for the longer term to be reviewed by the funder, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). In the first 18 months, we will: - Carry out a scoping study to look at needs, priorities and opportunities for behavioural research and set up a national network of researchers and research users - Determine how behavioural research can be more sustainable to make the best use of available funding - Identify (with our international advisory board) under-used global evidence as well as methods and theories to improve behavioural research excellence - Conduct 'demonstration projects' to show how the team can work together to use existing data and speed up the application of models and frameworks to provide rapid results. Topics include how behavioural advice was used during the Covid-19 pandemic, how we address some current issues like speeding on our roads, how to combine large amounts of data more efficiently and how well public support for different policies to help tackle climate change can be transferred between countries - Set up & test a responsive-mode consultancy service where organisations can ask questions about how behavioural research could help them with their policies or practices, and be matched to team members with relevant expertise. Looking ahead, BR-UK will organise our work around four Work Packages (WPs) and Themes (T). Work Packages are about HOW we will do things, and our Themes are about WHAT we will focus on. These are: WP1: Capability Building; WP2: Data and Technology; WP3: Methods and Evidence Synthesis; WP4: Engagement and Involvement; T1: Environment and Sustainability; T2: Health and Wellbeing; T3: Resilient Communities: and T4: Organisations, Markets and the Economy. We will conduct new studies across WPs and Themes. Examples of research questions to illustrate the range are: how to better use mobile phone technologies to engage people long-term to stop smoking or reduce their alcohol consumption; how to help regulators and the police keep children safer online and tackle internet crime; how to help people and organisations shift to transport that is better for the environment; how best to work with local and national governments to better understand the needs of their local communities when making policy decisions. As a Leadership 'Hub', BR-UK will work with other parts of the programme ('spokes' including a centre to train students and early career researchers as they develop. We will be flexible, and reserve part of the funding that could lead to new studies when sudden events like a new threat, emergency or event occur. We are well positioned to carry out rapid reviews of existing research to help governments and organisations know what behavioural evidence exists to inform decisions, and to identify evidence gaps. We will be ready to adapt and bring in new members with skills and experience that are most needed as BR-UK evolves.

Understanding the behaviour of the Internet with its inherent complexity and scale is essential when designing new Internet systems and applications. Simulation, emulation, and test-bed experiments are important techniques for investigating large-scale complex Internet systems. It is now widely recognised that classical theoretical/simulation scalability studies for Internet research are unreliable without relevant and representative supporting experimental evidence. This is increasingly important with the emergence of 5G, cloud services and IoT, which lead to at least 2 orders increase in connection capacity requirements and 3 orders of additional devices that require Internet connectivity. Great progress has been made in the UK over the years on the development of communications laboratories infrastructure in ICT domains such as optical & wireless, signal processing, networks and distributed systems, where the UK is internationally leading. However, UK telecommunications research remains largely segregated in independent optical, wireless or computer network research labs, so researchers very rarely have the opportunity to experiment across the boundaries between these disciplines. Due to the limitations of performing research in discipline-specific facilities, the current UK ICT research output does not address realistic end-to-end Internet systems INITIATE will create a new, specialist distributed test-bed to facilitate the increasingly large and complex experimentation required for future Internet research. This will be achieved by interconnecting operational, state-of-the-art operational laboratories at the Universities of Bristol, Lancaster (UoLan), Edinburgh (UoEd) and Kings College London (KCL). These laboratories will contribute many key capabilities for Internet research including optical networks, wireless/RF communications, the Internet of Things (IoT), Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) and cloud computing. Therefore INITIATE will offer the combined capability to the UK Internet research and innovation communities as a single distributed test-bed able to support the increasingly complex experimentation required for future Internet research. For example, INITIATE will enable for the first time experimentally driven research addressing the integration of multi-domain and multi-technology 5G and IoT access platforms with high-speed optical transport and investigate full system optimization strategies. Uniquely, INITIATE will also be able to integrate end-users as part of the experimental process and support user driven scenarios such as mobile edge computing, data visualization and autonomous mobility. The applicants have an outstanding worldwide reputation for creating, maintaining and operating research test-beds. They have repeatedly enabled remote access to their laboratories for experimenters and they have worked in multiple initiatives involving interconnection of research test-beds either locally, across the consortium partners or at a regional, national and international scale. Examples are: Bristol Is Open (UoB), TOUCAN (EPSRC involving UoB, UoEd, UoLan), NDFIS (UoB, UCL, SOTON, Cambridge), wireless mesh networks for rural communities (UoLan) and the Ofcom whitespace trial environment (KCL), among others. Internationally, the partners have been involved in numerous Future Internet infrastructure projects such as OFELIA & Fed4FIRE (EU FIRE), FIBRE & FUTEBOL (EU-Brazil), STRAUSS (EU-Japan) and GEANT, where they have delivered test-bed infrastructure, developed experimental control and federation tools and supported user experiments. INITIATE will create an environment for delivering excellence in Internet research, educational and industrial innovation and cross-discipline interaction through experimentally driven national collaboration. The project will also support academia as well as industry and SMEs and will deliver a sustainable engagement model.