This proposal is concerned with the renewal of the Salford IMRC which was initially established in January 2002. This proposal will extent the life of the Salford Centre for Research and Innovation (SCRI) in the built and human environment, until 2011 and further increase the impact that the centre has created in the first five years of its lifecycle. The rolling research agenda and evolving vision of the Centre has been very well received by the industrial and academic circles, as it has been made explicit by the international assessment panels and this renewal aims to firmly establish the world class status of the centre and increase the performance of UK Plc. The centre brings together significant expertise from three research institutes within the university of Salford and aims to continue its collaboration with more that 60 partners in the industrial and academic communities internationally.

The UK water sector is experiencing a period of profound change with both public and private sector actors seeking evidence-based responses to a host of emerging global, regional and national challenges which are driven by demographic, climatic, and land use changes as well as regulatory pressures for more efficient delivery of services. Although the UK Water Industry is keen to embrace the challenge and well placed to innovate, it lacks the financial resources to support longer term skills and knowledge generation. A new cadre of engineers is required for the water industry to not only make our society more sustainable and profitable but to develop a new suite of goods and services for a rapidly urbanising world. EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training provide an ideal mechanism with which to remediate the emerging shortfall in advanced engineering skills within the sector. In particular, the training of next-generation engineering leaders for the sector requires a subtle balance between industrial and academic contributions; calling for a funding mechanism which privileges industrial need but provides for significant academic inputs to training and research. The STREAM initiative draws together five of the UK's leading water research and training groups to secure the future supply of advanced engineering professionals in this area of vital importance to the UK. Led by the Centre for Water Science at Cranfield University, the consortium also draws on expertise from the Universities of Sheffield and Bradford, Imperial College London, Newcastle University, and the University of Exeter. STREAM offers Engineering Doctorate and PhD awards through a programme which incorporates; (i) acquisition of advanced technical skills through attendance at masters level training courses, (ii) tuition in the competencies and abilities expected of senior engineers, and (iii) doctoral level research projects. Our EngD students spend at least 75% of their time working in industry or on industry specified research problems. Example research topics to be addressed by the scheme's students include; delivering drinking water quality and protecting public health; reducing carbon footprint; reducing water demand; improving service resilience and reliability; protecting natural water bodies; reducing sewer flooding, developing and implementing strategies for Integrated Water Management, and delivering new approaches to characterising, communicating and mitigating risk and uncertainty. Fifteen studentships per year for five years will be offered with each position being sponsored by an industrial partner from the water sector. A series of common attendance events will underpin programme and group identity. These include, (i) an initial three-month taught programme based at Cranfield University, (ii) an open invitation STREAM symposium and (iii) a Challenge Week to take place each summer including transferrable skills training and guest lectures from leading industrialists and scientists. Outreach activities will extend participation in the programme, pursue collaboration with associated initiatives, promote 'brand awareness' of the EngD qualification, and engage with a wide range of stakeholder groups (including the public) to promote engagement with and understanding of STREAM activities. Strategic direction for the programme will be formulated through an Industry Advisory Board comprising representatives from professional bodies, employers, and regulators. This body will provide strategic guidance informed by sector needs, review the operational aspects of the taught and research components as a quality control, and conduct foresight studies of relevant research areas. A small International Steering Committee will ensure global relevance for the programme. The total cost of the STREAM programme is £9m, £2.8m of which is being invested by industry and £1.8m by the five collaborating universities. Just under £4.4m is being requested from EPSRC

Compared to many parts of the world, the UK has under-invested in its infrastructure in recent decades. It now faces many challenges in upgrading its infrastructure so that it is appropriate for the social, economic and environmental challenges it will face in the remainder of the 21st century. A key challenge involves taking into account the ways in which infrastructure systems in one sector increasingly rely on other infrastructure systems in other sectors in order to operate. These interdependencies mean failures in one system can cause follow-on failures in other systems. For example, failures in the water system might knock out electricity supplies, which disrupt communications, and therefore transportation, which prevent engineers getting to the original problem in the water infrastructure. These problems now generate major economic and social costs. Unfortunately they are difficult to manage because the UK infrastructure system has historically been built, and is currently operated and managed, around individual infrastructure sectors. Because many privatised utilities have focused on operating infrastructure assets, they have limited experience in producing new ones or of understanding these interdependencies. Many of the old national R&D laboratories have been shut down and there is a lack of capability in the UK to procure and deliver the modern infrastructure the UK requires. On the one hand, this makes innovation risky. On the other hand, it creates significant commercial opportunities for firms that can improve their understanding of infrastructure interdependencies and speed up how they develop and test their new business models. This learning is difficult because infrastructure innovation is undertaken in complex networks of firms, rather than in an individual firm, and typically has to address a wide range of stakeholders, regulators, customers, users and suppliers. Currently, the UK lacks a shared learning environment where these different actors can come together and explore the strengths and weaknesses of different options. This makes innovation more difficult and costly, as firms are forced to 'learn by doing' and find it difficult to anticipate technical, economic, legal and societal constraints on their activity before they embark on costly development projects. The Centre will create a shared, facilitated learning environment in which social scientists, engineers, industrialists, policy makers and other stakeholders can research and learn together to understand how better to exploit the technical and market opportunities that emerge from the increased interdependence of infrastructure systems. The Centre will focus on the development and implementation of innovative business models and aims to support UK firms wishing to exploit them in international markets. The Centre will undertake a wide range of research activities on infrastructure interdependencies with users, which will allow problems to be discovered and addressed earlier and at lower cost. Because infrastructure innovations alter the social distribution of risks and rewards, the public needs to be involved in decision making to ensure business models and forms of regulation are socially robust. As a consequence, the Centre has a major focus on using its research to catalyse a broader national debate about the future of the UK's infrastructure, and how it might contribute towards a more sustainable, economically vibrant, and fair society. Beneficiaries from the Centre's activities include existing utility businesses, entrepreneurs wishing to enter the infrastructure sector, regulators, government and, perhaps most importantly, our communities who will benefit from more efficient and less vulnerable infrastructure based services.

The majority of the world's railways - including all main lines in the UK - are currently on ballasted track. Although there have been developments in component specifications and materials, the principles of the system have changed little over the past 150 years. Ballasted track has generally been considered to offer the optimum solution in terms of construction cost, stiffness and drainage properties, and ease of modification: thus although more highly engineered track forms have been used (e.g. in Japan, Germany and China), ballasted track has been employed both for upgrades such as the UK West Coast Main Line and for new high speed lines including HS1 (UK), TGV (France) and AVE (Spain). However, the limitations of ballasted track as currently constructed are becoming more apparent and more significant as the demands placed upon it have increased. This has led to higher than expected maintenance requirements and costs, and demonstrates that a transformation in track performance - by retro-fit measures for existing ballasted track, or by an informed decision in favour of an alternative track system in the case of large-scale renewals - is essential if the Government's aspirations of reduced cost and increased capacity for rail transport are to be realised. This Programme Grant will bring about a step-change improvement in the engineering, economic and environmental performance of railway track making it fit for a 21st century railway, by developing new techniques for its design, construction and maintenance. By obtaining a better understanding of the behaviour of track components, the interactions between them and their response to external loading and environmental conditions, the performance of railway track can be significantly enhanced. Improved understanding will allow the development of more effective and efficient maintenance and renewal strategies, leading in turn to reduced costs, increased capacity and improved reliability. The Programme Grant will also enable a radical overhaul of current railway track design appropriate for both new build (e.g. HS2) and upgrades to meet current and future train loading requirements more efficiently than is at present possible. Meeting these challenges will require a coordinated programme of research to investigate how the various components of the track system relate to each other and to external factors. This will involve a series of inter-related experiments together with supporting mathematical and numerical modelling, field monitoring and observation. The outputs of these studies will feed into economic modelling work, leading to the production of a decision-support tool, for use by industry, to appraise the cost implications of using different track technologies in combination with specific external factors. The aims of this Programme Grant can only be achieved by combining a variety of skills and techniques. The research team therefore comprises world-leading engineers and scientists from different disciplines and universities, working together to apply their collective expertise. A well-defined organisational structure and adaptable methods of operation will together provide a high level of integration and synergy between the various research areas and activities; excellent communications between the researchers, institutions and industry partners; flexibility in the allocation and use of resources; agility and responsiveness in research direction; proactive management of risk; and ownership and early uptake of research results by industry.

Cloud computing offers the ability to acquire vast, scalable computing resources on-demand. It is revolutionising the way in which data is stored and analysed. The dynamic, scalable approach to analysis offered by cloud computing has become important due to the growth of "big data": the large, often complex, datasets now being created in almost all fields of activity, from healthcare to e-commerce. Unfortunately, due to a lack of expertise, the full potential of cloud computing for extracting knowledge from big data has rarely been achieved outside a few large companies; as a result, many organisations fail to realize their potential to be transformed through extracting more value from the data available to them. UK industry faces a huge skills gap in this area as the demand for big data staff has risen exponentially (912%) over the past five years from 400 advertised vacancies in 2007 to almost 4,000 in 2012 (e-skills UK, Jan 2013). In addition, the demand for big data skills will continue to outpace the demand for standard IT skills, with big data vacancies forecast to increase by around 18% per annum in comparison with 2.5% for IT. Over the next five years this equates to a 92% rise in the demand for big data skills with around 132K new jobs being created in the UK (e-skills UK, Jan 2013). While characteristics such as size, data dependency and the nature of business activity will affect the potential for organisations to realise business benefits from big data, organisations don't have to be big to have big data issues. The problems and benefits are as true for many SMEs as they are for big business which, inevitably broadens and increases the demand for cloud and big data skills. Further, even when security concerns prevent the use of external "public" clouds for certain types of data, organisations are applying the same approaches to their own internal IT resources, using virtualisation to create "private" clouds for data analysis. Addressing these challenges requires expert practitioners who can bridge between the design of scalable algorithms, and the underlying theory in the modelling and analysis of data. It is perhaps not surprising that these skills are in short supply: traditional undergraduate and postgraduate courses produce experts in one or the other of these areas, but not both. We therefore propose to create a multi-disciplinary CDT to fill this significant gap. It will produce multi-disciplinary experts in the mathematics, statistics and computing science of extracting knowledge from big data, with practical experience in exploiting this knowledge to solve problems across a range of application domains. Based on a close collaboration between the School of Computing Science and the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Newcastle University, the CDT will address market requirements and overcome the existing skills barriers. The student intake will be drawn from graduates in computing science, mathematics and statistics. Initial training will provide the core competencies that the students will require, before they collaborate in group projects that teach them to address real research challenges drawn from application domains, before moving on to their individual PhD topic. The PhD topics will be designed to allow the students to focus deeply on a real-world problem the solution of which requires an advance in the underlying computing, maths and statistics. To reinforce this focus, they will spend time on a placement hosted by an industrial or applied academic partner facing that problem. Their PhD research will therefore deepen their knowledge of the field and teach them how to exploit it to solve challenging problems. Working in the new, custom-designed Cloud Innovation Centre, the students will derive continuous benefit from being co-located with researchers, industry experts, and their fellow students; immersing them in a group with a wide range of skills, knowledge and experiences.