Mathematical competence can endow robots of the necessary capability for abstract and symbolic processing, which is required for improving their cognitive performance and their social interaction with human beings. But so far, only few attempts have been made to apply mathematical cognition in robots. The objective of the NUMBERS project is to construct a novel artificial cognitive model of mathematical cognition by imitating human like learning approaches for developing number understanding. This will provide a novel tool for developmental psychology and neuroscience research on the development of mathematical abilities in children. The objective will be achieved through a highly interdisciplinary research program that will take advantage of the collaboration of leading academics in the fields involved, prof. Cangelosi (Cognitive Developmental Robotics), Plymouth University, and prof. McClelland (Computational Psychology), Stanford University, USA, and the technical support of an industrial partner (NVIDIA Corporation, USA and UK). The NUMBERS' research activities will exploit the cutting-edge facilities offered by Sheffield Robotics, a joint initiative between the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, which will host the project. Indeed, the model will be integrated with one of the most advanced child-like robotic platform (the "iCub") and, therefore, validated through realistic experiments, resembling scientific experiments of mathematical cognition in children. The validation of the novel model of the numerical cognition in interactive robotic experiments will constitute a proof of concept of the enhanced capabilities offered by a modular approach to bio-inspired artificial intelligence architectures. Furthermore, an optimised implementation for mobile devices will be realised in order to downsize space and power requirements for the computation, increasing application opportunities. This foundational research will provide the methodological basis and cognitively plausible engineering principles for the next generation of socially interactive robots, mimicking advanced capabilities of the human intelligence for real understanding and interaction with the external world. Results will help the design of more efficient cognitive robotic systems capable of learning abstract symbolic number processing in a more flexible and ecological manner. The human-like learning and interaction are characteristics that might allow people to more easily identify the desired social overture that the robot is making, or facilitate the transfer of skills learned in human-human interactions to human-robot encounters. This envisioned humanization will positively affect the acceptance of robots in social environments, as they will be perceived as less dangerous, increasing the socio-economic applications of future robots that can take on tasks once thought too delicate or uneconomical to automate. This is particularly relevant in the fields of social care, companionship, therapy, domestic assistance, entertainment, and education.

This proposal led by the University of Oxford, with support from the Alan Turing Institute (ATI), Bristol, Edinburgh, KCL, QMUL, Sheffield, Southampton and UCL is for a national GPU system that will support multidisciplinary science with a focus on machine learning and molecular dynamics. The architecture is based on ``fat'' GPU compute nodes, with 8 of NVIDIA's new Pascal GPUs, each with a) 16GB 720GB/s HBM2 memory, b) an 80GB/s NVlink interconnect to other GPUs, c) 6GB/s bandwidth to main system memory, d) 6GB/s bandwidth to the Infiniband external network. Each server also has two 20-core Xeons, 512 GB DDR4 memory and 8TB SSD. The motivation for selecting this architecture is the huge growth in research in machine learning and associated areas of data science within the UK, particularly within the universities which are members of the Alan Turing Institute, or SES. The same architecture is also ideally suited for molecular dynamics, medical imaging and a number of other application areas. The system will be run as a national facility, similar to Archer in being free to all academic users with computing time available to all through a lightweight Resource Allocation Panel, with a top-level steering committee determining the policy on resource allocation between the different application areas (Machine Learning, Molecular Dynamics, Other).

We are living through a revolution, as electronic communications become ever more ubiquitous in our daily lives. The use of mobile and smart phone technology is becoming increasingly universal, with applications beyond voice communications including access to social and business data, entertainment through live and more immersive video streaming and distributed processing and storage of information through high performance data centres and the cloud. All of this needs to be achieved with high levels of reliability, flexibility and at low cost, and solutions need to integrate developments in theoretical algorithms, optimization of software and ongoing advances in hardware performance. These trends will continue to shape our future. By 2020 it is predicted that the number of network-connected devices will reach 1000 times the world's population: there will be 7 trillion connected devices for 7 billion people. This will result in 1.3 zettabytes of global internet traffic by 2016 (with over 80% of this being due to video), requiring a 27% increase in energy consumption by telecommunications networks. The UK's excellence in communications has been a focal point for inward investment for many years - already this sector has a value of £82Bn a year to the UK economy (~5.7% GDP). However this strength is threatened by an age imbalance in the workforce and a shortage of highly skilled researchers. Our CDT will bridge this skills gap, by training the next generation of researchers, who can ensure that the UK remains at the heart of the worldwide communications industry, providing a much needed growth dividend for our economy. It will be guided by the commercial imperatives from our industry partners, and motivated by application drivers in future cities, transport, e-health, homeland security and entertainment. The expansion of the UK internet business is fuelled by innovative product development in optical transport mechanisms, wireless enabled technologies and efficient data representations. It is thus essential that communications practitioners of the future have an overall system perspective, bridging the gaps between hardware and software, wireless and wired communications, and application drivers and network constraints. While communications technology is the enabler, it is humans that are the producers, consumers and beneficiaries in terms of its broader applications. Our programme will thus focus on the challenges within and the interactions between the key domains of People, Power and Performance. Over three cohorts, the new CDT will build on Bristol's core expertise in Efficient Systems and Enabling Technologies to engineer novel solutions, offering enhanced performance, lower cost and reduced environmental impact. We will train our students in the mathematical fundamentals which underpin modern communication systems and deliver both human and technological solutions for the communication systems landscape of the future. In summary, Future Communications 2 will produce a new type of PhD graduate: one who is intellectually leading, creative, mathematically rigorous and who understands the commercial implications of his or her work - people who are the future technical leaders in the sector.

The Communications sector is a vital component within the UK economy, with revenues in this area totalling around 129B. Recognised as a key enabler of telecommunications, broadcasting and ICT, communications is also poised to be a transformational technology in areas such as energy, the environment, health and transport. The UK is well placed to reap the full economic and social benefits enabled by communications and investment in a CDT, embracing the breath and reach of the discipline, will help to facilitate our economic recovery and growth and enhance our global standing.There is a serious and growing concern over the future availability of suitably skilled staff to work in the communications sector in the UK. International competition is fierce, with large investments being made by competitor countries in research and in the training of personnel. IT and telecoms companies in the UK are reporting difficulties in attracting candidates with the right skills. In this context, the National Microelectronics Institute and the IET have warned that the ICT sector is facing a growing recruitment crisis with little confidence that the problem will improve in the short or medium term. Various organisations (eg DC-KTN and Royal Academy of Engineering) with support from industry are addressing this issue but acknowledge that it cannot be achieved without relevant high quality under- and postgraduate degrees through which specialist skills can be obtained.To address this shortage, a new Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in 'Future Communication' is proposed. The University of Bristol has a world leading reputation in this field, focused on its Centre for Communications Research (CCR), but built on close collaboration between colleagues from Mathematics, Computer Science, Safety Systems and industry. Our vision is to establish a world-leading research partnership which is focused on demand and firmly footed in a commercial context, but with freedom to conduct academically lead blue skies research.The Bristol CDT will be focused on people: not just as research providers, but also as technology consumers and, importantly, as solutions to the UK skills shortage. It will develop the skilled entrepreneurial engineers of the future, provide a coherent advanced training network for the communications community that will be recognised internationally and produce innovative solutions to key emerging research challenges. Over the next eight years, the CDT will build on Bristol's core expertise in Efficient Systems and Enabling Technologies to engineer novel solutions, offering enhanced performance, lower cost and reduced environmental impact. The taught component of the Programme will build on our MSc programme in Communication Systems & Signal Processing, acknowledged as leading in the UK, complemented by additional advanced material in statistics, optimisation and Human-Computer Interaction. This approach will leverage existing commitment and teaching expertise. Enterprise will form a core part of the programme, including: Project Management, Entrepreneurship, Public Communication, Marketing and Research Methods. Through its research programme and some 50 new PhD students, the CDT will undertake fundamental work in communication theory, optimisation and reliability. This will be guided by the commercial imperatives from our industry partners, and motivated by application drivers in Smart Grid, transport, healthcare, military/homeland security, safety critical systems and multimedia delivery. While communications technology is the enabler it is humans that are the consumers, users and beneficiaries in terms of its broader applications. In this respect we will focus our research programme on the challenges within and interactions between the key domains of People, Power and Performance.

Central to many research programmes in plasma physics is the requirement to capture the full kinetic properties of the plasma. This is most commonly done with a particle-in-cell (PIC) code which move samples of plasma particles in the self-consistent electromagnetic field. For over a decade Warwick, initially in collaboration with Oxford and York, has been developing such a code for UK plasma researchers - the EPOCH code. The core PIC scheme deals with a plasma in which collisions between particles are ignores - a collisionless plasma. EPOCH has been extended to include binary collisions, Quantum Electro-Dynamics (QED) processes and radiation. This has made EPOCH one of the most widely used PIC codes worldwide with application to particle accelerators, next generation light sources, high-power laser QED studies and fusion science for both magnetic and inertial confinement fusion. There are key science extensions required to UK EPOCH to meet the needs of the UK user base. These are detailed in the Objectives section above. However, maintaining EPOCH has become increasingly fraught. This is because EPOCH evolved out of an older Fortran PIC code and while this was relatively easy to modify for the collisionless plasma when adding more sophisticated boundaries, diagnostic or physics packages the restricted feature set of Fortran made these additions increasingly cumbersome. It may be possible to persevere with the old legacy Fortran for a while longer but there are other perhaps more pressing problems. Modern high-performance computer (HPC) systems are moving away from being built all from the same processor type. Instead HPC systems with a mixture of traditional CPUs accelerated with GPUs are becoming prevalent. Other systems are being installed which use ARM processors or even FPGAs. This move towards heterogeneous HPC systems and a complex HPC landscape is been driven by the need for continued increases in computing power. The toolsets for working with these newer heterogeneous systems are primarily in C++, not Fortran. Moving EPOCH over to a C++ implementation (renamed EPOC++ as a result) opens up access to these newer routes towards Exascale HPC. At the same time it makes the code easier to maintain and more flexible for future changes. This project will complete all these changes and deliver an EPOC++ code able to meet the needs of UK and International EPOCH users with a performant and parallel code future proofed for decades.