Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Model checkers are tools which can automatically verify that a system behaves as intended. Because this is done on a model of a system, design flaws are identified before the system is actually built, thus saving time, money, and even loss of lives (e.g. systems that control the navigation of airplanes). Here we focus on real-time model-checking, which deals with systems where timing constraints are important.A (real-time) model-checker accepts a model represented as a network of timed automata. Timed automata are a graph-like notation where nodes represent states in the system behaviour, and arcs between nodes represents actions. Both the time when actions can be performed, and the amount of time the system may remain in a given state, can be constrained. The second input to model-checkers is a logic formula, describing the correctness property we wish to check (e.g, that a certain undesired event will never occur). The logic is usually known as the requirements logic.Model-checking is one of the triumphs of theoretical computer science research, with a large number of successful applications in the commercial sector. This is because model-checkers can now automatically verify properties which, in the past, required experts to develop complex proofs by hand. Among real-time model-checkers, Uppaal is the most extensively applied. The success of Uppaal in bridging the gap between academic research and industrial application is impressive. However, the approach still has a number of significant limitations:1. Timelocks. These are degenerate states in which time is unable to pass and cannot, in the general case, be detected. Timelocks arise because of the way in which the passage of time is modelled in timed automata semantics. Of course, physical systems cannot stop time. However, the verification of properties by model-checkers is (for reasons that I will not address here) only meaningful for timelock-free models. If a model contains a timelock, then the user cannot have complete confidence in the verification results. For example, Uppaal may report that a bad event never occurs, unaware that the event may indeed occur, but cannot be detected because the model stops time before this happens. Dangerously, this undetected bad event may still be present when the system is built.2. Expressiveness of Requirements Logic. Uppaal is very efficient. But to achieve this, the designers had to limit the kind of properties which can be written (i.e they had to restrict the requirements logic). As a result, many properties that one would like to verify cannot be checked with Uppaal, or are difficult to express (and so it is easier to make mistakes when trying to capture the meaning of a given property).The proposed research will address these limitations and thereby significantly improve the applicability of real-time model-checking in general, and Uppaal, in particular. This will be done as follows.1. Building from existing related work on the subject I will develop techniques and tools to prevent or detect timelocks in timed automata specifications (these are based on the structure of the timed automata).2. I will integrate research on choppy logics (more expressive than Uppaal's logic) with test automata approaches (a different way to express properties, which Uppaal can handle efficiently) to enlarge the class of properties that Uppaal can model-check, without compromising its performance. 3. I will undertake a set of demanding case studies to evaluate our Uppaal extensions (e.g. control systems, communication protocols, sensor networks, etc.).4. Finally, I will feed the results of our research into fields of computing for which symbolic real-time model checking is critical.

Molecular imaging is one of the key tools for non-invasive clinical diagnosis and opens up the possibility of personalising patient treatment. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) in particular is expanding rapidly and new PET imaging centres are currently being installed across the UK. Biomedical research provides increasing numbers of active molecules that target disease sites in the body and thus could in principle function as imaging agents by labeling with a positron emitting isotope. However, 18-F-FDG is currently the only routinely used PET tracer in the clinic, despite the wide availability of the 18-F radionuclide. This is mainly due to the complexity of the multistep-procedures requiring specialized equipment to make the 18-F labeled imaging agents. The current labeling methods also can be harmful to sensitive biomolecules and thus a small precursor molecule is often labeled that is then attached to an active biomolecule to create the imaging agent. This project will develop a new 18-F-labeling method for sensitive biomolecules which uses the metal aluminium to bind fluoride, rather than carbon-fluorine bond formation which has been the main approach adopted hitherto. The one step labeling procedure will allow clinicians to add the 18-F-fluoride directly into a prepared kit containing the biomolecule in order to prepare the imaging agent. The use of special polymer beads in the labeling has the potential of achieving a higher ratio of labeled to unlabeled precursor than conventional solution methods. This has the advantage of giving better contrast in-vivo and reducing the problems of patient reaction caused by the presence of unlabelled excess biomolecule. The chemistry involved requires no specialised equipment and the faster, kit-based method helps to minimise the exposure of radiation workers to the radionuclide. To achieve our aim, we are designing metal binding sites for fluoride that will allow radiolabeling under conditions that do not harm sensitive biomolecules and proteins. We also propose to combine this approach with methods to attach biomolecules of interest in a way that preserves their ability to reach the target site in the body. Additionally, the compounds we propose are intrinsically fluorescent, so that the potential imaging agents can also be evaluated in living cells using fluorescence microscopy, since PET imaging on its own does not have the resolution necessary to observe the behaviour of the complexes in something as small as a cell. By offering much improved labeling, our new system will facilitate the discovery of new potent biomolecules and facilitate the adoption of Positron Emission Tomography in the clinic without the need for expensive, specialized equipment. A final benefit of the ligand chemistry involved for aluminium is that it also has the potential to be used with other metallic PET radionuclides.

Cryptogams (mosses, lichens) are a conspicuous part of the ecology of alpine and higher-latitude ecosystems, and are important for cycling carbon and nutrients. In particular, how cryptogams take nitrogen from the atmosphere (N-fixation), could be of considerable importance in these systems, where nutrients are generally not easily accessible by plants and microbes. Our understanding on these processes is poor, especially in the alpine, and especially for times of the year outside of the main summer growing season. This is concerning given how climate change is disproportionally effecting higher latitude, higher elevation, ecosystems, and through changing snow-cover, affecting winter strongly. This also means that understanding the role cryptogams plays in global climate modelling is not well resolved, and in ecosystem where they are abundant, this is a shortcoming. Cryptogams also have a diverse microbial community inhabiting the aboveground parts. As part of a complex microbial food web, this includes photosynthesising organisms and microbes that can fix atmospheric nitrogen. Currently, we have little information on the molecular ecology of these communities, and if the structure and function of the microbe-cryptogam system varies over time, and amongst different cryptogams. To understand this, and how alpine cryptogams function over time and in response to changing energy and nutrient availability, we will study four different species of cryptogams in our fieldsite in the Cairngorms of eastern Scotland. In this sub-arctic alpine environment, we will measure how C and N are captured and cycled by cryptogams, measure for the first time how these processes occur under snow, and track the fate of C and N into soils. We will use shading methods to change how C enters to the system, allowing us to determine how cryptogams change their nutrient cycling under altered energy availability. Together, these investigations will help us better model how these ecosystems under a changing climate, and increase our understanding of the ecology of the cryptogamosphere.

Across Western Europe the activity of urban regeneration is now around 40 years old. From the vantage point of the present this history is best understood as one of experimentation and re-experimentation with a range of policy tools, agencies and spatial scales. To take the issue of scale as an example, the preferences of British policy makers in the 1970s for 'the local' were replaced by regions in the 1980s and early 1990s (having been earlier in vogue in the 1950s). This 'new regionalism' was followed by policy orientated towards 'cities', construed as metropolitan city-regions, in the later 1990s/early 2000s - itself redolent of analysis and policy stretching back to the 1930s. Most recently this has given way to a (new) 'new localism' post-2010 (for a historical review see, Lord and Tewdwr-Jones, 2013). Against this rapid cycling of preferences for the scale at which urban policy should be delivered we could produce a parallel history of the range of limited-life agencies created by the central state to deliver such policy (the Urban Development Corporations of the 1980s, the Regional Development Agencies of the late 1990s, the Urban Regeneration Companies of the mid-2000s being a very few indicative examples). The overarching impression is a policy landscape characterised primarily by upheaval. Indeed the only commonality between periods is the central role played by national government as architect of the agencies themselves and the geographies to which they apply. A genuine departure to this formula came with the Localism and Decentralism Act, 2011. Under this piece of legislation for the first time anywhere in the Western world individual citizens have been given the power to assemble into coalitions, determine the boundaries of their own neighbourhood and author a plan for that area. The resultant neighbourhood plan can cover many of the features that would historically have been the preserve of a professional planner at City Hall including, for example, the design characteristics of new development. More than this, the neighbourhood planning process can draw upon innovative funding models, some of which lie outside the traditional public or public-private financial arrangements that have been the norm in the past. Good examples in this respect include Community Land Trusts and the Community Right to Build initiative which allow private individuals to jointly acquire existing buildings identified as being of local significance or develop new ones. The purpose of this research is twofold. Firstly it seeks to investigate this process of self-organised governance of urban policy using the explanatory framework provided by game theory; secondly it aims to contextualise findings from England within the wider setting offered by related approaches that have been pioneered in mainland Europe. Taking neighbourhood planning fora as the empirical subject for the domestic component of the research we will use a range of research methods rooted in game theory and experimental economics to explore urban planning policy designed and delivered in this self-organised manner. Fundamental questions to be addressed will include what conditions are necessary for coalitions to spontaneously form; what features promote coalition stability/instability, and; how might the use of collectivised financial instruments (such as a community land trust) encourage community-directed urban transformation. The results of this research on neighbourhood planning fora will then be added to the experience of similarly self-organised approaches to effecting urban transformation reported by partner universities in North West Europe. This international feature of the research is designed to encourage policy transfer and enhance the value of the work to policy makers.