This project represents joint work between 12 leading Chinese Universities, and several other invited key partners in the UK and US. The Internet, and other large-scale databases, form a significant resource of what may be termed "visual media": images, videos, 3D shape models, and so on. Internet text searches usually produce useful results. However, it can be much more difficult to find visual media, e.g. videos with specific content, or images similar to a picture in one's mind's eye. This is partly due to the fact that most image search is based on text inputs, and partly due to the difficulty of classifying pictures. It is easy for humans to "know" what an image contains, but image understanding by computer requires many tricky tasks - splitting an image into separate objects, and analysing their colour, their shape, and many other attributes. Better solutions to search of visual media would enable many applications in addition to search itself, and we will also look at one of them - the re-use of existing visual media when creating new visual media. This project has four main goals. The first is to investigate new approaches to structural analysis of visual media. This will include devising methods to find salient information (for example, what is the main object? what is irrelevant background? how is this object composed of parts?), and methods which process the information on different scales (small details may be just as important as overall shape, for example). The aim is to come up with hierarchical descriptions of the important information in visual media. The second is to find efficient new approaches to comparing, classifying and searching visual media, based on the above hierarchical descriptions. We will also look at how sketches can be used as a much more powerful means than text of allowing users to describe what they want to find when searching. The third area to be considered is editing and resynthesis of visual media. Structural analysis will provide more meaningful ways to select parts of an image than just, for example, all parts of the scene with a certain colour. In turn, this will simplify the process of editing visual media. Users will be able to apply consistent editing to scene elements with similar meaning (e.g. the user controls bending of one finger, and the computer applies a similar bend to the rest of the fingers of a hand, despite minor shape differences). More powerful search will also allow elements to be rapidly retrieved from visual media databases or the Internet to be combined into new scenes, or to be included within existing images, with suitable adjustment for different lighting, etc. When video is processed, further considerations will be needed to ensure results are consistent over time, and smoothly vary as time progresses; the vast amounts of data involved in video processing make this a challenging problem. The final area of work concerns the use of machine learning techniques to assist with all of the previous goals. The aim here is to automatically learn to recognize complex patterns, permitting software to make intelligent decisions based on visual data. Ultimately, a careful balance must be struck in which the user is firmly in control of the creative process, but the computer makes it easy for the user to produce the desired results.

An age of globalization makes it more than ever urgent to ask: what processes of transmission mediate literary and cultural exchanges between China and the West? China's complex interactions with its others are key to understanding its relation to modernity. Humanities scholarship on the translations and transformations involved in such interactions have diverged. Some have posed, from a Western point of view, the alterity of China. Others have focused on the negotiations of difference and equivalence involved in any cultural encounter, and on forms of transmission enabled or transformed by these negotiations. \n\nThe Network will focus on the oppositions and relations through which Chinese modernity has been shaped and imagined. The historical origins of 'the modern' have been variously located in western formations: Reformation, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, or the emergence of an Avant-Garde. Defining the modern, however, is not only a question of periodization, but also of geography. As Lydia Liu observes, 'The problem of translation has become increasingly central to critical reflections on modernity... The fact that one can speak about a varied range of modernities suggests an extraordinary faith in the translatability of modernity and its universal ethos.' \n\nAt the heart of this problem are specific acts, sites, and theories of translation; relationships between universal and particular; and the limits or possibilities of cultural commensurability. Whether at the level of language and culture, or concepts, technologies and techniques, translation defines the field of Chinese modernism and modernity. The processes of transmission include literary and visual translation, as well as contextualization and reception, but also raise issues of translatability in the broadest sense. The study of modernity in relation to cultural transmission has proved increasingly attractive not only to scholars of literary and cultural studies in China and the West, but to translation theorists, critical theorists, and theorists of the visual. \n\nThe activities of the Network will be organized into three strands: \n\nTranslating Modernism: Scholars working on the relationship between Western and Chinese modernisms increasingly seek to go beyond the question of what in Chinese modernism corresponds to or derives from European modernism.\n\nTranslating Theory: The take-up of western post-modern cultural and critical theory in China since the 1990s has been dramatic, yet poses questions about its translation into new contexts.\n\nTranslating Culture: Contemporary Chinese artistic and cultural production has never been more accessible to global audiences, but issues of commensurability arise in both elite and popular culture.\n\nThe rationale of the Network is to increase UK research capacity into modern and contemporary Chinese culture. While work on cultural transmission to and from China has been vibrant in the US academy over the past fifteen years, the field remains comparatively weak in the UK. The aim of the three-way Network between CRASSH, the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Tsinghua University, and Yale's Council on East Asian Studies is to create and sustain relationships with academics in both China and the US, where the field is further advanced. The Network will play a key role in developing research capacity through a programme of workshops, seminars, visiting fellowships, and two major international conferences in Cambridge and Beijing. \n\nIts participants have expertise in literary theory, cultural studies, translation theory, modernism, and contemporary Chinese culture, including visual culture. The activities of the Network will be of interest to academics and practitioners in the fields of comparative literature, cultural studies, critical and cultural theory, translation studies, and Chinese studies.

By 2015, the UK is expected to face an electrical power shortage of over 20GW, based on projected economic growth and projected life expectancy of a number of existing power plants. There is currently an exceptionally wide variety of new generation technologies being considered. Nuclear power generation will take a long time from build to generation; in fact, the earliest estimated time of generation from new nuclear power stations would be 2018. Renewable energy alone is not capable of generating enough electricity to fill this gap. Around 40% of the current electricity is generated by gas/oil in the UK, but the price of gas/oil faces a huge fluctuations and uncertainty. So gas/oil is not the suitable choice to fill the big electricity generation capacity gap. To meet the various requirements in electricity demand, environment, finance and performance, coal fired power generation is really in need, actually the realistic choice, for compensating the generation gap. Plans have been made for new coal-fired power stations to be built in the UK in the near future. In China, more than 70% of electricity is currently generated by Coal. New coal fired power stations bring into generation almost every month in China. In American, 335,830MW electricity is generated by coal. It is likely that coal remains a dominant fuel for electricity generation from many years to come. Coal is, no doubt, playing an important role in electrical power generation but we must make it cleaner. Supercritical coal fired plant technology is one of the leading options with improved efficiency and hence reduced CO2 emissions per unit of electrical energy generated. Indeed, power plants using supercritical generation have energy efficiency up to 46%, around 10% above current coal fired power plants. On the other hand, this technology costs less than other clean coal technologies and can be fully integrated with appropriate CO2 capture technology in a timely manner. In addition to higher energy efficiency, lower emission levels for supercritical plants are achieved by using well-proven emission control technologies. However, power plants adopting supercritical boilers face great challenges from the UK National Grid Code (NGC) compliance. The UK grid code is far more demanding than in other European countries due to the relatively small scale of the UK electricity network. The most significant issue for a supercritical steam plant is the absence of the stored energy provided by the drum of a conventional plant. As a result the plant would struggle to produce the 10% frequency response requirement in the Grid Code quickly enough Ensuring NGC compliance for supercritical boiler power generation is an important pre-requisite for gaining acceptance in the UK for this highly promising cleaner coal technology. The generation companies have already proposed the Grid Code review request to NGC for the possibility of grid code change to accept supercritical plant There is an urgent demand to conduct the whole process modelling and simulation study to get a clearer picture of the dynamic responses of the supercritical coal fired power plant and to study the feasible strategy to improve the dynamic responses. Also, it is essential to establish the university based research capacity in the UK to provide research solutions in response to the challenges arising from adopting supercritical technology in electrical power generation and also to provide the training needed for future electrical power engineers. Currently, no supercritical or ultra-supercritical boilers operate in the UK, which make it difficult for UK researchers alone to conduct the above proposed study. There are more than 400 such units worldwide, with China operating 24 of them and more to be built. So this proposal is proposed to collaborate with Chinese top universities for this challenging research.

Coal-fired generation accounts for 82% of China's total power supply. Even in the UK the coal-fired generation still accounts for 35% . Because of this, the efficient and clean burn of coal is of great importance to the energy sector. Coal gasification and the proper treatment of the generated syngas before the combustion can reduce emissions significantly through alternative power generation system such as Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC). The syngas usually contains varying amounts of hydrogen. The existence of hydrogen in the syngas may cause undesirable flame flashback phenomenon, in which the flame propagates into the burner. The fast flame propagation speed of hydrogen can travel further upstream and even attached to the wall of the combustor. The strong heat transfer to the wall may damage the combustor components. The consequence can be very costly. Because of this, many existing combustors are not suitable for the burning of syngas. To overcome this bottle neck, in-depth knowledge of the flame dynamics of hydrogen enriched fuel is essential, which is still not available. There is also a need to study the flame-wall interactions, which are important to the life span of a combustor but have not been fully understood.In order to understand the complex combustion process of hydrogen enriched fuels, combined efforts from experimentation and numerical simulations are essential. This joint project will investigate the flame dynamics including the flame flashback phenomenon, combustion instability, and flame-wall interactions. The flame dynamics will be investigated for different types of burners with fuel variability. Due to the limitation of optical access, the flame measurements need to be complimented by high-fidelity numerical simulations. The dynamic behaviour of the flame will be experimentally captured by the innovative combustion diagnostic tools developed at Manchester. To complement the experimental work, advanced numerical simulations based on direct numerical simulation and large eddy simulation will be performed at Brunel. The proposed research activities are based on the existing tools developed by the investigators and preliminary studies that have already been carried out by the applicants. The project will further develop innovative combustion diagnostic and advanced numerical tools. The knowledge to be gained from the project research and the physical models to be developed including improved near-wall flow, heat transfer and combustion models can lead to better combustion control and combustor design. The joint project will enhance the understanding on combustion of hydrogen enriched fuels with scientific advancement in flame measurements and near-wall flow modelling. More importantly, it will enhance the development of technologies for clean combustion of hydrogen enriched fuels, leading to a clean coal industry.Collaboration This project has excellent synergy between the UK and Chinese partners. Both partners are linked to BP. The Manchester group is directly supported by BP AE to work on combustion instability. Tsinghua University is one of the few identified links of BP in China. The involvement of Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery Ltd will ensure the maximum input from a gas turbine manufacturer's point of view.Management Both partners have long term informal research connections and the well established communications will ensure the smoothing running of the project. The PIs are well experienced in working with large research consortia. Dr Zhang has close collaboration with the industrial partners.Novelty Valuable physical insight into the potentially damaging combustion phenomena of hydrogen enriched fuels such as syngas burning will be provided; Original combustion diagnostics will be developed; Advanced numerical simulations will be performed; Near-wall flow, heat transfer and combustion models for unsteady reacting flows will be developed.

Reliability is essential to the success of renewable energy systems. The estimated life of wind turbines is about 20 years, this is in comparison to 40 years for a conventional steam turbine generator unit. However the failure rate of wind turbines is about 3 times higher than that of conventional generators. The key feature that differentiates a renewable energy source, from conventional generation, is the inherent fluctuation of the source, giving rise to poor reliability due to fatigue cycling and consequently high life-cycle cost. This proposal aims to build a consortium of UK and Chinese researchers to investigate the scientific causes of poor reliability of components and develop solutions to improve it. Stress analysis and impact evaluation will be performed for stresses in thermal, mechanical, or coupled thermo-mechanical domains, taking into account the practical operating conditions. Accelerated aging test will be carried out to identify critical areas where improvement can be made cost-effectively. The research aims to develop new design concepts and new techniques that can be integrated in future renewable energy conversion systems and networks for reliability. Potential new techniques include active thermal management, integrated power smoothing, and mechanical stress releasing methods. These will be compared with alternative technologies that have been pursued by the consortium members and other researchers, such as gearless direct-drive systems, modular and fault tolerant designs and condition monitoring. The research will initially focus on wind turbines but will be extended to other forms of renewable electrical power generation including wave and tidal stream systems.Five UK and four Chinese universities as well as Chinese Academy of Sciences are initially included in the consortium which is strengthened by seven industrial partners from the two countries, in order to establish the expertise and facilities needed to address the multidisciplinary problem. The programme promotes essential and close interaction between the themes and the individual tasks. The interactions take a range of forms, from providing testing materials and facilities to the development of stress and reliability models for techniques for performance improvement. Chinese organisations will commit 9 PhD studentships to compliment the 7 themed PhD studentships in UK universities. The dissemination will involve academic publications, a dedicated website, consortium meetings, international seminars and events.