The 5G-and-Beyond cellular networks promise UAVs with ultra-reliable low-latency control, ubiquitous coverage, and seamless swarm connectivity under complex and highly flexible multi-UAV behaviours in three-dimension (3D), which will unlock the full potential of UAVs. This so-called cellular-connected UAVs (C-UAVs) system creates a radically different and rapidly evolving networking and control environment compared to conventional terrestrial networks: 1) The UAV-ground BS/user channels enjoy fewer channel variations due to their dominant line-of-sight (LOS) characteristics, which imposes severe air-ground interference to the coexisting BSs/users in the uplink/downlink. 2) Operating in existing cellular networks designed mainly for dominate downlink traffic (e.g., video), the UAVs with high data rate requirement in uplink payload uploading, and ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) requirement in downlink command and control communication can hardly be satisfied. 3) Maintaining seamless connectivity for mission-centric UAV swarms with 3D high mobility is essential for UAV cooperation but extremely challenging. 4) Controlling a swarm of UAVs to accomplish complex tasks with limited human supervision under the connectivity constraints is of capital importance but challenging. The above challenges can hardly be solved via conventional model-driven approaches, which are limited to performance evaluation or optimisation at one time instant in an offline or semi-offline manner, relying on given ideal probabilistic channel models without time correlation. Meanwhile, the future cellular networks in 5G-and-Beyond moves towards an open, programmable, and virtualised architecture with unprecedented data availability. Both facts mandate a fundamental change in the way we model, design, control, and optimise the C-UAVs system, from reactive/incident driven decoupled networking and control operation to proactive/ data-driven joint network and control design. This project has the ambitious vision to develop artificial intelligence (AI)-powered C-UAVs system with full network automation and conditional control automation, that allow for joint design and optimization of the network operation and the UAVs control in real-time with minimum human supervision and the target of mission completion under the long-term quality of service (QoS) guarantees. The project will engage with the end-users to exploit the C-UAVs applications in surveillance and emergency services in urban areas. Our results on network automation and control automation will directly benefit the telecom manufacturers (e.g., Ericsson AB, Toshiba Europe, AccelerComm), and broader UAV industries (e.g., Airborne Robotics, Thales, Northrop Grumman) internationally with foreseeable industrial impact. The NGMN and CommNet will facilitate the dissemination of the research outcomes nationally and internationally. The development, implementation, and testing of our proposed solutions serve as a platform towards the commercialisation of our research outcomes, putting the UK at the forefront of the "connected aerial vehicles" revolution.

Current software development processes are expensive, laborious and error prone. They achieve adaptivity at only a glacial pace, largely through enormous human effort, forcing highly skilled engineers to waste significant time adapting many tedious implementation details. Often, the resulting software is equally inflexible, forcing users to also rely on their innate human adaptivity to find "workarounds". As the letters of support from the DAASE industrial partners demonstrate, this creates a pressing need for greater automation and adaptivity. Suppose we automate large parts of the development process using computational search. Requirements engineering, project planning and testing now become unified into a single automated activity. As requirements change, the project plans and associated tests are adapted to best suit the changes. Now suppose we further embed this adaptivity within the software product itself. Smaller changes to the operating environment can now be handled automatically. Feedback from the operating environment to the development process will also speed adaption of both the software product and process to much larger changes that cannot be handled by such in-situ adaptation. This is the new approach to software engineering DAASE seeks to create. It places computational search at the heart of the processes and products it creates and embeds adaptivity into both. DAASE will also create an array of new processes, methods, techniques and tools for a new kind of software engineering, radically transforming the theory and practice of software engineering. DAASE will develop a hyper-heuristic approach to adaptive automation. A hyper-heuristic is a methodology for selecting or generating heuristics. Most heuristic methods in the literature operate on a search space of potential solutions to a particular problem. However, a hyper-heuristic operates on a search space of heuristics. We do not underestimate the challenges this research agenda poses. However, we believe we have the team, partners and programme plan that will achieve the ambitious aim. DAASE integrates two teams of researchers from the Operational Research and Search Based Software Engineering communities. Both groups of researchers are widely regarded as world leading, having pioneered the fields of Hyper-Heuristics and Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE); the two key fields that DAASE brings together.

This project will make the Internet's infrastructure and applications more reliable and secure, more trustworthy and less vulnerable to cyber attack, by improving the engineering processes by which the network is designed. The Internet comprises a large number of laptops, smartphones, and other edge devices, connecting to servers located in data centres around the world via numerous interconnecting links and switching devices. To make this work, all the devices must agree on how they should communicate. That is, they must speak a common language, known as a "protocol" that describes the format of the information that is sent and the operations to be performed. There are many such protocols, describing the different types of communication. For example, the HTTP protocol describes how browsers fetch pages from websites. To ensure interoperability between devices from different manufacturers, these protocols are described in a series of standards documents, published by organisations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). These standards are developed incrementally by teams of engineers working over several months, or perhaps years, to produce a written specification that describes how the protocol should work. Despite the best efforts of those developing the standards, however, the results are often found to contain inconsistencies and ambiguities. These can lead to devices from different manufacturers failing to work together, due to differing interpretations of the standard, and in the worst cases can lead to vulnerabilities that open devices up to cyber attack. Much of the reason for these inconsistencies and ambiguities is that the protocol standards are written in English, and hence there's no automated way of checking them for correctness. Researchers have proposed ways of describing protocols using methods (known as "formal languages") that are more like computer programming languages, and that would allow automated consistency checks to be made, but these have not been widely adopted by the standards community. This project will study the social, cultural, and educational barriers to adoption of these new techniques, to understand why standards continue to be written in English. We will explore the perceived limitations of the alternatives, to understand why they've been adopted in certain niches, and for certain purposes, but are not used more broadly in standards development. We'll then formulate a model for the adoption of formal languages and their supporting tools in the protocol standards community, and use it identify areas that are ready to increase use of such techniques in their standards. Finally, we'll use the knowledge gained to propose formal languages, that are designed to fit the way the standards developers work, and begin the process of introducing these into the standards process, to improve protocol specifications and make them less vulnerable to attack. The work will be conduced in the IETF, since it's the key international technical standards body developing Internet protocol standards. The aim is to improve the quality and trustworthiness of the standards that the IETF develops, and increase security, robustness, and interoperability of the Internet. The novel engineering research idea we will explore is that formal languages need to be adapted to the community of interest. It is not enough that they help solve the technical problem of how to specify a protocol: they must do so in a way that fits the expertise and culture of those who need to use them. Research into structured approaches and formal languages for protocol design has not yet considered the nature of the standards process, and hence has not seen wide uptake. We start with a deep awareness of the standards process, consider social and technical barriers to uptake, and propose new techniques to improve the way standards are developed.

As the world becomes ever more connected, the vast number of Internet of things (IoT) devices necessitates the use of smart, autonomous machine-to-machine communications; however, this poses serious security and privacy issues as we will no longer have direct control over with what or whom our devices communicate. Counterfeit, hacked, or cloned devices acting on a network can have significant consequences: for individuals through the leakage of confidential and personal information, in terms of monetary costs (for e.g. the loss of access to web services - Mirai attack on Dyn took down Twitter, Spotify, Reddit); or for critical national infrastructure, through the loss of control of safety-critical industrial and cyber-physical IoT systems. In addition, IoT devices are often low-cost, low power devices that are restricted in both memory and computing power. A major challenge is how to address the need for security in such resource-constrained devices. As companies race to get IoT devices to market, many do not consider security or, all too often, security is an afterthought. As such, a common theme in all realms of IoT is the need for dependability and security. The SIPP project aims to rethink how security is built into IoT processor platforms. Firstly, the architectural fundamentals of a processor design need to be re-engineered to assure the security of individual on-chip components. This has become increasingly evident with the recent Spectre and Meltdown attacks. On the upper layer of systems-on-chip (SoCs), hardware authentication of chip sub-systems and the entire chip is crucial to detect malicious hardware modification. Then, at the systems layer (i.e., multiple chips on a common printed circuit board), innovative approaches for remote attestation will be investigated to determine the integrity at board level. Finally, the security achieved at all hierarchical layers will be assessed by investigating physical-level vulnerabilities to ensure there is no physical leakage of the secrets on which each layer relies. The proposed project brings together the core partners of the NCSC/EPSRC-funded Research Institute in Secure Hardware and Embedded Systems (RISE), that is, Queen's University Belfast and the Universities of Cambridge, Bristol and Birmingham, with the leading academics in the field of hardware security and security architecture design from the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, to develop a novel secure IoT processor platform with remote attestation implemented on the RISC-V architecture.

This program is about using nanostructured materials to address key areas in energy related applications. This proposal will deliver world class materials science through ambitious thin and thick film development and analysis and the proposal targets the EPSRC strategic areas Energy and Nanoscience through nanoengineering. The programme grant will provide the opportunity to integrate three well established research areas that currently operate independently of each other and will establish a new consortium of activities. Collectively they offer the essential ingredients to move this particular field forward. The planned program of work is timely because of the convergence of modelling capability, precision multilayer oxide growth expertise and nanofabrication facilities. The overall vision for the Programme Grant is focussed on Energy. Within the Programme we aim to find means of reducing energy consumption for example by using electro and magnetocaloric means of cooling; generating energy by use of nanoscale rectifying antennas and finally storing energy by photocatalytic splitting of hydrogen from water. Our program is divided into two themed areas:1) Nanostructured oxides for Energy Efficient Refrigeration with 2 project areasElectrocaloricsMagnetocalorics2) Nanostructured oxides for energy production and storage with 2 project areasSolar HarvestingPhotocatalysisThis research will enable :- The development of new materials, new material architectures and new device concepts for energy refrigeration and energy harvesting. The synergy across a range of programs particularly the underpinning activities of materials theory, modelling and characterisation will move these important fields closer to application.- The research will also enable a new forum to be established, with representation from UK and European scientists and industrialists so that broad discussions can be held to enable moving these fields forward. We place a significant emphasis on training, outreach and knowledge transfer.The research challenges that need to be addressed are:- Designing physical systems that are close to an instability so that small external perturbations from magnetic or electric fields, optical or thermal excitation will tip the system into a new ground state- Optimising control over (strain, defects, doping inhomogeneity, disorder) and first layer effects in thin film oxides (with thicknesses of the order of 10nm or less) so that we can develop the capability to tune the band gap of the oxide using directed modelling and targeted growth control.