Battery electrified power is predicted to become the dominant mode of propulsion in future light duty transport. For sustainable heavy duty applications challenges remain around practical range, payload and total cost. Currently there is no economically viable single solution. For commercial marine vessels the problem is compounded by long service lives, with bulk carriers, tankers and container ships the main contributors to greenhouse gases. Ammonia (NH3) has excellent potential to play a significant role as a sustainable future fuel in both retrofitted and advanced engines. However, significant uncertainties remain around safe and effective end use, with these unknowns spanning across fundamental understanding, effective application and acceptance. This multi-disciplinary programme seeks to overcome the key related technical, economic and social unknowns through flexible, multidisciplinary research set around disruptive NH3 engine concepts capable of high thermal efficiency and ultra low NOx. The goal is to accelerate understanding, technologies and ultimately policies which are appropriately scaled and "right first time".

Imagine you are standing on a street corner in a city. Close your eyes: what do you hear? Perhaps some cars and busses driving on the road, footsteps of people on the pavement, beeps from a pedestrian crossing, rustling and clonks from shopping bags and boxes, and the hubbub of talking shoppers. You can do the same in a kitchen as someone is making breakfast, or as you are working in a busy office. Now, following the successful application of AI and machine learning technologies to the recognition of speech and images, we are beginning to build computer systems to tackle the challenging task of "machine listening", to build computer systems to automatically analyse and recognize everyday real-world sound scenes and events. This new technology has major potential applications in security, health & wellbeing, environmental sensing, urban living, and the creative sector. Analysis of sounds in the home offers the potential to improve comfort, security, and healthcare services to inhabitants. In environmental sound sensing, analysis of urban sounds offers the potential to monitor and improve soundscapes experienced for people in towns and cities. In the creative sector, analysis of sounds also offers the potential to make better use of archives in museums and libraries, and production processes for broadcasters, programme makers, or games designers. The international market for sound recognition technology has been forecast to be worth around £1bn by 2021, so there is significant potential for new tools in "AI for sound" to have a major benefit for the economy and society. Nevertheless, realising the potential of computational analysis of sounds presents particular challenges for machine learning technologies. For example, current research use cases are often unrealistic; modern AI methods, such as deep learning, can produce promising results, but are still poorly understood; and current datasets may have unreliable or missing labels. To tackle these and other key issues, this Fellowship will use a set of application sector use cases, spanning sound sensing in the home, in the workplace and in the outdoor environment, to drive advances in core machine learning research. Specifically, the Fellowship will focus on four main application use cases: (i) monitoring of sounds of human activity in the home for assisted living; (ii) measuring of sounds in non-domestic buildings to improve the office and workplace environment; (iii) measuring sounds in smart cities to improve the urban environment; and (iv) developing tools to use sounds to help producers and consumers of broadcast creative content. Through this Fellowship, we aim to deliver a step-change in research in this area, bringing "AI for Sound" technology out of the lab, helping to realize its potential to benefit society and the economy.

Our vision is to pioneer a mobile phone sized quantum navigator by combining chip-scale quantum clocks, accelerometers and rotation sensors (gyroscopes) that can be manufactured on silicon chips to be used for position, navigation and timing without reliance on signals from satellites. Our aim is to improve satellite-free navigator accuracy compared to present marine grade commercial systems by at least x10 with over a x100 reduction in size, weight, power and cost enabled through the development of new science approaches. An analogy is Harrison's pocket watch, H4, that won the Longitude Prize in 1773 as the small size reduced the uncertainties from temperature and acceleration drifts on navy ships. Society navigates using satnavs in vehicles and mobile phones but the nano-Watt signals are easy to jam, spoof and do not work inside buildings, under the ocean or underground. Spoofing and jamming are also used by pirates to steal ships, people traffickers and organised crime to hid illegal behaviour, and in military conflict zones to limit situational awareness of opponents. Resilient navigation without satellites uses dead reckoning where the current position from a previously determined reference is calculated using time, velocity, acceleration and rotation measurements. The UK Government recommends all position, navigation and timing for national security and critical national infrastructure can operate for greater than 3 days without updated references from satellites. The UK Government Blackett Review on Global Navigation Satellite Signals (GNSS) Dependencies and Vulnerabilities states that 5 days loss of satellite navigation has a potential loss of £5.2Bn to the UK economy. MOD, US DARPA, the European Defence Fund and the Connected Places Catapult indicates that national security and autonomous vehicle markets require far smaller, more accurate, robust and cheaper position, navigation and timing solutions such as the quantum chip-scale systems we proposed to develop. Connected and autonomous vehicles are predicted to create a £100 Bn global market for resilient position, navigation and timing systems with £2.7Bn GVA to the UK economy (>23,400 direct and 14,600 indirect UK jobs) by 2035. This research is key underpinning work to enable that market by developing UK supply chains with industry for practical position, navigation and timing systems. Quantum rotation sensors / gyroscopes have experimentally demonstrated drift stability performance 65 times better than optical gyroscopes with theoretical performance calculated to be 20,000 times better. Quantum accelerometers have experimentally demonstrated drift stability 4 orders of magnitude superior to classical accelerometers with hybrid systems also showing improvements of x80. At present these demonstrated quantum sensors are difficult to scale below 50 kg and something about the size of a washing machine. This project aims to take photonic integrated circuit and MEMS technologies to develop chip-scale atomic clocks, quantum rotation sensors / gyroscopes and quantum accelerometers to build much smaller and more practical quantum navigators that will have many applications and benefits to UK and global society.

Digital twins are a fusion of digital technologies considered by many leading advocates to be revolutionary in nature. Digital twins offer exciting new possibilities across a wide range of sectors from health, environment, transport, manufacturing, defence, and infrastructure. By connecting the virtual and physical worlds (e.g. cyber-physcial), digital twins are able to better support decisions, extend operational lives, and introduce multiple other efficiencies and benefits. As a result, digital twins have been identified by government, professional bodies and industry, as a key technology to help address many of the societal challenges we face. To date, digital twin (DT) innovation has been strongly driven by industry practitioners and commercial innovators. As would be expected with any early-adoption approach, projects have been bespoke & often isolated, and so there is a need for research to increase access, lower entry costs and develop interconnectivity. Furthermore, there are several major gaps in underpinning academic research relating to DT. The academic push has been significantly lagging behind the industry pull. As a result, there is an urgent need for a network that will fill gaps in the underpinning research for topics such as; uncertainty, interoperability, scaling, governance & societal effects. In terms of existing networking activities, there are several industry-led user groups and domain-specific consortia. However, there has never been a dedicated academic-led DT network that brings together academic research teams across the entire remit of UKRI with user-led groups. DTNet+ will address this gap with a consortium which has both sufficient breadth and depth to deliver transformative change.

The Future Places Centre will explore how ubiquitous and pervasive technologies, the IoT, and new data science tools can let people reimagine what their future spaces might be. Today, the footprint of such systems extends well beyond the work environments where they first showed themselves and are now, quite literally, ubiquitous. Combined with advances in data science, particularly in the general area of AI, these are enabling entirely new forms of applications and expanding our understanding of how we can shape our physical spaces. The result of these trends is that the potential impact of these systems is no longer confined to work settings or the scientific imagination; it points towards all contexts in which the relationship between space and human practice might be altered through digitally-enabled comprehension of the worlds we inhabit. Such change necessitates enriching the public imagination about what future places might be and how they might be understood. In particular, it points towards new ways of using pervasive technologies (such as the IoT), to shape healthy, sustainable living through the creation of appropriate places. To paraphrase Churchill: if he said we make our buildings, and our buildings come to shape us, the Future Places centre starts from the premise that new understanding of places (enabled by pervasive computing, data science and AI tools), can be combined with a public concern for sustainability and the environment to help shape healthier places and thus make healthier people. It is thus the goal of the centre to reimagine and develop further Mark Weiser's original vision of ubiquitous computing. As it does this so it will cohere Lancaster's pioneering DE projects and create a world-class interdisciplinary research endeavour that binds Lancaster to the local community, to industry and government, making the North West a test-bed for what might be.