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.

The Spanish empire controlled the vast majority of the western hemisphere's lands and peoples for more than three centuries. Its vast administration in the Americas depended on the work of royal notaries, Indigenous artists, and printers. They produced prodigious amounts of documents, written or printed on paper, which fill archives and libraries today. Despite the extensive documentation, present-day understanding of the Spanish colonial enterprise is fragmentary. Once the initial barrier of archival access has been overcome, scholars and other publics then must decipher archaic penmanship, obscure writing conventions, and unfamiliar Indigenous imagery. This project seeks to lower these barriers by introducing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies into representative Indigenous and Spanish colonial archives in Mexico and the U.S., and training them to convert the "unreadable" archive into worldwide accessible data. The project has the potential to revolutionize how cultural institutions provide access to their colonial collections and how humanities researchers can undertake cutting-edge digital scholarship. In a highly interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeologists, historians, web scientists, designers, and computer scientists, the "Unlocking the Colonial Archive" project will create a step-change in the way a broad spectrum of researchers and the public engage with and use countless early modern Indigenous and Spanish collections dispersed throughout the world. Using machine learning and the exceptional collections of the LLILAS Benson library (US) and the General Archive of the Nation (Mexico), the project will tackle three challenges in interconnected research areas to: (a) accomplish the automated transcription of 16th- and 17th-century historical colonial documents that combine Spanish with Indigenous languages such as Nahuatl, Mixtec, Huastec, and Otomi, among others; (b) develop methods to carry out text mining in large historical collections; and (c) develop techniques to facilitate the automated identification of iconographic and other pictorial features in Indigenous maps and printed books. The development of such approaches will not only facilitate the searching, retrieval, and reading of these materials, but will also transform the accessibility and analysis of large textual and image collections. With a strong commitment to a decolonial approach, both in terms of archival practices and in the critical use of technologies, the project will create freely available, enhanced open digital collections. As such, "Unlocking the Colonial Archive" will work in close partnership with Mexican, UK, US, Portuguese, and Spanish researchers and institutions, training scholars and interested members of the public on transferable skills and digital methods, and it will produce innovative, reproducible workflows that Latin American scholars and cultural institutions around the world can adopt and implement.

Geological dykes - sheets of rock that are often oriented vertically or steeply inclined to the bedding of preexisting rocks - typically intrude because stresses either 1) overcome rock strength or 2) exploit existing fractures created by preceding tectonic activity. Normally, it is impossible to tell these two possibilities apart because intrusion occurs along the rift zone - i.e., in the same direction as the faults within the rift. More generally, it is also poorly known how many types of fractures increase in size to form larger faults for similar reasons. Some existing mechanical models can explain how the displacements of faults scales with their length. However, they leave open questions of how fractures not showing such scaling develop. The role of pre-existing fractures in creating pathways for dyke propagation could be important for guiding the propagation. This potential "irrationality" of dyke intrusion is crucial for interpreting the nature (and source) of intense earthquake crises in volcanic systems, and ultimately for managing volcanic crises when knowledge of potential eruption sites would otherwise be an asset. For instance, if dykes are shown to preferentially follow pre-existing structural weaknesses, then detailed mapping of faults could provide important constraints for volcano eruption hazard maps and scenario-planning. An exciting opportunity to tackle this outstanding scientific problem is now presented by a rare, intense earthquake crisis in one of the most geometrically extreme, fissure-fed volcanoes on Earth, the volcanic ridge of São Jorge Island (Azores), which contains faults oblique to the rift zone. Starting on 19 March 2022, the region's seismicity levels raised extraordinarily from only 5 earthquakes recorded in 01/01-18/03, to over 27,000 M 2-3.3 events recorded from March 19th until now. Unfortunately, current earthquake locations are substantially uncertain because of geometric limitations of the existing seismic network, which includes only seismic stations in the islands. These uncertainties prevent us from relating the earthquakes to known faults and volcanic centres. Further, the limited data coverage and quality of existing networks have hindered the construction of detailed 3-D seismic tomography images of the region, with only 1-D velocity models being available based on land data. In order to address these issues, we propose to deploy a temporary seismic network of five ocean bottom seismometers (OBSs) around São Jorge and ten land broadband (BB) stations on São Jorge and surrounding islands. This will substantially enhance the region's seismic data coverage, leading to an unprecedented dataset: (1) showing how seismicity associated with a dyke intrusion relates to known faults; and (2) enabling the construction of the first detailed 3-D subsurface images of the crust and of the volcanic edifice in this rare example of a dyke in an environment with faults oblique to the rift zone. More generally, this project will bring key new insights into the structure and plumbing network of tall and narrow fissure-fed volcanic systems such as São Jorge. It will also shed new light on the mechanics of dyke intrusions and their kinematic evolution in general.

In the last decade, the web infrastructure has evolved to support on-the-fly access of services provided by different vendors. Potentially, this enables collaborations that are cross-boundary and obey precise non-trivial patterns of conversation. However, today services are still used separately, with little integration and guarantees of safety and quality of service. To enable the digital economy to concretely benefit from service integration and open collaborations among several parties, it is critical to ensure safety guarantees (e.g., deadlock freedom) that encompass whole systems, and not just single services. Moreover, as services are developed separately and composed on-the-fly, verification should be modular. Modularity is supported by existing frameworks based on multiparty session types (MPST), which allow effective static (behavioural) local type-checking of programs against global protocol specifications involving several parties. Unfortunately, the state of the art on session types does not sufficiently address non-functional aspects of program correctness. A quality-aware approach to process engineering is particularly critical, as quality properties may affect the functional behaviour of the overall system. For example, the response time of a remote database may affect the deadlock freedom of complex interactions with several clients. This project will focus on time, which is at the basis of many critical safety and quality properties, as many non-trivial collaborations rely on some notion of deadline or timeout (e.g., the Twitter Streaming API requires clients to "...reconnect no more than twice every four minutes"). The aim of the project is to provide a framework for engineering time-sensitive distributed protocols. Protocols are intended here as ad-hoc, application level, abstract specifications of the interaction patterns that actual distributed implementations should follow. Some examples of protocol are the Post Office Protocol (POP2) or Map-Reduce. The framework we propose will be practical, formally grounded, and support: specification of time-sensitive protocols, their modular implementation as executable programs, and modular automated verification of programs against protocols via type-checking. We will provide two languages, one for the specification and one for the implementation of time-sensitive protocols, and establish their relationship in terms of a verification (i.e., behavioural type-checking) framework based on MPST. Modularity and formality will derive from using MPST. Three open challenges will be addressed, which are critical for the practical applicability of MPST to timed session programming: expressiveness, tractability, and embedding into concrete languages and tools. By expressiveness we mean the ability of the programming primitives to set flexible schedules for the timing of actions and support run-time adjustments (e.g., depending on the actual timing in which actions are executed, or on the run-time system load). This will yield robustness of the overall approach by enabling programs to adapt to unpredicted run-time delays. When verifying programs with such flexible time schedules, tractability will be ensured by combining static and dynamic verification (i.e., via hybrid typing). Hybrid typing of timed interactions is still an unexplored direction, but a promising one in terms of efficiency of verification and robustness. Finally, the programming primitives for timed session programming will be embedded into a mainstream programming language that can be directly used by practitioners. Concretely, we will provide a Java API for time-aware session programming and a hybrid type-checking tool for programs written with this API. This will enable timely assessment of the theory, wide access to the project's results from academics and practitioners, and support impact.

The vision of this Fellowship proposal is to provide a unique capacity internationally, where proteins, metabolites and trace elements can be imaged and co-located at the sub-micron scale, under ambient pressure. This is not available using any other technique and will provide significant benefits to researchers in industry and academia studying the fluxes of metabolites, proteins and other biomarkers in tissues and cells. The Fellowship will develop a new emerging world leader and provide training to a team of researchers in this new field. The vision will be achieved by developing a novel toolbox for molecular speciation, to be used alongside ion beam analysis (IBA). The Fellowship will tackle this challenge with three interconnecting work packages, each investigating a different approach to augmenting the molecular speciation that can be provided alongside or with IBA techniques. These approaches can be summarised as follows: 1. Multimodal mass spectrometry and ion beam trace element imaging; 2. Microscale (point) protein and metabolite characterisation alongside ion beam trace element imaging; 3. Multiplexed ion beam imaging of biomolecules and proteins using antibody-lanthanide tags. This will provide a step change in the UK's capability in the characterisation of biological materials. This proposal will enhance the >£10M investment that EPSRC has recently made in renewing the UK National Ion Beam Centre (UKNIBC) contract and investment in associated equipment (EP/P001440/1; EP/I036516/1), ensure continuing provision of cutting-edge capability in the UK and provide enhanced capabilities at the UKNIBC. It will also ensure the primary benefits go to the needs of UK industry and academia and support the development of applications across RCUK priority areas, with significant economic and societal benefits.