Humans interact with tens of objects daily, at home (e.g. cooking/cleaning) or outdoors (e.g. ticket machines/shopping bags), during working (e.g. assembly/machinery) or leisure hours (e.g. playing/sports), individually or collaboratively. When observing people interacting with objects, our vision assisted by the sense of hearing is the main tool to perceive these interactions. Let's take the example of boiling water from a kettle. We observe the actor press a button, wait and hear the water boil and the kettle's light go off before water is used for, say, preparing tea. The perception process is formed from understanding intentional interactions (called ideomotor actions) as well as reactive actions to dynamic stimuli in the environment (referred to as sensormotor actions). As observers, we understand and can ultimately replicate such interactions using our sensory input, along with our underlying complex cognitive processes of event perception. Evidence in behavioural sciences demonstrates that these human cognitive processes are highly modularised, and these modules collaborate to achieve our outstanding human-level perception. However, current approaches in artificial intelligence are lacking in their modularity and accordingly their capabilities. To achieve human-level perception of object interactions, including online perception when the interaction results in mistakes (e.g. water is spilled) or risks (e.g. boiling water is spilled), this fellowship focuses on informing computer vision and machine learning models, including deep learning architectures, from well-studied cognitive behavioural frameworks. Deep learning architectures have achieved superior performance, compared to their hand-crafted predecessors, on video-level classification, however their performance on fine-grained understanding within the video remains modest. Current models are easily fooled by similar motions or incomplete actions, as shown by recent research. This fellowship focuses on empowering these models through modularisation, a principle proven since the 50s in Fodor's Modularity of the Mind, and frequently studied by cognitive psychologists in controlled lab environments. Modularity of high-level perception, along with the power of deep learning architectures, will bring a new understanding to videos analysis previously unexplored. The targeted perception, of daily and rare object interactions, will lay the foundations for applications including assistive technologies using wearable computing, and robot imitation learning. We will work closely with three industrial partners to pave potential knowledge transfer paths to applications. Additionally, the fellowship will actively engage international researchers through workshops, benchmarks and public challenges on large datasets, to encourage other researchers to address problems related to fine-grained perception in video understanding.

Quantum Technologies (QT) are at a pivotal moment with major global efforts underway to translate quantum information science into new products that promise disruptive impact across a wide variety of sectors from communications, imaging, sensing, metrology, simulation, to computation and security. Our world-leading Centre for Doctoral Training in Quantum Engineering will evolve to be a vital component of a thriving quantum UK ecosystem, training not just highly-skilled employees, but the CEOs and CTOs of the future QT companies that will define the field. Due to the excellence of its basic science, and through investment by the national QT programme, the UK has positioned itself at the forefront of global developments. There have been very recent major [billion-dollar] investments world-wide, notably in the US, China and Europe, both from government and leading technology companies. There has also been an explosion in the number of start-up companies in the area, both in the UK and internationally. Thus, competition in this field has increased dramatically. PhD trained experts are being recruited aggressively, by both large and small firms, signalling a rapidly growing need. The supply of globally competitive talent is perhaps the biggest challenge for the UK in maintaining its leading position in QT. The new CDT will address this challenge by providing a vital source of highly-trained scientists, engineers and innovators, thus making it possible to anchor an outstanding QT sector here, and therefore ensure that UK QT delivers long-term economic and societal benefits. Recognizing the nature of the skills need is vital: QT opportunities will be at the doctoral or postdoctoral level, largely in start-ups or small interdisciplinary teams in larger organizations. With our partners we have identified the key skills our graduates need, in addition to core technical skills: interdisciplinary teamwork, leadership in large and small groups, collaborative research, an entrepreneurial mind-set, agility of thought across diverse disciplines, and management of complex projects, including systems engineering. These factors show that a new type of graduate training is needed, far from the standard PhD model. A cohort-based approach is essential. In addition to lectures, there will be seminars, labs, research and peer-to-peer learning. There will be interdisciplinary and grand challenge team projects, co-created and co-delivered with industry partners, developing a variety of important team skills. Innovation, leadership and entrepreneurship activities will be embedded from day one. At all times, our programme will maximize the benefits of a cohort-based approach. In the past two years particularly, the QT landscape has transformed, and our proposed programme, with inputs from our partners, has been designed to reflect this. Our training and research programme has evolved and broadened from our highly successful current CDT to include the challenging interplay of noisy quantum hardware and new quantum software, applied to all three QT priorities: communications; computing & simulation; and sensing, imaging & metrology. Our programme will be founded on Bristol's outstanding activity in quantum information, computation and photonics, together with world-class expertise in science and engineering in areas surrounding this core. In addition, our programme will benefit from close links to Bristol's unique local innovation environment including the visionary Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre, a fellowship programme and Skills Hub run in partnership with Cranfield University's Bettany Centre in the School of Management, as well as internationally recognised incubators/accelerators SetSquared, EngineShed, UnitDX and the recently announced £43m Quantum Technology Innovation Centre. This will all be linked within Bristol's planned £300m Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus, placing the CDT at the centre of a thriving quantum ecosystem.

Society is battling with an explosion of health conditions that need long-term management. These chronic conditions occur at all ages: UK children have some of the world's highest levels of both asthma and type 1 diabetes and, with a third of the UK's school children leaving primary education obese, there are huge concerns over type 2 diabetes at all ages; in any year, working age men and women in the UK have a 12% chance of a diagnosed mental health issue such as anxiety, depression and post-natal depression; conditions including dementia, Parkinson's disease and frailty are rapidly increasing in later years. Low-cost, connected, digital technologies are increasingly seen as vital to the understanding, prevention, diagnosis and management of these conditions for months and years in the community. These digital technologies, such as smartphone apps, wearables, blood sugar monitors - and a near future of Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as smart home systems (e.g. Echo), smart meters and connected appliances - offer an unprecedented opportunity to monitor a patient's condition within their community. With the data processed by artificial intelligence they will deliver decision support to health and care professionals; predict or detect a patient's symptoms worsening; support independent living; deliver behavioural and even pharmaceutical interventions; and allow the efficacy of treatments to be monitored. This cannot be business as usual for doctoral education since a digital health technology is likely to require a highly multidisciplinary understanding of technologies spanning software engineering, microelectronics, data communication, signal processing, machine learning and visualisation. Achieving actual patient benefit requires user-centred/driven design, a broad understanding of health and care, psychology, physiology, ethics, regulation, health economics and the design of clinical trials. To meet the challenge and seize the opportunity, the UK needs to nurture leadership that will span this hugely multidisciplinary space - combining technological depth with broad appreciation of the health landscape; empathy with the patient's needs with an eye to business models that underpin adoption; ambition to accelerate innovation with a principled commitment to ethics, inclusivity, regulation, data security and privacy. The opportunity and the challenge for this Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Digital Health and Care is to be bigger than the sum of its parts; to physically co-locate a cohort of students from Engineering & Computer Sciences and Health & Life Sciences; to bridge the disciplinary gaps, work with key external partners, foster better understandings and activate peer-to-peer learning within the cohort itself. Bristol is the perfect place to train future leaders at this disciplinary interface, building on £30M of digital health research at the University since 2013. Our proposed CDT will develop team-players with the skills to work effectively with experts from other disciplines, with patients and with the public. In a space where issues of trust, privacy, transparency, accountability and inclusion are absolutely fundamental, the CDT will not only embrace Responsible Innovation but influence and lead best practice nationally and internationally. The CDT will build on a variety of established relationships; with small and medium sized businesses, technology companies, big pharmaceutical companies, charities, universities, one of the UK's largest public science centres (WeTheCurious), Bristol City Council, and with the public. This CDT is therefore envisaged as a multidisciplinary community of students and academics that will create exciting research projects and will build networks of individuals across academia, industry and the NHS at all levels. It will sow the seeds of future collaborative research and of commercialisation activities.

Ultrasonics, the science and technology of sound at frequencies above the audible range, has a huge range of applications in sensing and remote delivery of energy. In sensing, 20% of medical scans rely on ultrasonics for increasingly diverse procedures. Ultrasonics is pervasive in underwater sensing and communication and a key technology for non-destructive evaluation. Ultrasonic devices are essential components in every mobile phone and are being developed for enhanced biometric security. Ultrasound is also important in remote delivery of energy. In medical therapy, it is used to treat neural dysfunction and cancer. Many surgical tools are actuated with ultrasound. As the best way to clean surfaces and bond interconnects, ultrasound is pervasive in semiconductor and electronics fabrication; it is also being explored for power delivery to implants and to give a contactless sense of touch. Such a broad range of applications predicts an exciting future: new materials will emerge into applications; semiconductor circuits will deliver smaller, more convenient instrumentation systems; autonomy and robotics will call for better sensors; and data analysis will benefit from machine learning. To maintain competitive advantage in this dynamic and multidisciplinary topic, companies worldwide rely on ambitious, innovative engineers to provide their unique knowledge of ultrasonics. As a significant contribution to address this need, Medical & Industrial Ultrasonics at the University of Glasgow and the Centre for Ultrasonic Engineering at the University of Strathclyde will combine to form the Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Ultrasonic Engineering (FUSE), the largest academic ultrasonic engineering unit in the world. Working with more than 30 external organisations, from microcompanies to multinationals, this will, for the first time, enable systematic training of a new generation of leaders in ultrasonics research, engineering and product development. This training will take place in the world-class research environment provided by two of the UK's pre-eminent universities with its partners, creating a training and research powerhouse in ultrasonics that will attract the best students and put them at the global forefront of the field.

Science fiction movies, such as Star Wars or The Avengers portray the vision of volumetric systems in which the characters cannot only see 3D content floating in mid-air, but they can also feel it and hear it, interacting with it with their bare eyes, ears and hands, just as they would do with any other real object around them. Current display approaches, such as VR, allow us to get a glimpse of such experiences, but users need to wear headsets and other devices such as VR controllers or data-gloves. These devices create visual, tactile and auditive stimuli as to trick our brains into believing that the contents we are seeing are real. Instead of creating illusions, Particle Based Displays (PBDs) take an approach which is much closer to these visions from science fiction, directly controlling matter in the real world to create contents that we can directly see, hear and touch. PBD systems make use of ultrasounds to trap and move small particles in mid-air. By quickly moving and colouring these particles in 3D space, PBD systems can create coloured volumetric shapes visible by our naked eyes. Making use of the pressure delivered by the ultrasound acoustic waves, PBDs can also create points of high pressure that our bare hands can feel, or induce air vibrations that create audible sound. During this 3 year programme, our team of artists and researchers will make use of PBDs to create public artistic installations in UK and Shanghai, showcasing immersive mixed-reality installations in which virtual content (created by the PBD) and real contents (scenery, real props, illumination) will merge seamlessly, creating new and magical experiences for entertainment, story-telling, retail and digital signage. The programme will also exploit collaborations with media artists and industries in UK, Shanghai and across the globe, creating a network of collaborators to explore the potential of PBD displays, either together with us or independently. At the same time, we will work in creating development tools to make the creation of PBD experiences easier, allowing our technology to become accessible to more people, and as a necessary step to take our PBD displays from our labs and exhibitions and into our workplaces and homes.