• 2022-2022close
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• 2019 close

We observe the world around us predominantly through the measurement of optical intensity. Although powerful, this leaves the other fundamental optical degrees of freedom, phase and polarisation massively under-utilized. Our tendency to solely use intensity results from the static sensor technology that is available, which offer very limited ability to dynamically reconfigure their function or perform any optical processing. In Super-Pixels we will co-develop a new integrated sensor platform that will revolutionize the way we process light to allow the full utilization of its fundamental properties. Redefining the core functionality of our sensor technology will radically impact the technology that is deployed in a broad spectrum of cross-disciplinary areas such as nano-particle detection, compact atmospheric corrected imaging systems, endoscopy, coherent communications and on-chip processing of structured light. This vision will be enabled by a compact and multi-functional photonic integrated chip that would be installed into phones, microscopes, cameras, communication and environmental monitoring systems, becoming central part of the way we collect and process optical information. In Super-pixels, we will create such an integrated photonics device that is based on a mesh of several hundred Mach-Zehnder interferometers, which will be used to dynamically map phase and polarization, with the ability to fully transform any optical field incident. A revolutionary prototype system will be delivered that will partner our Super-Pixels chip with a commercially available camera to enhance its functionality within a single frame of a camera. This prototype will support a number of potential applications that include visualising normally invisible nano-particles through phase mapping, imaging through multimode optical fibres, reconfigurable quantum communication links and mapping of airflow and particulates through phase and polarisation retrieval.

In the domain of Cybersecurity Research and innovation, European scientists hold pioneering positions in fields such as cryptography, formal methods, or secure components. Yet this excellence on focused domains does not translate into larger-scale, system-level advantages. Too often, scattered and small teams fall short of critical mass capabilities, despite demonstrating world-class talent and results. Europe’s strength is in its diversity, but that strength is only materialised if we cooperate, combine, and develop common lines of research. Given today’s societal challenges, this has become more than an advantage – an urgent necessity. Various approaches are being developed to enhance collaboration at many levels. Europe’s framework programs have sprung projects in cybersecurity over the past thirty years, encouraging international cooperation and funding support actions. More recently, the Cybersecurity PPP has brought together public institutions and industrial actors around common roadmaps and projects. While encouraging, these efforts have highlighted the need to break the mould, to step up investments and intensify coordination. The SPARTA proposal brings together a unique set of actors at the intersection of scientific excellence, technological innovation, and societal sciences in cybersecurity. Strongly guided by concrete and risky challenges, it will setup unique collaboration means, leading the way in building transformative capabilities and forming world-leading expertise centres. Through innovative governance, ambitious demonstration cases, and active community engagement, SPARTA aims at re-thinking the way cybersecurity research is performed in Europe across domains and expertise, from foundations to applications, in academia and industry.

CIPHER will launch the global research initiative, Hip Hop Interpellation, pilot a new semantic digital/ethnographic web methodology, and codify the emergent discipline of global hip hop studies. It addresses the central question: why has this highly localized and authenticizing African American music translated so easily to far-flung communities and contexts around the globe? Through this specific question the project attempts to understand the foundational and broadly transferable question: how are globalization and localization related? To answer these questions CIPHER posits the Hip Hop Interpellation thesis, that hip hop spreads not as a copy of an African American original, but, through its performance of knowledge, emerges as an always already constituent part of local knowledge and practice. The theorization thus moves beyond the “hailing practices” described by Althusser’s theory of interpellation—the discursive webs that coerce ideological incorporation—to describing an interpolation that locates other histories within and through hip hop’s performed knowledges. CIPHER’s semantic web methodology tests this thesis, tracking how hip hop memes—slogans, anthems, and icons—are simultaneously produced by people and produce people. This research clears the conceptual impasse of structural “cultural imperialism” vs. agentic “cultural appropriation” debates and instrumentalizes the methodological distance between ethnographic specificity and big data generality. It does so by creating a feedback loop between digital humanities methods (crowd sourcing, semantic tagging, computational stylometry) and ethnographic fieldwork techniques (interviews, musical analysis, participant observation). The result will be an iterative map of Hip Hop Interpellation/Interpolation created by stakeholders that is transformational of our understanding of culture and/as cultural production and transferable to pressing questions about globalization and l’exception culturelle.

An organism’s metabolic rate is a central trait that links its physiology with its ecology and life history. However, while textbook definitions of metabolic rate generally refer to the rate of energy use by the animal, most empirical studies instead record it very indirectly as whole-animal oxygen consumption rate, without any actual measurement of ATP production. This approach contains a conceptual weakness: it is equivalent to estimating a car’s capacity or efficiency by measuring its fuel consumption per minute, with no measurement of what that consumption actually achieves in terms of speed or distance travelled. This can significantly weaken our ability to link metabolic rates to ecological processes, and may explain why conventional measures of metabolic rate often do not predict performance or fitness. This ambitious project will therefore attempt to re-dress the balance by shifting the focus onto the efficiency with which mitochondria produce ATP, with the expectation that this will lead to completely new insights into how metabolic rate influences and constrains the behaviour and ecology of animals. It will use new techniques that we have developed for simultaneous measurement of both ATP and ROS production by the mitochondria; these have revealed two-fold variation among individuals in the efficiency of ATP production (and hence ability to perform aerobic work), totally hidden from usual measurements of metabolic rate. I will use these approaches to examine the impact of metabolic efficiency on performance and the trade-off between efficiency and rates of senescence, using freshwater fish as an experimental system. By applying cutting-edge methods, so far only used in the laboratory, to animals living in their natural habitats, the project will reveal for the first time how environmental conditions select for particular mitochondrial phenotypes and hence metabolic efficiency, so allowing a re-evaluation of the links between ecology and metabolic rate.

Our long-term vision is that AVATAR therapy is optimised for delivery in clinical settings, with the impact that a novel effective treatment for distressing voices is readily adopted in UK and international clinical settings. As a result of the current study we expect the impact to be: - Software platform tested and optimised for use in NHS settings - Further evidence of effectiveness and the relative cost effectiveness of two therapy levels, including a further elaboration of the participants for whom the simpler phase 1 approach would be sufficient. The advantage of this being that the therapy would be more rapidly disseminated as the more straightforward skills needed for this phase are widely available and at lower cost both in the UK and internationally compared to the specialised psychological therapy skills necessary for phase 2 - Clarity about optimal therapy content and training, with published therapy operational and clinical manuals - Evidence sufficient for a NICE recommendation of AVATAR as a treatment in the NHS. This is a key next step in the wider dissemination of this therapy in the UK and will also be helpful data for similar clinical guideline and policy recommendations in the US and elsewhere AVATAR therapy is a brief intervention aimed at reducing the frequency of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH, henceforth ‘voices’). It involves the use of a digital simulation (avatar) of the entity the person believes is the source of the voice in a three-way discussion between participant, avatar and therapist, focussing initially on managing anxiety and helping the participant to stand up to the avatar (phase 1) followed by a realistic enactment of the ascribed character of the voice, targeting processes that are specific to an individualised formulation (phase 2). The first fully powered RCT found AVATAR therapy resulted in a rapid and substantial fall in frequency and associated distress of voices that was superior to a supportive counselling control condition at 12 weeks. In the current study we have four main goals. First, a multicentre RCT to examine the effects of high and low intensity AVATAR therapy (where high intensity involves both phases and low intensity only phase 1) by comparing each to a treatment as usual comparator, and to identify who would be likely to benefit from the high intensity therapy versus those for whom low intensity alone would be sufficient. Second, to examine the relative cost-effectiveness of the two levels of AVATAR therapy and routine treatment. Third, to broaden the availability of AVATAR therapy by expanding the number of staff trained in geographically dispersed NHS settings. Finally, to provide the evidence on effects and cost-effectiveness necessary to take AVAVAR therapy to recommendation by guideline bodies such as NICE.

Immunotherapy holds the potential to dramatically improve the curative prognosis of cancer patients. However, despite significant progress, a huge gap remains to be bridged to gain board success in the clinic. A first limiting factor in cancer immunotherapy is the low response rate in large fraction of the patients and an unmet need exists for more efficient - potentially synergistic - immunotherapies that improve upon or complement existing strategies. The second limiting factor is immune-related toxicity that can cause live-threatening situations as well as seriously impair the quality of life of patients. Therefore, there is an urgent need for safer immunotherapies that allow for a more target-specific engineering of the immune system. Strategies to engineer the immune system via a materials chemistry approach, i.e. immuno-engineering, have gathered major attention over the past decade and could complement or replace biologicals, and holds promise to contribute to resolving the current issues faced by the immunotherapy field. I hypothesize that synthetic biomaterials can play an important role in anti-cancer immunotherapy with regard to synergistic, safe, but potent, instruction of innate and adaptive anti-cancer immunity and to revert the tumor microenvironment from an immune-suppressive into an immune-susceptible state. Hereto, the overall scientific objective of this proposal is to fully embrace the potential of immuno-engineering and develop several highly synergistic biomaterials strategies to engineer the immune system to fight cancer. I will develop a series of biomaterials and address a number of fundamental questions with regard to optimal biomaterial design for immuno-engineering. Based on these findings, I will elucidate those therapeutic strategies that lead to synergistic engineering of innate and adaptive immunity in combination with remodeling the tumor microenvironment from an immune-suppressive into an immune-susceptible state.