• OA Publications Mandate: Yes close

The automotive industry is being encouraged to cut emissions from cars, with OEMs threatened with penalties if they do not meet targets. One way of achieving this is to make vehicles lighter. Reducing the weight of a small family car by 5% can lead to increased fuel efficiency of 2% . Conventional car seats can weigh up to 35kg each , whereas Gordon Murray Design’s composite iStream® seat weighs only 12kg, potentially a huge weight saving. The manufacture of composite car seats has traditionally been expensive due to their unsuitability for mass production but the revolutionary iStream® manufacturing process overturns this convention, utilising a composite sandwich panel structure and metallic frame combination, which costs no more than a conventional car seat. Reducing the weight is also of benefit to electric vehicles (EVs) as well as internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, lower weight means lower emissions and for EVs it means greater range for a given battery size or a smaller (cheaper) battery for a given range, both of which are very desirable for customers. The principal objective of the The Productionisation of Advanced Modular Passenger Autonomous Seating (PAMPAS) project is to fully understand all aspects of the industrialisation process to ensure the already technically proven seating system can enter into series production with a commercially viable proposition.

The protozoan parasites Trypanosoma brucei, Trypanosoma cruzi and Leishmania spp. are the causative agents of neglected tropical diseases. They rely on surface glycans, chains of sugar units attached to proteins and lipids, for their survival and infectivity. These surface glycans are synthesized by enzymes called glycosyltransferases located in the secretory pathway. However, contrary to this canonical model of glycan synthesis and surface expression, our group has recently described the presence of an essential glycosyltransferase, a fucosyltransferase, in the mitochondrion of T. brucei. A similar putative fucosyltransferase gene, called TcFUT1, has been found in the genome of T. cruzi, the causative agent of Chagas’ disease, endemic in the Americas. We aim to obtain recombinant, active TcFUT1 protein in order to analyse its enzymatic activity, define its preferred substrate(s) in vitro, design assays for compound screening and to raise antibodies against it for immuno-localisation. In parallel, we also aim to define its essentiality and characterise its endogenous substrates. This work will provide an opportunity to uncover the function(s) of this novel mitochondrial fucosyltransferase and provide a much-needed drug target for Chagas’ disease.

Through events, summits, gathering of existing tools for best practice and a digital ecosystem for social entrepreneurs, we will strengthen the ecosystem for social innovation in Europe. We will create a European peer-to-peer academy for social & impact entrepreneurship support. Co-owned by European support organizations, we will endeavor to increase the capacities of social entrepreneurship support organizations in Europe. The academy aims to sustainably boost the impact of the European ecosystem for social & impact-driven entrepreneurship. We will gather and promote tools and facilitate locally based events, and facilitate summits where knowledge, methods, best practices, and tools are disseminated. In addition, we will build on existing digital platforms to create a social innovation ecosystem where best practices, knowledge and tools will be granted free of charge for social entrepreneurs. Key output from the project: - Registration of best practice out before and after intervention. The registration forms from the first registration will be used to select relevant tools to be included in the digital ecosystem. - Two social innovation policy summits and a final conference for actors in the social innovation ecosystem. - Collection of tools from actors working with social innovation. The tools may come from relevant accelerators, investors, incubators and public entities such as universities and government. All activities and tools will be free accessible at the digital ecosystem. The digital ecosystem will be built on existing software systems. The digital ecosystem will be a strong European network with various actors within different branches and knowledge from professionals within the field.

Solar energy conversion will play a key role in our transition to a carbon-neutral society. However, single junction photovoltaic (PV) cells fail to achieve their theoretical efficiency due to an inability to harness all wavelengths of the solar spectrum. Spectral losses may be overcome through the addition of a spectral converter coating to the surface of a finished PV cell, which, through a photoluminescence process, converts solar photons into wavelengths suitable for use. Nonetheless, spectral converters currently fail to deliver their promise to significantly boost PV cell performance due to the difficulties of translating luminescent molecules (lumophores) from solution into efficient solid-state materials. By considering the lumophore-host material as an integrated unit, rather than discrete components, in SPECTRACON, I take a radically new approach to the design of spectral converters. Organic-inorganic hybrid polymer hosts incorporating covalently-grafted lumophores will be rationally engineered to deliver spectral converters with the tailored optical, structural, viscoelastic and mechanical properties needed for high performance solid-state conversion, which has so far been unattainable. Using cheap materials and a solution-based process suitable for scalable manufacturing, these spectral converters will be integrated with PV cells to realise next generation luminescent solar devices which display record levels of efficiency and reduced costs. A scientific breakthrough that demonstrates efficient solar spectral conversion in the solid-state would enable immediate deployment of luminescent solar devices to the commercial market, thus accelerating progress to an all-renewables society and delivering unprecedented impact on the quality of life of future generations. Moreover, the fundamental knowledge gleaned on the design of efficient solid-state emitters will open up new frontiers for application in light-emitting displays, optical storage and sensing.

The Millimetre-wave (mmWave) frequency band offers wide available bandwidth for 5G and future wireless networks. However, due to the large propagation attenuation of the mmWave frequency, real-world environmental factors, including weather, foliage, humans, vehicles, have a significant impact on the channel path loss. In order to design and optimise 5G and future networks, a mmWave channel model considering the environmental factors is urgently required. In this project, we aim to equip a ray-tracing channel model with environmental factors in the mmWave band. The goal will be approached through 3 work packages (WPs). First, the ER will develop a parametric attenuation model by parameterising the environmental factors and integrate it with a ray-tracing simulation model. Second, the ER will acquire the channel data for each corresponding environment factor and extract parameters using machine-learning-based methods. Third, the developed channel model will be applied to evaluate and optimise mmWave wireless networks taking environmental factors into account. This project will be an extension of the ER’s previous work, which will develop him to be a mature researcher.

ClowdFlows is an open source cloud based platform developed within the MUSE FET project that supports the composition and execution of data and text processing workflows on the Web. It has a user-friendly graphical interface running in any browser, and supports big data analytics and text mining to discover patterns and regularities leading to new insights. As such, it fulfils the needs of many companies facing the problem of collecting huge amounts of data but lacking intuitive user-friendly tools to improve competitive market advantage. Data and text processing in ClowdFlows is easily managed in the browser by connecting processing components into an executable workflow executed in the cloud. Once constructed, workflows can be reused to process vast amounts of static data or high volumes of data streams. The web based platform is provided as a hosted service, with the ability for users to install it on a private cloud. In the proposed business model, ClowdFlows serves as a workflow publishing platform: a marketplace of ready-made workflows and data/text processing components, offering components for reuse to companies lacking the expertise and tools to perform needed big data analytics. From the end user’s perspective, the lack of internal developmental resources is compensated by crowdsourcing of needed new analytical components within the marketplace. From the developer’s perspective, the ClowdFlows marketplace allows the developers of processing components to publish and monetize their work, and to connect to companies in need of easy to use cloud based data mining tools. The CF-Web project will develop a value proposition focused on ease of use for end-users including SMEs, and serve as a marketplace of workflow components and provide revenue sharing for developers, while creating a growing, stable, new business venture based in Slovenia.