BackgroundDuring three multi-segment visits to India, Professor Gerard Parr will visit Institutes of Technology in Madras-Chennai, Delhi, Bangalore, Bombay and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. The purpose of the visits are three-fold in order to:-.(i) develop parallel research proposals on NGN Management to the Indian Department of Science & Technology and EPSRC with Professors Timothy Gonsalves and Mani Subramanian (IIT Madras).(ii) develop plans for future collaborations on architectures and protocols for resource-constrained SLA-convergence in NGNs, taking into account e2e requirements across the fixed-wireless boundaries. This will be between Professor Kumar (IISc Bangalore), Prof Asoke Talukder (IIIT Bangalore) and Professor U.B. Desai (IIT Bombay) and Professor Surendra Prasad (IIT Delhi). (iii) build upon previous and existing collaborations between UK and India to assist in the investigation and development a unique consortium-based research and technology-transfer Centre of Excellence in NGNs/ICT.Leading on from (iii), as a result of an excellent workshop event in Madras, the challenge now is to maintain the momentum with all the interested academics and industrial players who participated in the discussions and technical presentations and to develop an agreed programme of work that will represent the interest of the UK and Indian consortium that was established. The intention is that the programme will help identify and develop priority research areas and seek out relevant funding mechanisms to actively encourage leading researchers and companies to pursue innovative research and technology transfer. Such a research aganda will power the next generation of communications technology and usher in a new era of ICT research and technology transfer between Britain and India, the world's second fastest growing economy. This is very much in keeping with the recent 2006 Budget Statement from the UK government to ensure the UK can maintain its goal as a competitive centre for global investment in technology-led sectors .Context for ProposalPreviously, the Technical Workshop (as evidenced in the appendices) was developed, planned and organised by Professor Parr on behalf of the EPSRC/British High Commission in India in response to a desire to further academic research and technology transfer collaboration between the UK and India. The proposal was based on previous meetings and discussions organised during British High Commission (Delhi) UK-India ICT visits (8th-14th January 2005) and subsequently. These visits included top research Institutes of Technology (Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai) and key companies in the ICT sector within India, including Wipro, InfoSys and Sasken Communications. The background to these visits was to determine the level of interest and capability to develop a more in-depth UK-India collaborative effort in ICT, particularly concerning the fixed-wireless interface and its management. For the past twelve months under the invitation of EPSRC and the British High Commission in Delhi, Professor Parr has established a UK-India advisory group which has been formulating the development plan between the two nations. In the activity, Professor Parr has been designated the UK Consortium Academic Lead.

The water sector in the UK has, by many measures, been very successful. In England and Wales, drinking water standards stands at over 99.9%, water pipe leakage is down by a third, sewer flooding reduced by more three quarters in the last 10 years and bathing water standards are at record high levels. This success has been achieved using a 19th century design approach based on the idea of plentiful resources, unrestrained demand and a stable climate. However, a perfect storm of climate change, increasing population, urbanisation, demographic shifts and tighter regulation is brewing! Each one of these challenges is a threat to the water sector and, taken in isolation, existing approaches may be able to cope. Taken together and compounded by the speed, size and uncertainty of change, the system is heading for failure unless something radical is done. The current way of working looks increasingly out of date and out of step with emerging thinking and best practice in some leading nations. This fellowship aims to meet these emerging challenges and global uncertainties head on by developing a new approach to water management in UK cities. The starting point is a new vision that is: Safe & SuRe. In a sense, our existing water systems are all about safety goals: public health, flood management and environmental protection. These are important and still need to be respected, but they are NOT sufficient to rise to the coming challenges. In the new world of rapid and uncertain change, water systems in cities must also be Sustainable and Resilient. Only a 'Safe & SuRe' system can be moulded, adapted and changed to face the emerging threats and resulting impacts. In this fellowship. my vision will be developed, tested and championed into practice over a period of 5 years. It will draw from multi-disciplinary collaboration with leading academics inside and outside the field. A comprehensive, quantitative evaluation framework will be developed to test in detail what options or strategies can contribute towards a Safe & SuRe water future, focussing on the challenges of water scarcity, urban flooding and river pollution. Recommendations and best practice guidance will be developed in conjunction with key stakeholders.

The subject of electron transport when states are localized by disorder has been an important topic in physics for a considerable time. It was first realized in 2006 that a closed quantum system in which there is both disorder and many body interactions shows a completely new regime of behaviour termed Many Body Localization, MBL. This regime is characterised by a breakdown of equilibrium statistical mechanics, it predicts a zero conductance state at a finite temperature, entanglement can spread although there is a lack of thermalisation due to the breakdown of ergodicity expressed as a violation of the Eigenstate Thermalisation Hypothesis, ETH. Ergodicity is assumed in many areas of condensed matter science, namely that a sub-system of the whole is typical of the whole and that the behaviour averaged over time is identical to that averaged over space. Consequently the fact that it does not hold in this situation allows new phenomena as does the lack of equilibration due to the ETH no longer holding. Possible new states can be formed by the application of high frequencies to MBL and these will be investigated in the project. To date there has been no sustained experimental investigation of these predictions in condensed matter systems although there is considerable activity using cold atoms which naturally form a closed quantum system. Enormous theoretical interest has been expressed in the hundreds of papers published on the topic. It is in the area of condensed matter that this new state of matter would have a major impact if realised - which is the purpose of the project. We will comprehensively investigate this regime of behaviour using semiconductor technology and the fabrication techniques used in investigating mesoscopic devices and semiconductor nanostructures. By fabricating free standing nanostructures we will ensure a closed system by drastically reducing the coupling to the phonons which act as a heat bath. The temperature of measurements will be down the milliKelvin region and the length scale of the disorder will be varied as will other parameters such as dimensionality. Electrical and thermal techniques will be utilised as probes of the MBL state. In addition to the importance for basic physics this work will be extremely significant in quantum information and topological physics as this new state provides a means of quantum protection not presently available.

Some 5 million people live in flood risk areas in England and Wales, with one in six homes at risk of flooding. In India, similar risks are present: over 40 million hectares (12% of India's land mass) are prone to flooding and river erosion. In this century, the economic losses resulting from damage caused by flooding far outweigh the costs associated with other natural disasters ($21bn in losses from 27 instances in the UK, and $39bn in losses from 128 instances in India). Furthermore, both the frequency and intensity of pluvial and fluvial flooding is expected to increase over time due to climate change - increasing flood risk, financial loss and (human) fatalities. The UK has well-developed emergency planning processes and procedures, and yet there have been a number of recent cases of flooding where the emergency evacuation process has been stretched to its limits and beyond (e.g. Cockermouth and Carlisle). Earlier this year, the Indian Parliament put forward a national action plan under the Disaster Management Act with the aim of substantially decreasing the loss of life, livelihoods and assets, by improving the country's response to disasters. The plan highlights the urgent need for improved (predictive) warning, risk and threat identification and policy assessment, evacuation planning, data collection, information dissemination, cooperation and effective management of the relief operation. At the heart of the management of these issues is developing a good knowledge of the underlying communities and their infrastructure and the state of these endangered systems at critical times, particularly during the onset and development of the flooding event. The deployment and management of unmanned aerial systems (either vertical take-off and landing quad-rotors or small fixed wing aircraft) and of their data product coupled with advanced model prediction capabilities would seem to be a challenging but promising way of supporting emergency planning and management and testing the predicted and actual effects of policy decisions. The project focuses on using instrumented unmanned aerial systems (UASs) to collect and collate pertinent information about an unfolding flooding disaster. The relative ease with which UASs can be deployed (often hand launched) to assess damage across large areas provides emergency responders with the opportunity to assess the situation quickly, allowing the prioritisation of resources and their effective deployment where they are required. One aspect of the research will focus on addressing the challenges associated with flying UASs in such (non-ideal) situations: for example maintaining performance during adverse weather conditions, during intermittent loss of communication with the base station, overcoming the loss of operator visuals, providing the ability to recover the vehicle without a runway and avoiding potential collisions with unexpected obstacles within the flight domain. The project will also consider how the data can be combined with accelerated flood inundation models to generate detailed evacuation plans, and to predict the nature and progress of the flooding to improve allocation of emergency resources, build community flood resilience, save lives and reduce economic damage. The strategy will take into account both the physicality of the flood event itself and the social structures which are subject to the flooding. The concepts will be practically realised by the creation of a prototype decision support system to allow on-the-ground decision makers in the UK and India emergency coordination teams, or government agencies, to better understand the consequences of flooding to help them make timely and better informed decisions. We will also focus on engaging users and building capacity in India and the UK to integrate the use of UASs effectively into current flood response frameworks in a structured way to maximise the benefits they can provide.

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