Horizon will tackle the challenge of harnessing the power of ubiquitous computing for the digital economy in a way that is acceptable to our society and increases the quality of life for all. This will involve establishing a world-leading and sustainable centre of excellence for research and knowledge transfer for the ubiquitous digital economy. Horizon will conduct a five-year programme of research into the key scientific challenges involved in the widespread adoption of ubiquitous computing; collaborate with users to create, demonstrate and study next generation services; deliver a knowledge transfer programme that ensures that the results of our research are fully connected to the digital economy; train a new generation of researchers to meet the demands of industry for skilled interdisciplinary staff; engage with policy makers and the wider public in order to address societal concerns; and provide a focal point for international, national and regional research in this area.Horizon will exploit the distinctive nature of hub funding to develop a unique approach to this challenge. Our Collaborative Research Programme will be driven by the overarching concept of a lifelong contextual footprint, the idea that each of us throughout our lifetimes will lay down a digital trail that captures our patterns of interaction with digital services. Our research will explore the major infrastructural, human and business challenges associated with this concept, adopting a unique multidisciplinary approach that integrates insights from computer science, psychology, sociology, business, economics and the arts and humanities. We will collaborate with over 30 users from different sectors of the Digital Economy in order to create, deploy and study a series of next generation services 'in the wild' so as to drive our underlying research. We will initially focus on the creative industries and transportation sectors, but subsequently extend our focus to additional sectors in partnership with other hubs and major initiatives. In parallel, our Transformation Programme will drive knowledge transfer and long-term economic impact through partnership management, public engagement, international outreach, incubation of new ventures, the transfer of people, and training for 24 associated PhD students, funded by the University.Our team draws on leading groups at Nottingham spanning computer science, engineering, business, psychology and sociology, complemented by expertise at two spokes: distributed systems and communications at Cambridge, and mathematical modelling and advertising at Reading. A series of further mini-spokes will enable us to introduce other key individuals through hub fellowships.These multiple disciplines and partners will be brought together in a new centre at Nottingham where they will be able to engage with a critical-mass cohort of research staff and students to explore innovative and challenging new projects. The Hub will be directed by Professor Derek McAuley who brings extensive experience of working in academia, directing major industrial research laboratories, and also launching spin-out companies. He will be supported by Professor Tom Rodden, an EPSRC Senior Research Fellow who previously directed the Equator IRC. The net result will be a unique partnership between EPSRC, industry, the public, and the University, with the latter committing 16M of its own funds to match the 12M requested from EPSRC.

The Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre (IMCRC) will undertake a wide variety of work in the Manufacturing, Construction and product design areas. The work will be contained within 5 programmes:1. Transforming Organisations / Providing individuals, organisations, sectors and regions with the dynamic and innovative capability to thrive in a complex and uncertain future2. High Value Assets / Delivering tools, techniques and designs to maximise the through-life value of high capital cost, long life physical assets3. Healthy & Secure Future / Meeting the growing need for products & environments that promote health, safety and security4. Next Generation Technologies / The future materials, processes, production and information systems to deliver products to the customer5. Customised Products / The design and optimisation techniques to deliver customer specific products.Academics within the Loughborough IMCRC have an internationally leading track record in these areas and a history of strong collaborations to gear IMCRC capabilities with the complementary strengths of external groups.Innovative activities are increasingly distributed across the value chain. The impressive scope of the IMCRC helps us mirror this industrial reality, and enhances knowledge transfer. This advantage of the size and diversity of activities within the IMCRC compared with other smaller UK centres gives the Loughborough IMCRC a leading role in this technology and value chain integration area. Loughborough IMCRC as by far the biggest IMRC (in terms of number of academics, researchers and in funding) can take a more holistic approach and has the skills to generate, identify and integrate expertise from elsewhere as required. Therefore, a large proportion of the Centre funding (approximately 50%) will be allocated to Integration projects or Grand Challenges that cover a spectrum of expertise.The Centre covers a wide range of activities from Concept to Creation.The activities of the Centre will take place in collaboration with the world's best researchers in the UK and abroad. The academics within the Centre will be organised into 3 Research Units so that they can be co-ordinated effectively and can cooperate on Programmes.

This document presents the case for a DTC at Lancaster University, targeting the Digital Economy priority area. Recent government thinking (as witnessed by the Sainsbury, Cox and Denham reviews) highlights the crucial role of innovation and its importance for the future health of the UK economy (including the Digital Economy). We rise to this challenge by proposing a world class, cross-disciplinary and user-centric DTC which places innovation at the heart of its curriculum and ethos. We propose to go beyond traditional multi-disciplinary approaches by seeking a creative fusion between three key disciplines, namely computer science, management and design. The emphasis is on producing a new breed of innovative people who understand and are able to advance the state of the art in technical, design and business innovation (exploring the possible, desirable and feasible). We further propose to align the Centre closely with the needs and goals of industrial producers and consumers of digital innovation (user focus) to ensure the relevance of the PhD programme and to encourage technology transfer/ early adoption of the emerging ideas and knowledge exchange. The DTC will build on the strengths of the InfoLab21 initiative, a recognised leader in technology transfer strategies, in order to seek more valuable and viable technical, social and economic pathways from the laboratory to organisational end-users and producers. The bid also builds on existing support including a Marie Curie Training Network in Creative Design/ Innovation. The long term vision of the centre is to achieve sustainability through partnerships between the university and organisational and customer end users.Key features of the bid include:- A deliberate and distinctive cross-cutting strategy of focusing on innovation as the core of the programme and rooting each PhD within thematic clusters to achieve the desired user focus;- The bringing together of three centres of excellence at Lancaster, namely the Management School, InfoLab21 and ImaginationLancaster with a focus on the resultant creative fusion;- Strong and dedicated leadership offered by 0.5 FTE Director (Prof. Gordon Blair) with significant experience of leadership and postgraduate training;- Location in a new customised space, with value added features such as the Imagination Studio, at a total cost of 10m, building on other investments in the 3 centres of excellence of 38.5m;- Programmes to engage with producers and users of digital innovations, thereby enhancing the student experience through sponsorship, industrial internships and international placements;- Significant focus on SME engagement and their business development, with associated structures and mechanisms becoming a focus for innovation in their own right;- The incorporation of a 12 month Masters of Research (MRes) featuring core modules on innovation, tailorable elements from the three centres, and also a number of ideas factories supporting a refinement from the cross-disciplinary thematic clusters and the definition of MRes and PhD projects; - A requirements-driven transferable skills programme within the 1+3 programme, targeted at industrial needs and capabilities, with the added feature of master classes from inspirational speakers including Sir Chris Bonnington;- Strong programme and quality assurance management, including an emphasis on recruitment.This is a distinctive, bold, imaginative and potentially high impact proposal which can contribute significantly to, and indeed shape, the emerging Digital Economy agenda through its focus on digital innovation. Significant additional contributions are also planned with respect to the Innovation Nation and in particular mechanisms and policies to stimulate innovative thinking in the economy and in society.

The complexity of wireless communication networks has grown considerably in recent years. This has been driven in part by academic research that has started to define the information theoretic boundaries and advantages of certain complex networking topologies and protocols. On the other hand, the demands from consumers and industry have pushed wireless networks towards more sophisticated architectures and solutions, primarily in order to ensure a broad range of services can be delivered using a common infrastructure. This is particularly true of 4/5G technologies, which many believe should support all things for all people, including voice, data, public safety, distributed sensing and monitoring, etc. However, similar beliefs and trends can be found in other sectors, such as smart grid networks and even satellite networks. It is important that engineers understand the global properties of complex networks, and how these properties arise from local structure. Such information can be fed into models and optimisation routines so that practical networks can be designed to perform as well as possible. A common approach to tackling complex problems is to exploit randomness and statistical properties of the underlying system. Probabilistic approaches to network modelling are not without their difficulties, and some of the main problems that researchers have struggled with over the years arise from the fact that networks are finite entities with physical boundaries. Recent research by the investigators has focused on the effects that boundaries have on connectivity when networks are embedded in some finite spatial domain. Analytic expressions for the overall connection probability have been obtained. These formulae quantify the intuitive phenomenon that nodes near the boundary are more likely to disconnect, and thus they explain how the network outage probability behaves at high node densities. This work has been extended considerably to explore notions of resilience (k-connectivity), the effects of node directivity, diversity and power scaling laws, complicated geometric bounding domains (both convex and non-convex), and even the interplay between higher layer trust protocols and the physical network set-up and spatial domain. In this project, the probabilistic formalism alluded to above will be exploited further to study several key concepts that influence the structure of spatially embedded networks. The following four topics will be treated: - continuum models of spatially embedded networks, including the investigation of spectral and centrality properties of random networks; - mobility models in spatially embedded networks, including random waypoint and Levy flight processes; - trust models in spatially embedded networks, including trust dynamics and protocol design; - temporal models of spatially embedded networks, including dynamical node and link (edge) models. The work will take a mathematical approach, but will always maintain a focus on practical implications and designs.

Organisations, small and large, increasingly rely upon cloud environments to supply their ICT needs because clouds provide a better incremental cost structure, resource elasticity and simpler management. This trend is set to continue as increasingly information collected from mobile devices and smart environments including homes, infrastructures and smart-cities is uploaded and processed in cloud environments. Services delivered to users are also deployed in the cloud as this provides better scaleability and in some cases permits migration closer to the point of access for reduced latency. Clouds are therefore an attractive target for organised and skilled cyber-attacks. They are also more vulnerable as they host environments from multiple tenant organisations with different interests and different risk aversion profiles. Yet clouds also offer opportunities for better protection both pro-actively and reactively in response to a persistent attack. This project aims to develop novel techniques for intelligent cloud protection by advancing the state of the art in system modelling at run time, attack scenarios based analysis, novel techniques for selecting countermeasures and remedial actions and novel techniques for re-perimeterisation of the cloud environment. The methodology adopted combines fundamental research on knowledge representation, probabilistic analysis and machine learning with empirical and experimental studies in an industrial test-bed environment. Additionally, the project also aims to achieve a better understanding of the business models and incentives involved in the relationships between cloud tenants and hosting organisations in the provision of security services based on measures of cost, risk and value and to propose new models that facilitate sharing of risk and exchange of security relevant information, which would in turn allow to simplify security management and provide better protection.