Date:

2010-2014

Themes:

Web of Data, Semantic Web

Funding:

EUFP7

PlanetData aims to establish a sustainable European community of researchers that supports organizations in exposing their data in new and useful ways. The ability to effectively and efficiently make sense out of the enormous amounts of data continuously published online, including data streams, (micro)blog posts, digital archives, eScience resources, public sector data sets, and the Linked Open Data Cloud, is a crucial ingredient for Europe's transition to a knowledge society. It allows businesses, governments, communities and individuals to take decisions in an informed manner, ensuring competitive advantages, and general welfare. Research will concentrate on three key challenges that need to be addressed for effective data exposure in a usable form at global scale. We will provide representations for stream-like data, and scalable techniques to publish, access and integrate such data sources on the Web. We will establish mechanisms to assess, record, and, where possible, improve the quality of data through repair. To further enhance the usefulness of data - in particular when it comes to the effectiveness of data processing and retrieval - we will define means to capture the context in which data is produced and understood - including space, time and social aspects. Finally, we will develop access control mechanisms - in order to attract exposure of certain types of valuable data sets, it is necessary to take proper account of its owner's concerns to maintain control and respect for privacy and provenance, while not hampering non-contentious use. We will test all of the above on a highly scalable data infrastructure, supporting relational, RDF, and stream processing, and on novel data sets exposed through the network, and derive best practices for data owners. By providing these key precursors, complemented by a comprehensive training, dissemination, standardization and networking program, we will enable and promote effective exposure of data at planetary scale.

Primary investigator

• Elena Simperl

Partners

• Semantic Technology Institute, University of Innsbruck
• Freie Universität Berlin
• he Open University

Associated research group

• Web and Internet Science

Date:

2013-2015

Themes:

Open & Linked Data, Open Government Data, Web of Data

Funding:

EUFP7

Within a few years the idea of open data has spread throughout Europe and produced extensive changes especially in thinking about governmental data and how it can be used for public and private purposes. This has also led to a fractured landscape of open data resources, making it challenging to gain an overview. Even on a national level there is an unconstrained growth of regional open data repositories. These circumstances cause extensive problems for policy makers, institutions and NGOs, to build up efficient and sustainable open data strategies. Further, identifying gaps in and opportunities for open data publishing is almost impossible. Finally, on a pan-European level there is a lack of analysis on this topic which hinders the large-scale reuse of open data.

OpenDataMonitor provides the possibility to gain an overview of available open data resources and undertake analysis and visualisation of existing data catalogues using innovative technologies. By creating a highly extensible and customizable harvesting framework, metadata from diverse open data sources will be collected. Through harmonization of the harvested metadata, the gathered information can be structured and processed. Scalable analytical and visualisation methods will allow the end users to learn more about the composition of regional, national or pan-European open data repositories. For example the aggregation of catalogues of one region or country can be easily visualised to draw an exact picture of the open data situation and allow comparison to other areas. Analysing and visualising metadata will reveal hidden potential and essential insights from existing resources and identify gaps where additional open data are needed.

To guarantee the availability, usage and reuse of the created plugins and components during the OpenDataMonitor project, established open source software like CKAN will be adopted and extended. The research outcomes and technical developments will be combined in a demonstration platform, integrated in third-party sites and will be distributed to the open data community to maximise impact.

Primary investigator

• Elena Simperl

Secondary investigator

• yl2

Partners

• SYNYO
• Open Data Institute
• Institute for the Management of Information Systems, ATHENA
• IFG.CC - Institute for e-Government EV
• Entidad Publica Eemprsarial RED.ES
• Landeshauptstadt Muenchen

Associated research group

• Web and Internet Science

Date:

2014-

Theme:

Provenance

Funding:

Microsoft Research

Partners

• Ian Gent
• Lars Kotthoff
• Alexander Konovalov

Date:

2014-2018

Theme:

Bionanotechnology and Biosensors

Over the last decade, giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) have emerged as a valuable tool for the study of membrane domains, receptor and ion channel function, membrane morphology, and also as models for 'proto-cells'. GUVs are liposomes (lipid bilayers enclosing an aqueous volume) with a diameter of tens of micrometers. The large size of these structures enables optical imaging of membrane domains and of vesicle morphology as well as clamping of the vesicle with micropipettes, while the diffusion of lipids and membrane proteins is not restricted because there is no solid support layer. GUVs have become a popular research topic with the introduction of the electroformation protocol by Angelova and Dimitrov, who showed that some lipids, as a dried film on electrodes, formed GUVs when rehydrated with a salt-less or low-salt solution while an AC field is applied. This method, which is postulated to involve localized electroswelling of lipid bilayers, has been gradually optimized to allow GUV formation with a wider variety of lipid species and at more physiological (~100 mM) salt concentrations. The key change is that the lipids are deposited on the electrodes as small unilamellar liposomes (SUVs), which are partially but not completely dried prior to rehydration in the AC field. More recently, it has been demonstrated that the use of protein-containing liposomes (proteoSUVs) enables the formation of protein-containing GUVs. In this project, we will systematically explore this exciting development to derive standard procedures for microsystem-enabled semi-automated proteoGUV formation, and employ ion channel GUVs for drug screening with patch clamp methods.

Primary investigators

• Maurits De Planque
• Dr Philip Williamson (Biological Sciences)

Secondary investigator

• Hang Lu

Partner

• Dr Ita O'Kelly (Medicine)

Associated research group

• Electronics and Electrical Engineering

Date:

2013-2016

Funding:

EPSRC

This project will create a shared, facilitated learning environment in which social scientists, engineers, industrialists, policy makers and other stakeholders can research and learn together to understand how better to exploit the technical and market opportunities that emerge from the increased interdependence of infrastructure systems. The Centre will focus on the development and implementation of innovative business models and aims to support UK firms wishing to exploit them in international markets. The Centre will undertake a wide range of research activities on infrastructure interdependencies with users, which will allow problems to be discovered and addressed earlier and at lower cost. Because infrastructure innovations alter the social distribution of risks and rewards, the public needs to be involved in decision making to ensure business models and forms of regulation are socially robust. As a consequence, the Centre has a major focus on using its research to catalyse a broader national debate about the future of the UK's infrastructure, and how it might contribute towards a more sustainable, economically vibrant, and fair society.

Primary investigators

• Nick Jennings
• Professor Bakr Bahaj
• Sarvapali Ramchurn

Secondary investigator

• dz1a13

Partners

• University of Brighton
• University of Bristol
• Cranfield University
• University of Sussex
• University College London

Associated research group

• Agents, Interaction and Complexity

Date:

2013-2016

Funding:

EPSRC

This project will create a shared, facilitated learning environment in which social scientists, engineers, industrialists, policy makers and other stakeholders can research and learn together to understand how better to exploit the technical and market opportunities that emerge from the increased interdependence of infrastructure systems. The Centre will focus on the development and implementation of innovative business models and aims to support UK firms wishing to exploit them in international markets. The Centre will undertake a wide range of research activities on infrastructure interdependencies with users, which will allow problems to be discovered and addressed earlier and at lower cost. Because infrastructure innovations alter the social distribution of risks and rewards, the public needs to be involved in decision making to ensure business models and forms of regulation are socially robust. As a consequence, the Centre has a major focus on using its research to catalyse a broader national debate about the future of the UK's infrastructure, and how it might contribute towards a more sustainable, economically vibrant, and fair society.

Primary investigators

• Nick Jennings
• Prof Bakr Bahaj
• Sarvapali Ramchurn

Secondary investigator

• dz1a13

Partners

• University of Brighton
• University of Bristol
• Cranfield University
• University of Sussex
• University College London

Associated research group

• Agents, Interaction and Complexity

Date:

2012-2016

Theme:

Decentralised and Autonomous Systems

Funding:

EPSRC

This project aims to develop control and planning algorithms for future applications of autonomous vehicles. In particular, it will investigate solutions to problems that require multiple robotic platforms to act together, in a coordinated fashion, so that the best use is made of their combined resources to tackle the task in hand. To achieve to this, the project is adopting a practical multidisciplinary approach, in which multiagent planning and coordination algorithms will be developed and deployed on real robotic platforms, including Autonomous Ground Vehicles (AGVs) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). These platforms will operate under the principle of flexible autonomy, in which robotic platforms will operate in a fully autonomous manner when appropriate, while still being guided by human involvement when key operating decisions need to be made.

Primary investigators

• Prof Sandor M. Veres
• Nick Jennings
• acr
• Eric Rogers
• Sarvapali Ramchurn

Secondary investigators

• J.P. Scanlan
• A.Sobester
• wtlt

Associated research groups

• Agents, Interaction and Complexity
• Communications, Signal Processing and Control

Date:

2011-2014

Themes:

Bionanotechnology and Biosensors, Nanophotonics and Biomimetics

Funding:

EUFP7

The PHOTOSENS project aims to develop a low-cost, mass-manufacturable, nano-structured, large-area multi-parameter sensor array using Photonic Crystal (PC) and enhanced Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) methodologies for environmental and pharmaceutical applications. Integrating the PC and SERS based sensors with integrated optics coupling structures within a single sensor platform allows the implementation of a high-performance multi-parameter sensor. Currently, utilization of multi-parameter sensing is hindered by the lack of low-cost and, highly reproducibility fabrication methods for nano-structured surfaces.

PHOTOSENS addresses these challenges by developing new roll-to-roll nanoimprinting manufacturing methods. Scientific work includes development of the multilayer nanophotonic sensor structure, nanoimprint materials for large-area fabrication, functionalized molecularly imprinted polymers (MIP) and mass-manufacturing methods including Roll-to-Roll (R2R) nanoimprint processes for nano-texturing of large-area plastic films. PHOTOSENS will greatly increase understanding of photonic and plasmonic dispersion and field localization effects in periodic nanostructures, such as Photonic Crystals, and their applicability to sensing purposes. PHOTOSENS demonstrates a multi-parameter large-area sensor platform for environmental and pharmaceutical sensing.

Primary investigator

• Martin Charlton

Secondary investigators

• Stuart Pearce
• Michael Pollard
• Ruiqi Chen
• SweZin Oo

Partners

• VTT
• Nanocomp
• Renishaw
• University of Vienna
• 3DAG
• TNO

Associated research group

• Nano Research Group

Date:

2013-2013

Themes:

Multimedia, Data Science / Big Data, Open & Linked Data

Funding:

EPSRC SematicMedia Mini-Project