Date:

2011-2014

Themes:

Nanoelectronics, Biomimetics, Biologically Inspired Computing and Robotics

Funding:

EPSRC (EP/J00801X/1)

During the past two decades, philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, clinicians and neuroscientists strived to provide authoritative definitions of consciousness within a neurobiological framework. Engineers have more recently joined this quest by developing neuromorphic VLSI circuits for emulating biological functions. Yet, to date artificial systems have not been able to faithfully recreate natural attributes such as true processing locality (memory and computation) and complexity (10^10 synapses per cm2), preventing the achievement of a long-term goal: the creation of autonomous cognitive systems.

This project aspires to develop experimental platforms capable of perceiving, learning and adapting to stimuli by leveraging on the latest developments of five leading European institutions in neuroscience, nanotechnology, modeling and circuit design. The non-linear dynamics as well as the plasticity of the newly discovered memristor are shown to support Spike-based- and Spike-Timing-Dependent-Plasticity (STDP), making this extremely compact device an excellent candidate for realizing large-scale self-adaptive circuits; a step towards "autonomous cognitive systems". The intrinsic properties of real neurons and synapses as well as their organization in forming neural circuits will be exploited for optimising CMOS-based neurons, memristive grids and the integration of the two into realtime biophysically realistic neuromorphic systems. Finally, the platforms would be tested with conventional as well as abstract methods to evaluate the technology and its autonomous capacity.

Primary investigator

• Themistoklis Prodromakis

Associated research groups

• Nano Research Group
• Southampton Nanofabrication Centre

This project is concerned with rapid charging of supercapacitors as an alternative energy source to Li-Ion for portable appliacance that require high load current. The charger must operate from the AC mains and be limited only by the supply network. Fully integrated converters new algorithms for control and regulation are being designed in MV CMOS technology that allow direct connectio to the AC mains.

Primary investigators

• William Redman-White
• Rares Bodnar

Associated research group

• Nano Research Group

Date:

2011-2015

Themes:

Channel coding, Multimedia Source Compression, Software Defined Radio

Funding:

EUFP7

FP7 ICT CONCERTO (Content and cOntext aware delivery for iNteraCtive multimedia healthcaRe applications) is a STREP project in the EU's Seventh Framework Programme aiming at designing and validating several critical building blocks of telemedicine applications. These include network-aware applications that rely on content-aware codecs and storage formats, carried over an application-aware network. The ultimate aim of FP7 ICT CONCERTO is to provide high a Quality of Experience (QoE) for medics, which is a necessary condition for providing flawless medical diagnosing of the highest reliability.

CONCERTO will achieve this ambitious goal by the joint optimization of several tightly coupled system components, which form an organic ensemble, rather than a simple interconnected conglomerate. The ‘conductor of the CONCERTO’ relies on its advanced signaling system, which will support the real-time end-to-end adaptation of the constituent blocks designed for efficiently conveying the medical signals and video streams, potentially emanating from multiple, uncorrelated and rapidly moving sources. The ‘players’ are from leading-edge companies, universities and research centers with a proven experience and key positions spanning from video coding to wireless communications, collaborating with doctors and medical staff of the hospital of Perugia (participating as University of Perugia).

The CONCERTO applications will be designed to optimize these delicate multimedia transmission sessions through constant monitoring of the current network conditions. The proposed approach includes the adaptation of the encoding parameters at the source, but also the fusion of multiple objects/stream, in order to reduce the amount of redundancy in case of high tele-traffic demands aggravated by the paucity of network resources.

FP7 ICT CONCERTO will develop advanced algorithms and codecs to improve the compression as well as the protection and transmission of 3D medical image sets complemented by multi-view, stereoscopic and holographic video. High-quality near-capacity lossless and near-lossless coding schemes will be employed, which are capable of handling diverse storage formats supporting interactive control, including progressive download and streaming, just to mention a few.

From a network point of view, FP7 ICT CONCERTO will take into account media caching assisted content-aware wireless delivery (e.g., over LTE / LTE Advanced networks). The particular objectives include the optimization of LTE uplink and downlink transmissions for video delivery, considering all relevant variables (e.g., distance from base station, power adaptation, traffic priority, etc.) and decision techniques (e.g., scheduling and resource allocation).

Primary investigators

• Soon Ng
• Lajos Hanzo

Secondary investigator

• Zunaira Babar

Partners

• Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME)
• ICT Centre of Excellence for Research, Innovation, Education & industrial Labs (CEFRIEL)
• National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT)
• Kingston University (KU)
• NEC Technologies (NEC)
• SIEMENS AG (SIEMENS)
• Thales Communications and Security (TCS)
• University of Perugia (UOP)
• Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT)

Associated research group

• Communications, Signal Processing and Control

Date:

2011-

Themes:

Web Science, Social Network Analysis

It has been widespread interest in social network connections between individuals following the transformative advent of the Internet brought about by the implementation of the World Wide Web. Building of much earlier work on degrees of separation, theories which associated trust with networks were also established. The widespread political and social unrest in the middle east which began late in 2010 was dubbed the ‘Arab Spring’, and much social commentary pointed to the role of computer mediated social networks to disseminate information and co-ordinate confrontational activities.

However much of the existing work which has been carried out investigating social networks and trust has come from countries whose cultural traditions might be described as ‘Anglo Saxon’, Western European, or Judaeo Christian. The cultural traditions and current domestic and governmental assumptions of those countries engaged in the Arab Spring are, even at the level of superficial investigation, very different.

This study begins an examination into the nature of trust and methods in which it can be analysed and categorised. It identifies a single middle eastern country, currently experiencing some political turmoil; namely Syria, and examines some of the cultural references and norms which exist in that country. It argues that cues for interaction and clues about real and assumed identity are key factors in establishing online trust, and that such factors may have strong cultural associations.

In the light of that investigation it goes on to propose a programme of future research and investigation which is designed to gather substantive evidence to test to see how culture and practice might affect the creation and growth of trust online.

Primary investigators

• saw
• Jeff Vass

Associated research group

• Web and Internet Science

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.

Associated research group

• Nano Research Group

Date:

2012-2013

Theme:

Digital Libraries

Funding:

JISC

Deposit more content in real repositories. Follows on from the JISC DepositMO Project (June 2010 to January 2012), which aimed to change the Modus Operandi (MO) of deposit processes in institutional repositories by developing new deposit tools to exploit the SWORD v2 protocol. DepositMOre will seek to apply and adapt these tools to demonstrate and measure if they can result in more content being deposited in target repositories within partner institutions. In addition, the project will work with partners to identify third-party content sources and develop simple discovery and upload tools to copy relevant institutional content from those sources to selected repositories. Example sources with repository include EasyChair, Microsoft Academic Search, and YouTube.

Primary investigator

• Les Carr

Secondary investigators

• sh94r
• tdb2

Partners

• University of the Creative Arts
• University of Leeds
• University of Glasgow

Associated research group

• Web and Internet Science

Date:

2012-2016

Themes:

Marine Energy, Environmental modelling

At present, the export cables connecting wind farms back to shore are sized based on a continuous current rating, as is common practice with cables on land. However, the generation profile of the wind farm will certainly not match this steady state assumption due to its dependence on weather conditions. While there will be times when the wind farm is generating rated output, the total duration of such events is likely to be a small percentage of the asset life. Given the thermal capacitance within the cable system and its environment, the conductor temperature may rarely come close to its rated maximum.

The inevitable consequence of taking the steady state rating approach is that the size of the cable is determined by an overly worst case set of assumptions. This has the potential to lead to the cable system being over-sized, forcing up the cost of the export cable system considerably. In some, near shore, cases where ac transmission is still possible, this can lead to more cables being laid than is strictly necessary to deliver energy to shore with the required reliability. This acts to force up the cost of connection and hence the cost of the energy when sold in the power market, reducing the economic viability of some projects while increasing the cost of energy for consumers.

To tackle this problem, this project will develop statistical rating techniques suitable for application to ac, and eventually HVDC, wind farm export cable systems. All thermal sections of the cable will be considered, including examples of: • Burial at sea • Land falls with and without horizontal directional drills • Land cable sections • J-tube installations

In each case, appropriate thermal models will be designed either based on existing algorithms or using techniques such as finite element analysis. Through a synergy with an existing HubNet funded PhD programme, improved models of the subsea environment will be incorporated based on typical UK coastal shelf sediments.

Having created suitable dynamic thermal models for each cable section, the models will be solved to obtain a temperature profile for multiple model-years, based on an input of actual wind farm output levels. This data will be supplied from existing offshore wind sites, plus shorter term predictions of wind farm output. Once typical levels of cable system capacity utilisation are known, the project will examine statistical methods for rating the system. This will allow the cable system to be sized based on the likelihood of needing transmit certain levels of power for certain time intervals, rather than simply taking the steady state approximation. A brief economic review will then be undertaken to determine whether or not the cable size, or number of cables, could be reduced and the likely cost benefit to the wind farm operator as a result.

Primary investigators

• jp2
• Paul Lewin

Secondary investigator

• spp1g10

Associated research group

• Electronics and Electrical Engineering