In the wake of recent terrorist atrocities, intelligence experts have commented that failures in detecting terrorist activities are not so much due to a lack of data, as they are due to difficulties in relating and interpreting the available intelligence. An automated tool for monitoring and interpreting intelligence data will provide a helpful means for intelligence analysts to consider emerging scenarios of plausible terrorist attacks, thereby offering useful assistance in devising and deploying preventive measures against such possibilities.While conventional knowledge-based systems, such as rule-based and case-based reasoners, have useful applications for common crime detection, their scope is restricted to either the situations foreseen or those resulting from previously encountered cases. To devise a robust monitoring system that is capable of identifying many variations on a given type of terrorist activity, this project will employ a model-based approach to scenario generation. The main potential of such work is its ability to construct automatically many variations of a given type of scenario from a relatively small knowledge base, by dynamically combining reusable scenario fragments. The proposed work involves a number of research activities that are entirely new. In particular, the resulting compositional modelling methods will be the first which are able to work with multiple scenarios at one time, the first which can handle ill-defined concepts, and the first to incorporate qualitative preference handling. Also, the application of these methods to aid in monitoring intelligence data is itself highly novel. This research will provide theoretical foundations to develop software systems that will aid anti-terrorist intelligence analysts in considering as widely as possible the range of emerging scenarios that may reflect organised terrorist activities. The work will have the ability of linking up seemingly distinct and unrelated intelligence data and associating such data with logically inferred and justified possible scenarios. The multi-disciplinary team assembled for this project involves leading researchers in artificial intelligence, and in counter-terrorism and intelligence studies, offering a very strong combination to undertake the work.

"Creating Safer Space" is a four-year international, interdisciplinary research network, which supports local civilian processes that build sustainable structures of protection from physical harm for and with communities affected by violent conflict. The Network brings together conflict-affected communities, protection practitioners, academics, policymakers and artists to jointly work on the vision of enhancing unarmed protection practices, which create safer space for communities and individuals amidst violent conflict, raise their levels of resilience and help prevent displacement. According to the UN Refugee Agency, there are now a record high of 68.5 million people forcibly displaced by violent conflict (UNHCR 2019), and the majority of deaths in conflicts are among civilians. This makes the protection of civilians from physical harm in contexts of war a pressing issue of our time. While the international community has acknowledged the need for protection, the physical safety of civilians is still seen almost exclusively as a task of armed outside actors like UN blue helmets. The originality of this Network is its focus on protection provided by unarmed actors and deployed at the local level of communities, be it by "outside" specialists or "insider/local" protection actors. Unarmed civilian protection (UCP) organisations accompany human rights defenders and deter armed actors from carrying out attacks against them through their presence and proactive engagement strategies. They use networks of relationships built with armed and unarmed parties to a conflict to negotiate safe passage of internally displaced persons to a safe camp or to bring forcefully recruited youth back to their families. They also monitor ceasefires & agreements. Moreover, some violence-affected communities self-protect by setting up peace communities and weapons-free zones, creating safer space for civilian life amidst violent conflict. There are over 40 international NGOs and a growing number of national and local organisations currently undertaking protection work in 24 countries in conflict, in addition to local self-protection initiatives. They illustrate that the protection of civilians by civilians without the use or threat of force can work to create physical safety, and may even do more: by providing a role model, and by not fuelling further violence, UCP can help break cycles of violence and thus contribute to longer-term peacebuilding. Initial research has suggested that UCP may often be more effective than armed protection and indeed, latest UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions mention the potential of UCP, indicating some change in thinking. "Creating Safer Space" aims to enhance and broaden the practice of UCP by engaging a wide range of stakeholders in networking, capacity-building, research and impact activities around three broad themes: A. Understanding vulnerability to physical harm in violent conflict: Which different kinds of vulnerabilities interact in what ways in situations that require protection, and which different protection strategies do they require? B. Building local protection infrastructures: How can outside protection strategies and self-protection mechanisms in communities work together for best protection results and without undermining each other? C. Developing civilian protection capabilities: How can unarmed local protection be scaled up in size/scope and include new actors and collaborations with a view to protect more people from violence and displacement and develop stronger protection capacity? To address these questions, our Network delivers activities for academic and non-academic partners from the Global North and South across three strands of work: networking and capacity enhancement; collaborative and innovative research; and knowledge sharing and advocacy. Taken together, these activities aim to increase the number of people benefiting from civilian protection worldwide.

The future sustainability of UK agriculture will be dependent on the provision of new crop varieties that are able to meet future environmental and economic needs. The development of new crop varieties by plant breeding is based on harnessing the natural variation that is generated through the process of sexual reproduction and selective crossing to produce lines with novel combinations of desirable characteristics. During the formation of male and female gametes new combinations of the parental genes inherited by an individual are generated through the process of meiosis. In meiosis, homologous recombination ensures that chromosomes are accurately segregated such that each gamete gets a single complete set of chromosomes. To achieve this, transient physical links must be established between homologous pairs of parental chromosomes. This results in the reciprocal exchange of genetic information between each pair of homologous parental chromosomes, thereby generating a new combination of genes along each chromosome. Thus when male and female gametes fuse during sexual reproduction the progeny possess some characteristics of each parent and novel features that have arisen through the 'shuffling' of genes during meiotic recombination. Control of the patterns of recombination along chromosomes during meiosis in plants is therefore one of the major factors determining the outcome of plant breeding programmes. Unfortunately, it is clear that patterns of recombination can be highly skewed such that genes in some regions of the genome rarely undergo recombination. This is the case in some important grass species such as barley and wheat where it can have an adverse effect on potential breeding programmes Over the past decade studies in Arabidopsis, the model system for plant genetics, have resulted in considerable progress in our understanding of how meiosis and recombination in plants is controlled at the molecular level. Hence, this project seeks to transfer some of this knowledge to the crop plant barley and thus enable plant breeders to overcome one of the major challenges they face in the development of new varieties of this crop. This is feasible in the case of barley because we have a good understanding of barley genetics and genetic tools are in place for this crop to facilitate such a transfer. Our objectives will be to determine how meiotic recombination is controlled in barley and the basis for the skewed pattern of recombination. We will then explore strategies that could be used to manipulate the patterns of recombination that could be applied by plant breeders in their existing programmes without recourse to GM technology. If this is successful these approaches could then be applied to more complex grass crop species such as wheat and forage grasses (e.g. ryegrass) that show the same skewed distribution of recombination.

The FLEECOIN project addresses a serious gap in research on counterinsurgency (COIN): the gendered effects that COIN campaigns have on the civilian population, and the strategies employed by men and boys to escape the gender-based violence (GBV) related to COIN. With this innovative focus, and exploring in depth the case study of COIN against Boko Haram (BH) in Nigeria, the project makes two core contributions to knowledge. First, FLEECOIN contributes to emergent scholarship that amplifies the research focus on GBV to include the experiences of men and boys. Secondly, this project deepens and nuances our understanding of the effects of states' COIN campaigns on civilians, and of the coping mechanisms used by vulnerable males in response, especially fleeing. Here, its primary focus is on understanding flight as a response to COIN by civilian men and adolescent boys. The FLEECOIN research is designed as a qualitative case study and will involve fieldwork in Nigeria. The major instrument for primary data collection will be indepth interviews with experts, men and adolescent boys who have fled their communities, soldiers who have taken part in Boko Haram-related COIN operations, and residents of communities from where men and boys fled. Failure to address the suffering of male victims during violent conflicts has profound consequences for the survivor because it excludes them from assistance and support. The research coincides with Horizon Europe work programme cluster 2 "Culture, creativity and inclusive society", specifically HORIZON-CL2-2022-TRANSFORMATIONS01-05: Gender and social, economic and cultural empowerment, interested in intersections between gender and other social categories and the cumulative effect of multiple forms of discrimination and disadvantages, and in how gendered power hierarchies lead to systematic GBV.

Legumes are a group of important plant species that, together with bacteria that live in nodules on the root, can convert nitrogen in the atmosphere to a form that can be used by plants. They include peas and beans as well as crop plants that are used for animal feed. Some legume species have been developed as 'models' that allow us to investigate genome structure, DNA sequence and the control of gene expression in a way that would be more difficult in crops. Model species typically have a small genome size, short generation times and an inbreeding system of reproduction. The barrel medic (Medicago truncatula ) has been developed as a model legume and, for example, is expected to have all its genes sequenced by the end of 2007. Information and resources from model species can be used to understand more about the genetics and genomics of crop plants in a way that will facilitate improved ways of breeding new varieties for the changing needs of agriculture. In this work we will use knowledge of Medicago truncatula to gain understanding of a closely related species, red clover. Red clover (Trifolium pratense L.) is an important crop for feeding animals (sheep, beef and dairy cattle) in the UK and many temperate parts of the world. In this work we will compare the genomes of the model and crop to lay the foundation for new approaches to breeding in the crop. We will do this in several different ways: (i) The sequences of long stretches of DNA will be compared. To do this we will use DNA that has been inserted into bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) in a way that allows it to be held together and suitable for sequencing. The extent of similarity in sequence between red clover and M. truncatula will tell us how closely related the two species are and the extent to which we can use information from the model e.g. to clone genes in the crop. (ii) The position of differences in DNA sequence (polymorphisms) will be mapped in the genome of red clover in such as way as to relate these differences to the physical genome as represented by the BACs (iii) A number of bio-informatic approaches will be used to extract information from DNA sequencing, physical and genetic mapping and to place the information found in the wider context of legume genetics. The bioinformatic component of the work will also facilitate the application of the knowledge gained and resources generated to the development of new varieties of red clover and other important crop species.