During unusually warm greenhouse conditions of the Aptian to Cenomanian, several major perturbations in the global carbon cycle are reflected by black shale deposits and/or carbon isotope excursions (OAEs). To fully understand the ocean-climate dynamics of this greenhouse world, and the mechanistic drivers that propel ocean anoxia and deterioration of ecosystems, new radioisotopic dating, in parallel with a more geographically dispersed array of high-quality Cretaceous sedimentary records are essential. The Yezo Group (YG), Japan comprises Aptian to Maastrichtian sediment deposited in a high latitude Pacific Ocean-facing fore arc basin. Unlike other well-studied Lower Cretaceous sequences, e.g., the Vocontian Basin, France (VB), the YG contains rhyolitic tuffs amenable to precise U-Pb and 40Ar/39Ar dating. We propose to obtain new radioisotopic dates from the YG in concert with new osmium (Os) and carbon (C) isotope chemostratigraphy. This new chronology and chemostratigraphy can be exported and correlated to records from Tethys, including the VB for which we aim to generate new Os and C isotope chemostratigraphy and an astrochronologic age model focused on the critical onset interval of OAE1a. Our proposed research to update and improve the Lower Cretaceous time scale by integrating French and Japanese strata is designed to rectify critical time scale inaccuracies, and employ refined time scales and new proxy data to address fundamental questions concerning lithosphere-hydrosphere-biosphere interactions associated with major Cretaceous C-cycle perturbations such as OAEs.

In computer systems, copies of data are very often stored in different formats. Bidirectional transformations are programs that synchronise the data pairwise: when one is changed, the appropriate transformation is run to incorporate the changes in the other format. For bidirectional transformations to be considered correct, they are generally expected to satisfy "round-tripping": if A is transformed to B, and then back, it shall give back the same A. This pattern of bidirectional transformations is much more widely applicable than just to data synchronization. They form a fundamental part of modern software engineering, where designs in the form of high-level models are (very often mechanically) transformed into lower-level implementations, and one often needs to reverse engineer a revised high-level model from an updated implementation. Traditionally, bidirectional transformations are programmed as separate transformations in opposite directions, and then combined together to be made bidirectional. But this is very tricky to get right, because the programmer has to manually guarantee round-tripping, and even trickier to maintain, because changing one requires matching changes in the other. In fact, since the transformations in the opposite directions often follow a similar structure, programming them separately constitutes code duplication, which increases maintenance cost and human error. As a result, there has been increasing interest in special bidirectional languages that allow both transformations to be derived from a single definition, to guarantee round-tripping by construction, and to remove this duplication and the problems it causes. The downside of this is that existing bidirectional languages are typically very difficult to use. While this may be partly due to an inherent increase in complexity as one tries to do more with less code, the designs of the languages also leave a lot to be desired: they tend to focus on guaranteeing round-tripping, which is a challenging task in itself, but overlook the usability aspect, making programming in them a lot harder than it should be. In the EXHIBIT project, we will design a new generation of bidirectional languages that are easy to use. The central idea is that the new languages will be closely integrated with mainstream general-purpose languages, naturally reusing existing language constructs, libraries, and programming patterns to maximise the usability of the new framework. The work will be based on the project team's recent theoretical breakthroughs that enable the interconversion between bidirectional objects and mainstream programming units, making a close connection between the two types of languages possible. We will implement the proposed languages and evaluate its effectiveness through a case study. We expect that the superior programming utility offered by the language will make bidirectional programming and its benefits more accessible to mainstream programmers, which will ultimately result in higher productivity and quality in software development.

Nuclear facilities require a wide variety of robotics capabilities, engendering a variety of extreme RAI challenges. NCNR brings together a diverse consortium of experts in robotics, AI, sensors, radiation and resilient embedded systems, to address these complex problems. In high gamma environments, human entries are not possible at all. In alpha-contaminated environments, air-fed suited human entries are possible, but engender significant secondary waste (contaminated suits), and reduced worker capability. We have a duty to eliminate the need for humans to enter such hazardous environments wherever technologically possible. Hence, nuclear robots will typically be remote from human controllers, creating significant opportunities for advanced telepresence. However, limited bandwidth and situational awareness demand increased intelligence and autonomous control capabilities on the robot, especially for performing complex manipulations. Shared control, where both human and AI collaboratively control the robot, will be critical because i) safety-critical environments demand a human in the loop, however ii) complex remote actions are too difficult for a human to perform reliably and efficiently. Before decommissioning can begin, and while it is progressing, characterization is needed. This can include 3D modelling of scenes, detection and recognition of objects and materials, as well as detection of contaminants, measurement of types and levels of radiation, and other sensing modalities such as thermal imaging. This will necessitate novel sensor design, advanced algorithms for robotic perception, and new kinds of robots to deploy sensors into hard-to-reach locations. To carry out remote interventions, both situational awareness for the remote human operator, and also guidance of autonomous/semi-autonomous robotic actions, will need to be informed by real-time multi-modal vision and sensing, including: real-time 3D modelling and semantic understanding of objects and scenes; active vision in dynamic scenes and vision-guided navigation and manipulation. The nuclear industry is high consequence, safety critical and conservative. It is therefore critically important to rigorously evaluate how well human operators can control remote technology to safely and efficiently perform the tasks that industry requires. All NCNR research will be driven by a set of industry-defined use-cases, WP1. Each use-case is linked to industry-defined testing environments and acceptance criteria for performance evaluation in WP11. WP2-9 deliver a variety of fundamental RAI research, including radiation resilient hardware, novel design of both robotics and radiation sensors, advanced vision and perception algorithms, mobility and navigation, grasping and manipulation, multi-modal telepresence and shared control. The project is based on modular design principles. WP10 develops standards for modularisation and module interfaces, which will be met by a diverse range of robotics, sensing and AI modules delivered by WPs2-9. WP10 will then integrate multiple modules onto a set of pre-commercial robot platforms, which will then be evaluated according to end-user acceptance criteria in WP11. WP12 is devoted to technology transfer, in collaboration with numerous industry partners and the Shield Investment Fund who specialise in venture capital investment in RAI technologies, taking novel ideas through to fully fledged commercial deployments. Shield have ring-fenced £10million capital to run alongside all NCNR Hub research, to fund spin-out companies and industrialisation of Hub IP. We have rich international involvement, including NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and Carnegie Melon National Robotics Engineering Center as collaborators in USA, and collaboration from Japan Atomic Energy Agency to help us carry out test-deployments of NCNR robots in the unique Fukushima mock-up testing facilities at the Naraha Remote Technology Development Center.

Language is undoubtedly the most formidable tool that humanity has ever wielded. While most spoken languages evolved organically through the common exchange of ideas and interactions of people, the best programming languages have been carefully crafted to communicate the solutions of problems with fluency and precision to computers. Humans understand that the interpretation of a sentence is affected by its surrounding context, and the extent of its influence determines its scope. The SCOPE project caims to translate and transfer these concepts to the field of programming languages, and enrich the range of tools at the disposal of the next generation of language designers. In the realm of software engineering, the most critical task is to predict and control the effects that an application will perform. Effects have proven difficult to master: their interactions are often complex and chaotic with unpredictable interference. To maintain control, software engineers often employ domain-specific languages (DSLs) that consist of operations which can be composed and interpreted to produce desired effects within a particular domain. An application developed as a block of monolithic code is soon impossible to manage and understand effectively. Instead, engineers work with smaller languages and libraries that deal with their own specialised tasks. As such, DSLs are ubiquitous in software engineering. They manifest themselves in every programming context ranging from small libraries and frameworks to programming languages in their own right. However, as requirements and expectations have become increasingly diverse, modern applications and their DSLs must be given multiple interpretations. For instance, they must be analysed to understand energy requirements, vulnerability to side-channel attacks, efficiency in space and time, and interaction with resources. Adding a new interpretation normally incurs a tremendous engineering effort, either requiring considerable refactoring to calculate and record more information, or the design of new compilers and program analysis tools. This is clearly a costly and tedious exercise that can quickly become overwhelming. This problem is exacerbated by the presence of multiple interacting languages, where each one requires its own tools and interpretations. There is therefore a pressing need for new programming language techniques that support the developers who must face these difficult challenges. An exciting development in programming language research that offers help has been the innovation of algebraic effect handlers, a technique that allows programmers to describe and manipulate the interaction of language features in a modular and sophisticated manner. The main insight of the technique is to focus on a clean separation between the syntax and the semantics of a language and to give the semantics in a structured approach. When operations and their effects are separated, it is easy to give different interpretations of code. The modularity and conceptual simplicity of the methodology has attracted much academic and industrial interest and has quickly spread to encompass implementations in many different languages and for a variety of purposes. Unfortunately, not all useful operations are algebraic, and even some of the most fundamental programming language constructs fall outside of what can be handled by the approach. Yet there is hope: the goal of the SCOPE project is to broaden the effect handlers technique to embrace operations that are sensitive to scope and context, thus covering a wide range of useful constructs. Extending our understanding of algebraic effects in this way would not only be important for the significant theoretical insight that will be provided, but also for the practical benefits of helping software engineers to use algebraic effect handlers to design and manipulate DSLs.

Driving on ice can be slippery and leads to poor road safety. In order to improve grip of tire on ice, new materials have been developed for arctic conditions, and an increasing interest to the interaction between ice and rubber has emerged. Several mechanisms govern the tribological behavior of ice-rubber, such as melting and premelting of ice, adhesion of ice-rubber interface, rubber viscoelasticity. In addition, these mechanisms are known to depend on both temperature (T) and sliding velocity (V). These dynamic mechanisms and their coupling result in the complicated friction behavior of ice-rubber interfaces. This project aims at understanding the interplay between the governing factors and their coupling, depending on the conditions as well as the rubber properties in order to elucidate the friction mechanisms of ice-rubber interfaces, and establish a guideline to design innovative rubber materials. Combination of nano and macro approaches including simulation will be employed.