This project establishes the delivery mechanism to co-ordinate the essential public and private investments in infrastructure which underpin the City Council's Future Southampton programme. Working closely with core delivery partners this will encompass sustainable travel, major city transport schemes, flood risk management, district energy and renewables, waste management, estates regeneration, school and hospitals retrofit, port access and logistics. A green enterprise hub will drive research and investment in integrated energy technologies and an intelligent infrastructure management system for the city will maximise synergies between waste, energy, transport, freight and logistics. The programme will use of state-of-the-art demand reduction and energy generation technologies in buildings, and integrated transportation systems, underpinned by ICT processes that provide the necessary approaches for an exemplar 21st century City...

The BuyZET project will develop innovative procurement plans to help the participating cities achieve their goals of zero emission urban delivery of goods and services. The core cities in the project - Rotterdam, Oslo and Copenhagen - will first identify which goods and service procurement areas have the highest "transportation footprint" - i.e. the number of motorised vehicle trips to transport goods and people generated in delivering the goods or services, and the related emissions. Based on this each city will select two procurement areas to focus on for the project. For each priority area, the cities will then: a) Instigate in-depth market consultation activities with all relevant supply chain actors to identify potential procurement pathways to achieving zero emission delivery. b) Identify and engage with other significant public and private buyers in the priority area with the aim of establishing a buyers group, launching joint or collaborative procurement actions Based on these activities, each city will prepare procurement plans, identifying specific upcoming tenders where the innovative solutions identified will be applied. The core group of cities will be joined by a group of Observer Cities, who will closely engage with project activities and be encouraged to also carry out the defined activities within or following the project period.

It is now widely accepted that if current private car use trends continue then urban road networks will become increasingly unable to cope with the demand for travel, with existing traffic management techniques unable to achieve desired levels of both sustainability and safety. While much research effort has been directed towards this issue there has been a dichotomy between supply side solutions (for example flow responsive traffic signals) and demand side solutions (such as encouraging high occupancy vehicles and public transport use). The ultimate merging of these two approaches would result in signal priority being given based on an environmentally friendly vehicle occupancy scale (from hybrid/electric public transport at one end to single occupancy large engine cars at the other) with clear sustainability, economic and environmental benefits. The required real-time data sources and technologies to achieve this are only now beginning to be created however and forward looking research is now essential to shape the characteristics of these data sources and quantify the benefits which they facilitate. Since the introduction of demand responsive traffic signal control in the 1970s, urban traffic control (UTC) systems have attempted to optimise traffic signal stage lengths and stage orders based on real time traffic detector data. While much research has been carried out since this time to improve the optimality of the underlying algorithms however, the initial data source of inductive loop or above ground (e.g. infrared) detectors have remained fundamental to the operation of the system. In order to give the maximum opportunity for a set of traffic signals to react to approaching traffic, the detectors used to provide the input data for each arm of the junction are generally located as far upstream as possible often the exit stream from the upstream junctions. While this reliance on upstream detectors gives the greatest warning of approaching traffic it also means that the UTC system must make estimations of the stop line arrival times of vehicles, suffering from errors related to platoon dispersion and indeed the variable speed nature of urban driving. The development of GPS/Galileo technologies for individual vehicle positioning, accompanied by advances in wireless communications technologies however provides increasing opportunity to establish the position of vehicles not just at a single upstream detector location, but continuously along the approaching arm. This would provide the UTC systems with significant increased detail in relation to real-time traffic demand, allowing for more detailed stage adjustments and a transformation from the current discrete decision approach to one of continuous response to approaching demands.The focus of this research is therefore the creation of traffic signal control algorithms based on the real-time positions of individual vehicles and, through the creation of a simulation test bed, the quantification of the benefits in relation to the reductions (compared to existing signal control methods) in both delays and emissions that such an algorithm could achieve, a critical step towards achieving an environmentally and economically sustainable road transport system.

The 2021 LGA Commission on Culture and Local Government has noted that despite the £1billion spent per year on culture by local councils in the UK, strategies for regional cultural communities are fragmented, often relying on under-engaged decision-making processes (Young: 2021). Since 2020, the primary capital spend on creativity and culture in the UK comes through local government, yet regional connectivity is often related to bidding capacity, meaning councils in areas with greater civic resources or cultural infrastructure receive more support. There are also a complex series of challenges for creative practitioners and arts organisations in the UK since the pandemic. Arts organisations are struggling to source freelancers essential to their creative programming, creating an increased need for networkers and cultural connectors. These changes have exacerbated some of the long-standing structural and social barriers to inclusion, equity, and engagement in the creative industries. This project addresses these challenges by building a new knowledge exchange network for the creative industries in the Solent, improving connectivity for creative practitioners across the region. Working with Southampton City Council, the CHAOS Network, and Portsmouth Asian Socio-Cultural Organisation, it connects local government officers (LGOs) with a cultural remit with creative freelancers across the region. Through a series of workshops, creative activities, collaborative commissions, exhibitions, and mentoring sessions, it will also support an existing network of writers of South Asian heritage in the region to work as cultural connectors and advocates, introducing them to new digital technology and international creative networks. We will showcase these new models of connectivity and networking through a policy brief and report, a 'think-kit' of resources available on a public website, a published anthology and series of creative comissions, and a public programme of in-person events and training sessions held in underserved areas across the Solent. The project activities take place in four phases: 1. Connection - Opening workshops, held in the University of Southampton's Digital Humanities Hub, will be used to identify and map our connections and gaps in regional provision for cultural activities 2. Immersion - We will run four workshops on the theme of 'Writing Beyond Sectors' for 8 creative industries freelancers identified and recruited through CHAOS network, a regional forum for creative freelancers 3. Enmeshing - Our freelancers will be invited to take part in a series of collaborative paid commissions, while a network of local writers will be trained to act as connectors and advocates for culture, running workshops in Gosport, Portsmouth, Rushmoor, Isle of Wight, and the New Forest with members of the Portsmouth Asian Socio-Cultural Organisation 4. Reflection - The project team will hold a final launch event and exhibition of creative works created throughout the project at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton Our immersive workshops and events look to build deeper connections between LGOs, creative industries freelancers, and cultural networks, helping to augment regional capabilities and strengthen the connections supporting our cultural infrastructure.

Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence play a key role nowadays in many technological systems that control or affect various aspects of our lives. They optimise our driving routes every day according to traffic conditions; they decide whether our mortgage applications get approved; they even recommend us potential life partners. They work silently behind the scene without much of our notice, until they do not. Few of us would probably think much about it when our credit card application is approved in two seconds. Only when it is rejected, do we start to question the decision. Most of the time, the answers we get are not satisfactory, if we get any at all. The spread of such opaque automated decision-making in daily life has been driving the public demand for algorithmic accountability - the obligation to explain and justify automated decisions. The main concern is that it is not right for those algorithms, effectively black boxes, to take in our data and to make decisions affecting us in ways we do not understand. For this reason, the General Data Protection Regulation requires that we, as data subjects, be provided with "meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing." Likewise, consumers should be treated fairly when receiving financial services as per financial services regulations and algorithms should be free of discrimination as per data protection, equality and human rights laws. However, as laws and regulations do not prescribe how to meet such requirements, businesses are left with having to interpret those themselves, employing a variety of means, including reports, interactive websites, or even dedicated call centres, to provide explanations to their customers. Against this background, provenance, and specifically its standard PROV, describes how a piece of information or data was created and what influenced its production. Within recorded provenance trails, we can retrace automated decisions to provide answers to some questions, such as what data were used to support a decision, who or what organisation was responsible for the data, who else might have been impacted. While provenance information is structurally simple, provenance captured from automated systems, however, tends to be overwhelming for human consumption. In addition, simply making provenance available to a person does not necessarily constitute an explanation. It would need to be summarised and its essence extracted to be able to construct an explanation addressing a specific regulatory purpose. How we do this is unknown today. PLEAD brings together an interdisciplinary team of technologists, legal experts, commercial companies and public organisations to investigate how provenance can help explain the logic that underlies automated decision-making to the benefit of data subjects as well as help data controllers to demonstrate compliance with the law. In particular, we will identify various types of meaningful explanations for algorithmic decisions in relation to their purposes, categorise them against the legal requirements applicable to UK businesses relating to data protection, discrimination and financial services. Building on those, we will conceive explanation-generating algorithms that process, summarise and abstract provenance logged by automated decision-making pipelines. An Explanation Assistant tool will be created for data controllers to provision their applications with provenance-based explanations capabilities. Throughout the project, we will engage with partners, data subjects, data controllers, and regulators via interviews and user studies to ensure the explanations are fit for purpose and meaningful. As a result, explanations that are provenance-driven and legally-grounded will allow data subjects to place their trust in automated decisions, and will allow data controllers to ensure compliance with legal requirements placed on their organisations.