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City of Edinburgh Council

City of Edinburgh Council

17 Projects, page 1 of 4
  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/V042955/1
    Funder Contribution: 1,401,880 GBP

    Heat demand in the UK accounts for around 44% of final energy consumption and is currently predominantly obtained by burning natural gas and oil, representing about 90% of the fuel share, while renewable energy sources supply only a fraction of it. Recent legally binding net-zero targets for greenhouse gas emissions (by 2045 in Scotland and by 2050 for the UK), will truly test our nation's technical and engineering competence and ability to innovate. The net-zero transition will not only require radical changes in technologies-it will also result in a profound impact on our society. A targeted decarbonisation framework, built from the participation and contribution of every home and every customer, is needed, so each of them may find optimal place and role as a fully functioning part of a wider smart energy system. This will require innovation. DISPATCH asserts that a net-zero transition in the UK should be planned and realised as a "bottom-up" and "user-centric" approach, where scalability and flexibility are obtained through the aggregation, sharing and control of the resources of individual customers, in such a way that the search for optimal solutions always starts with customers' needs and always ends without reducing customers' comfort levels and sacrificing their wellbeing. DISPATCH will focus on multi-vector energy solutions for decarbonisation of heating and cooling in residential and typical commercial applications (office buildings, educational facilities, etc.). These can be specified as generic parameterised models, as opposed to medium and large industrial and non-domestic applications. Our decarbonisation framework will also include cooling, which is anticipated to increase due to climate change-caused global warming (since 1884, all of the UK's ten warmest years occurred in years from 2002), but also due to provision of automatic or user-set temperature regulation by reversible heat pumps. Furthermore, as the net-zero transition through electrification of heating requires electrical-thermal solutions to be better in all aspects than the currently predominant natural gas infrastructure for heating, we will use electrification of heating as a "reference case" for comparative evaluation and ranking of other considered decarbonisation routes. Arguably, the highest potential for the provision of flexibility and balancing services is through increased customer participation in energy management and coordinated shifting of energy demands in the UK's 27 million homes and 1.4 million SMEs. However, to ensure wider customer engagement and to increase their willingness to take part in various demand-side management (DSM) schemes, they should be able to access appropriate energy exchange and energy trading services for their voluntary or interest-based participation. DISPATCH approaches the above challenges as actual opportunities for exploring synergies, interoperabilities and the overall integration potential of different energy vectors, in order to identify the most cost-effective solutions for reshaping and redistributing energy flows. For example, we will repurpose balancing and demand shifting controls used in normal operating conditions as low-cost resources for automated frequency response in emergency conditions, and compare its benefits with recently introduced procurement of stability as an ancillary service by NGESO.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: AH/V015176/1
    Funder Contribution: 374,278 GBP

    The vast majority of cultural organisations face significant barriers in transitioning towards networked, online cultural and business models. We call this the 'New Real.' New literacies and skills are needed to develop and delight online audiences while negotiating the profound, complex challenges surrounding safety, privacy, transparency, and misinformation in networked environments. Being able to critically reason about the function of a system makes us more resilient in the face of future system failures, or can help us to make judgements about whether systems are safe and ethical. Our project responds directly to this need. Qualitative research through participatory design and ethnographic methodology will investigate the potential for strategies from data arts to be tailored and situated for organisations newly producing online experiences. It will specifically address the design of online and hybrid experiences to both delight audiences and develop critical literacies around the underlying tensions and moral dilemmas in the New Real. Aim: to better understand how to facilitate and accelerate the transition to resilience through new cultural, social and economic models for the UK's world leading cultural sector. This is supported by three concrete Objectives (O), each corresponding to a work-package (WP) and research question (RQ): O1: Understand the strategies used by data arts practitioners and organisations to delight audiences and build critical literacies in the New Real. O2: Co-design pathways with cultural organisations towards new forms of pandemic-resilient online and hybrid experiences. O3: Synthesise a set of actionable insights, tools, concepts and models that can enable and support post-COVID19 recovery.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: AH/P00900X/1
    Funder Contribution: 187,526 GBP

    The project stems from Transnationalizing Modern Languages (TML), one of three large grants awarded under the AHRC's Translating Cultures scheme. TML's established group of Modern Languages experts has conducted research revealing the centrality of a variety of language practices, ranging from multilingualism to translation, in migration contexts and multicultural societies. An important part of TML has been to develop methodologies aimed at embedding awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity within educational practices, from primary to higher and adult education. TML has cemented links with The Phoenix Project (http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/phoenix-project), led by Prof. Judith Hall, that links Cardiff University and the University of Namibia (UNAM) and which supports the Welsh Government's International Development Wales for Africa initiative, promoting mutual capacity building and sustainable collaboration. The aim of the project is to take the expertise and practical knowledge acquired within TML to Namibia by working closely with The Phoenix Project and its educational partnerships. Methodologies developed in TML will be adapted and refined to co-produce with researchers from UNAM and local practitioners materials tailor-made for the Namibian context. The new research seeks to facilitate educational and professional development through multilingual education in the local environment, identifying the school and health systems as key areas of social wellbeing and economic development. The promotion of multilingual education has been identified as a key target with social and economic benefits for Namibia with clear connections to a number of UN sustainable development goals. Issues relating to languages and communication affect the country's ability to grow economically; they are central to successful healthcare provision; they have a clear impact on poverty, income disparity and gender and generational inequality; they impact upon capacity building and access to job markets; they are relevant to conflict resolution as well as to the promotion of human rights; and they are clearly related to issues of cultural heritage and memory. The project concentrates on two specific areas: supporting multilingualism and translingual practices and their embedding in school education; and sensitizing health specialists to the role played by multilingual communication, including translation and self-translation, in their professional practice. In both cases, the focus is on co-research practices, mutual learning and capacity building. The aim is to achieve enduring impact through curriculum development, the production of teaching resources, and the creation of a transnational mentoring network that will amplify the effects of the project throughout the country and beyond. By promoting awareness of the impact of language capabilities and translation practices in Namibia's multilingual environment, the project aims to support sustainable action regarding cultural heritage and cultural memory (in education and the media), produce new research insights on the impact and sustainability of language and translation practices in a variety of locales and landscapes, and promote more efficient communication within health and medical practices (working with multilingual teams in multiple local contexts), all of which involve complex interactions among indigenous, colonial and post-colonial linguistic and cultural heritages. By engaging with creative practices of translation and language learning in Namibian schools and by building on an on-going project between Cardiff University's Phoenix Project and UNAM in health education, the project will make an enduring contribution to educational provision and access to healthcare for excluded sectors of the population as well as to the conservation of cultural memory and intangible heritage in Namibia through the validation of indigenous tongues as languages of education and information.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: ES/M011038/1
    Funder Contribution: 339,852 GBP

    Focus of the project Eastern Europeans who have arrived in the UK in the last decade are the fastest growing ethnic groups in the UK. This study will be the first to focus specifically on Eastern European migrant children who have lived in the UK for at least three years, and to compare their everyday lives and sense of cultural and national identity and belonging in Scotland and England. The primary aim of the research is to inform public debate, policy makers and service providers on the issue of children of Eastern European migrants settled in Britain. The study will promote social inclusion, by exploring the experiences of settled migrant children in relation to the distinct discourses around migration, identity and citizenship in the UK and by ensuring that voices of children from the 'new' minority groups are taken into account in current debates on national identity. Settled migrant children's perspectives help us understand whether or not they are being socialised into their local communities' culture and can highlight the spatial and temporal dimensions of their social lives and opportunities for future. Concepts of ethnic and diasporic identity, belonging, transnationalism, culture and nation are taking new meanings across Europe and need reassessment and questioning when discussing national identity and social inclusion. Evidence to be produced By bringing together discourses on migration and integration of migrant groups with knowledge on how children experience these discourses in their everyday interactions, the study will generate new knowledge on the UK's new ethnic minority children and their long-term experiences of integration. Focussing on children aged 12-18 of Eastern European migrants living in the UK for 3+ years, the study will provide a unique understanding on migrant children's long term experiences of settlement, exploring family, peer and community social networks. Another key area of investigation will be children's expressed needs in terms of the array of services they use, issues in access and the extent to which services are meeting their needs. Third, we will explore the factors that enable children of Eastern European migrants to adapt to the new social, economic and political context of the regions in which they live, as they negotiate national, social, cultural and political identities in the context of a changing Europe. Data will be generated through a review of existing evidence, a survey of between 500-600 children across six urban, semi-urban/rural areas in the UK and focus groups with between 70-100 children. In depth case studies 16-20 families will also be conducted. A young people's advisory group will have a central role in the project development and dissemination. Originality, contribution to knowledge and anticipated impact The originality of the project stems from the consideration given to the ways in which Eastern European children living in diverse geographical spaces are engaged in on-going, dynamic processes of making sense of the world, and their place within it, at local, national and global levels. The study will fill a gap in information on newly settled migrant communities, with a view of informing policy and practice. Information on settled migrant children's social practices, educational achievement and aspirations, sense of cultural and national identity and belonging will provide insights into the extent of European migrant communities' integration in the UK, in the context of various representations of 'nation' that circulate in policy, political and public discourses. The study will address the relative absence of migrant children's voices in public debates and provide policy makers and the public with an improved understanding of the lives of children who were originally migrants, but have settled long-term in the UK. This information will be disseminated widely, to benefit children, service providers, policy makers and the general public.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/L016427/1
    Funder Contribution: 4,746,530 GBP

    Overview: We propose a Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Science. Data science is an emerging discipline that combines machine learning, databases, and other research areas in order to generate new knowledge from complex data. Interest in data science is exploding in industry and the public sector, both in the UK and internationally. Students from the Centre will be well prepared to work on tough problems involving large-scale unstructured and semistructured data, which are increasingly arising across a wide variety of application areas. Skills need: There is a significant industrial need for students who are well trained in data science. Skilled data scientists are in high demand. A report by McKinsey Global Institute cites a shortage of up to 190,000 qualified data scientists in the US; the situation in the UK is likely to be similar. A 2012 report in the Harvard Business Review concludes: "Indeed the shortage of data scientists is becoming a serious constraint in some sectors." A report on the Nature web site cited an astonishing 15,000% increase in job postings for data scientists in a single year, from 2011 to 2012. Many of our industrial partners (see letters of support) have expressed a pressing need to hire in data science. Training approach: We will train students using a rigorous and innovative four-year programme that is designed not only to train students in performing cutting-edge research but also to foster interdisciplinary interactions between students and to build students' practical expertise by interacting with a wide consortium of partners. The first year of the programme combines taught coursework and a sequence of small research projects. Taught coursework will include courses in machine learning, databases, and other research areas. Years 2-4 of the programme will consist primarily of an intensive PhD-level research project. The programme will provide students with breadth throughout the interdisciplinary scope of data science, depth in a specialist area, training in leadership and communication skills, and appreciation for practical issues in applied data science. All students will receive individual supervision from at least two members of Centre staff. The training programme will be especially characterized by opportunities for combining theory and practice, and for student-led and peer-to-peer learning.

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