The main objective of the project is to strengthen Indo-Pacific studies. As the broad region of Indo-Pacific is getting more and more attention both from policy-makers and scholars, there is a growing demand for better understanding of the region which is provided by the growing research area of Indo-Pacific studies. For the purpose of the project Indo-Pacific studies are defined as a multidisciplinary research area focusing on the political, economic and social developments in the Indo-Pacific region. The concept of Indo-Pacific is derived originally from geography and comprises the areas of two oceans: Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean with exclusion of the coast of Americas and polar regions. Indo-Pacific spans from India and Pakistan, east through Southeast Asian states to China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. There is a world-wide need to build and strengthen Indo-Pacific studies. This demand for deepening of the understanding of the region can be justified as follows. Firstly, it is the region inhabited by over 1/3 of the humankind. Secondly, the countries of the region are developing very rapidly and their impact on global affairs is increasing. From the EU perspective the region is especially important for EU because it represents the biggest export market for the European products. 5 EU HEIs and 2 HEIs from India and Japan will collaborate for 31 months, involving 22 scholars to obtain the following OUTPUTS: -1 curriculum report with recommendations (O1)-22 podcasts recorded to popularize science (O3)-1 Digital, Open Access handbook (O2) with 22 chapters including: glossary, learning outcomes, smart index, exercises, cases, assignments, future reading list, follow-up questions + 1 annex with guidelines for teacher and a guide for self-study (O4)-7 partners will update their curricula and teaching techniques for IPS at MA level-21 educators trained in teaching IPS, will do field trainings in the EU (C7), India (C5) or Japan (C6)-240 students will test handbook chapters in India and Japan (C5 and C6)-90 students will test chapters in the EU (C7)-4 dissemination events OUTCOMES-changing study programs in the EU to establish and support IPS-improving didactic potential of teachers of Indo-Pacific Studies by providing them with innovative didactic tools, competences and recommendations-increasing the number of students specialized in IPS (through teaching) – 350 MA /yearly-increasing the number of scholars specialized in IPS (also through self-study) – 100/yearly-increasing awareness among the general public about the importance of the Indo-Pacific Region – 150 during, 4000 after project has ended.Specific for EU partners:-enhanced networking opportunities for partner institutions and staff-gather teaching materials from the region (C5 C6)All these outcomes are self-reinforcing like a virtuous circle: IPS programs will be active (and relevant) for years to come considering the rise of the Indo-Pacific region regarding global capital flows, trade, services, political influence, development, migration, regional security challenges and global challenges like multipolar great power rivalry (beyond the US-China rivalry), ecology and climate change. These factors in turn will create a growing need (pull factor) that will ensure a stable increase of new specialists on the region, which in turn will reinforce the human capital at HEIs (in the EU and beyond) to study the region, and engage with it professionally, legitimizing its pivotal role in global affairs. This same growing need will attract future funding by policy-makers for HEIs that have successfully adopted IPS. This will be a push factor for those Asia studies that have not conformed to ISP yet and do not focus on the interlinkages of Asia’s ever increasingly connected subregions.Since all outputs are tangible, and available through OPEN ACCESS on various online platforms or e-resource databases (O2). These platforms will receive funding for their upkeep by the coordinator - and the handbook availability in online databases will be guaranteed (by legal contract) by collaborating with a renowned publisher.The MONEY-VALUE of the handbook, which will of course be free in its digital version, will without doubt outcompete many of its future competitors for years to come, especially since at the moment NO handbook on this topic is available. EISIPS scholarly expertise that will be put into its development, cannot be outdone by single institutions, and will not easily be outdone by consortia either without similar funding opportunities

The proposed new network will generate interdisciplinary research collaboration and bring together mechatronics/robotics researches from the UK and Japan, to share experiences and formalise discussions for defining a common strategy for future R&D and collaborations at all level of research, teaching and technology transfer. Such a network is vital if the different communities in Japan and UK are to work together for mutual benefit. The network will also act as a knowledge base from the existing mechatronics/robotics community to create a new research community in human adaptive mechatronics able to address the many common challenges (e.g. Pollution / CO2 issue, Aging population issue, etc) in UK and Japan. In particular, the network will explore a number of key challenges: such as a) Investigating the modelling of a man-machine system that explicitly includes all necessary functions of humans as machine operators with sufficient accuracy; b) Implementation of human adaptive behaviour in autonomous systems; c) Application of human adaptive mechatronics to upgrade UK high-tech products; d) Development of human adaptive mechatronics into biomedical applications; e) Development of mathematics to model and analysis human adaptive mechatronic processes in productions.

Covid-19 has upset development progress and paradigms in Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan. Yet the pandemic also has created new opportunities to innovate, evaluate and redirect policy and practice across rural communities and customary livelihoods in these steppe nations. To address post-Covid-19 challenges, experienced Japanese and UK researchers will combine their expertise, shared experience and insights to explore, evaluate and inform inclusive and sustainable policy responses in Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan. As lower-middle income countries, the pandemic intersects with complex environmental and socio-economic factors impacting traditional rural mobile pastoralists and agro-pastoralist livelihoods which are centers for food production and cultural heritage. The project brings together eight Japanese universities with the University of Oxford, building on over 77 years of combined experience working in Mongolia and Central Asia. Original field research will center on rural livelihoods, governance and community engagement to understand the multi-scalar socio-economic and geographic dimensions of Covid-19 responses in rural areas. Challenges include citizen engagement and participation in decision-making, local government capacity, trade and markets, access and availability of information and public services, including health, restrictions on movement and financial support prioritising sustainable economic activity. By advancing a collaborative research agenda, our project aims to advance civic engagement, democratic participation, social well-being and an inclusive Covid recovery through evidence-based, collaborative and multi-stakeholder approaches and will empower researchers at every stage of their career through a comprehensive capacity building and skills development programme. Joint research will identify post-pandemic opportunities to address key issues, transition and improve rural livelihoods, governance and support services. Through fieldwork-based evidence and engagement activities, the project will seek to empower rural communities as they transition into post-Covid response. Strengthened communication (ICT) and markets, sustainable lives and movement and more resilient and equitable systems will be emphasised. This includes opportunities for women, respect for herding and farming, viable education and lifestyle opportunities to build inclusive and enduring rural societies.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) is by far the best-known Japanese artist, sometimes mentioned with Rembrandt and Picasso as one of the few artists to have created art with a truly global reach. The power of his work has long been apparent. He captivated the Japanese public in his lifetime, quickly caught the eye of Euro-American artists, and has continued to fascinate a global audience ever since. His Great Wave (c. 1831) is by some estimates now the most reproduced image in the world. Hokusai remains a puzzle, however, and the full scope of his work little known. Among the public, he is often seen as the archetypal representative of the ukiyo-e ('floating world') school, although this fails to capture the full range of his work. Among specialists, he is usually isolated as an 'eccentric', outside the conventional categories of Japanese art, even though there is a lack of consensus about the authentic body of his work. Neither perspective grasps the original, enduring, and universal power of Hokusai's pictorial imagination. To do so, this project will focus on his last three decades. The prints of Mount Fuji were not only evidence of his mastery of a startling range of styles, forms, and formats. They inaugurated an extraordinary series of images, some from the last months of his life, in which Hokusai continued to refine his communion with human, natural, and unseen worlds. In order to understand the power of this work, we will be asking: 1. How was Hokusai's art animated by his thought, notably his belief that painting and drawing were a means of transcending the limitations of the self? 2. How does Hokusai's mature style synthesize and redefine the artistic vocabularies of Japan, China, and Europe, which he had studied earlier in his career? 3. How can we identify Hokusai's own painted work, given the lack of consensus about criteria with which to establish authenticity? 4. How was Hokusai's work enabled by the social networks that linked him to collaborators and craftsmen, printers and publishers, pupils, patrons, and the public? These questions will provide the foundation for the next generation of scholarship and a transformed appreciation of Hokusai among the public. The results of the research will be disseminated through: a major exhibition and monograph at the British Museum in 2017, which will then travel to Japan; an international conference and edited research volume; and a pilot online resource, providing a space within which researchers and the public can explore and further our understanding of Hokusai's achievement. The project is lead by Timothy Clark of the British Museum, a specialist in Edo-period visual arts. He will be assisted by Angus Lockyer, a Japanese historian at SOAS, University of London, and Alfred Haft and Ryoko Matsuba, two specialists in Edo-period art at the British Museum and SOAS. The core project team will be advised by Roger Keyes, the leading specialist on Hokusai working in English, and ASANO Shugo, a Hokusai specialist and Director of Abeno Harukas Museum, Osaka, where the exhibition will travel after London. The Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, the leading database of ukiyo-e imagery in the world, will furnish digital support for the project. The project relies on international collaboration and will draw on a range of researchers in order to explore the interdisciplinary questions at its heart. Key institutional partners are Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Freer-Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée Guimet in Paris, and over ten leading museums in Japan, including the Tokyo National Museum. Among the key contributors to the project will be an advisory committee comprising Professors Henry Smith (Columbia University), Peter Kornicki (Cambridge), Robert Campbell (Tokyo) and KOBAYASHI Tadashi (Tokyo), Dr John Carpenter (Metropolitan Museum) and NAGATA Seiji (Tsuwano Katsushika Hokusai Museum).

Most structural materials are used as metallic alloys, often multi elemental. This is the case for certain steels or titanium alloys for which the alloying elements are rare and/or available in low concentrations in the Earth crust and sometimes difficult to refine. Indeed, the number of elements that humans can use is merely around one hundred. Moreover, that number is further limited due to scarcity or toxicity. There is a pressing need to open a path to the future with scientific technology, which makes possible to effectively utilize limited elements. This can perhaps be used to create materials for renewable societal infrastructure in severe resource conditions. In this context, structural materials are required to have superior mechanical characteristics while reducing the requirement for rare earth elements. In the framework of the present proposal, owing to the versatility of powder metallurgy (PM) routes, namely spark plasma sintering (SPS) and hot isostatic pressing (HIP), a new concept that combines severe plastic deformation (by high energy milling) and PM routes (SPS and HIP) will be used to develop and design harmonic microstructures. The harmonic structure will have a 3D network structure of continuously connected "shell" with ultrafine grains and a dispersive structure of coarse-grained "core". This makes them special and different compared to heterogeneous “nano-micro” bimodal microstructure usually produced via various metallurgical routes. The targeted materials are Ti-based: pure titanium (Ti), Ti-6-4 (Ti6Al4V) and ß-Ti (Ti-15-3-3 (Ti15V3Cr3Sn3Al) alloys (medical implants, aeronautic applications…). After processing by means of process encompassing PM routes (SPS and HIP) a combination of characterization techniques at both macroscopic (from quasi-static to impact loadings) and mesoscopic/microscopic (X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), in-situ XRD tensile tests and electron microscopy techniques) levels will be carried out to capture the elementary details of the deformation mechanisms and to provide the necessary input parameters into the predictive models for such complex harmonic structures. Indeed, numerical simulations and mechanical modeling will be proposed and will deal with damage nucleation and crack propagation that might result from deformation incompatibility between the fine-grained shell and the coarse-grained core. The models may help to capture the critical parameters and feedback the elaboration to improve the microstructure design. In addition to the full understanding and prediction of the macroscopic mechanical behavior, we intend to answer the following questions by the end of the project: • Are developed materials with harmonic microstructures more efficient in terms of mechanical properties than the same materials with conventional and/or bimodal microstructures? • Are pure Ti harmonic microstructures better than the Ti-6-4 or T-15-3-3 conventional alloys? • Will the expected high strength and high ductility properties allow making practical applications of structures that are light, compact and have superior reliability possible? • … If so, then we can save not only the rare and difficult to refine alloying elements but also costly thermo-mechanical treatments and machining used to transform them. This will contribute at some level to: • Resources and energy savings, • CO2 reduction, • Recyclability, • Uncovering new applications to provide society with the fruit of research results and contribute to the welfare of mankind. The knowledge resulting from this project will be likely to participate in the recent initiatives taken at national level for a renewal of metallurgy, from the point of view of fundamental research, technology transfer as well as the training of young scientists of all levels.