The project address the 'urban challenge' of delivering better, more cost effective healthcare in cities by enabling better resource planning based on data. It will develop a 'proof of concept' (POC) planning support solution for hospitals and health facilities using anonymised, aggregated mobile network data (extrapolated to provide insights representative of the total and segmented population in an area, including demographics, footfall and movement), together with health sector data (e.g. types of condition linked to demographics, environmental factors) and environmental data that can impact on health (weather, air pollution forecasts etc). The project will be led by O2, building on their Dynamic Insights platform, with Cambridge city and Addenbrooke's hospital providing the use case. This approach has been successfully applied in other sectors, such as retail and transport where it has enabled improvements in the nature and location of offerings based on detailed knowledge of the customer demographic. This will be the first time it has been used in the health sector. Successful demonstration of the POC (and supporting business models) will lead to commercial roll-out across the UK.

Automotive industry and the consumers are eager for smart features on new cars and more efficient vehicles. Modern cars are not considered as mere means for travelling from point A to B anymore, but rather smart systems that offer personalised services and have the capability to adapt to the user's preferences and needs. They are expected to become intelligent agents that learn from their environments and exploit various sources of information to become increasingly autonomous systems that relieve the driver from tedious tasks, such as parking, and improve safety, efficiency, and desirability of the future cars. From a wider angle, today's land transportation systems claim about 1.3 million lives and 7 million injuries in road accidents, according to a recent report by CISCO. The increasing number of cars results in traffic jams costing about 90 billion of lost hours for the drivers and the passengers. In addition, transportation accounts for about 26% of the total greenhouse gas emission from human activities. While public transport can help, cars remain to be the desired means of transport according to a recent report by the Department of Transport in 2014. These market forces in addition to the environmental, economic and social impacts of transport systems demand a timely and transformative research to rethink the automotive control systems and revolutionise vehicle design for future cars. There have been two trends towards this objective in the past decade: in the one hand the research in autonomous systems, inspired by unmanned space vehicles, gave birth to driver-less concept cars such as Google robotic car; on the other hand, modern wireless communications enabled cars to talk to each other and the roadside infrastructures, resulting in the concept of connected cars. However, driver-less cars remain to be too expensive for commercial vehicles (Google's cars cost about £100,000 only for sensing equipment) and connected vehicles can offer little if not properly integrated into smart and autonomous features. This ambitious research is defined by a number of world-class academic institutions and leading industrial partners to work with Jaguar Land Rover, a market leader in high end cars, to design and validate a framework that combines the power of connected vehicles concept with the notion of autonomous systems and build a novel platform for cost-effective deployment of autonomous features and ultimately realisation of connected and fully autonomous cars. This can be made possible thanks to modern wireless technologies and the power of cloud computing that allows sharing expensive computing resources (hence, reducing costs per vehicle) and provides access to information that are only available on the cloud. To realise the ambition of the project, a number of key challenges in the areas of ultra-low-latency wireless technologies, cloud computing, distributed control systems, and human interaction issues will be addressed in this project. In addition, potential security threats will be identified and analysed to assess the potential risks for the public and reputational damage for car manufacturers should such technologies be commercialised. At the end of the project, the technical solutions will be integrated into a single framework and will be validated by example applications, characterising technical and service-level performance of the framework, and providing a basis for the future direction of enhanced automated services. While the objective here is to ultimately enable affordable driver-less cars, in the short term, this project aims to enable a number of demonstrable autonomous features in a test environment.

Automotive industry and the consumers are eager for smart features on new cars and more efficient vehicles. Modern cars are not considered as mere means for travelling from point A to B anymore, but rather smart systems that offer personalised services and have the capability to adapt to the user's preferences and needs. They are expected to become intelligent agents that learn from their environments and exploit various sources of information to become increasingly autonomous systems that relieve the driver from tedious tasks, such as parking, and improve safety, efficiency, and desirability of the future cars. From a wider angle, today's land transportation systems claim about 1.3 million lives and 7 million injuries in road accidents, according to a recent report by CISCO. The increasing number of cars results in traffic jams costing about 90 billion of lost hours for the drivers and the passengers. In addition, transportation accounts for about 26% of the total greenhouse gas emission from human activities. While public transport can help, cars remain to be the desired means of transport according to a recent report by the Department of Transport in 2014. These market forces in addition to the environmental, economic and social impacts of transport systems demand a timely and transformative research to rethink the automotive control systems and revolutionise vehicle design for future cars. There have been two trends towards this objective in the past decade: in the one hand the research in autonomous systems, inspired by unmanned space vehicles, gave birth to driver-less concept cars such as Google robotic car; on the other hand, modern wireless communications enabled cars to talk to each other and the roadside infrastructures, resulting in the concept of connected cars. However, driver-less cars remain to be too expensive for commercial vehicles (Google's cars cost about £100,000 only for sensing equipment) and connected vehicles can offer little if not properly integrated into smart and autonomous features. This ambitious research is defined by a number of world-class academic institutions and leading industrial partners to work with Jaguar Land Rover, a market leader in high end cars, to design and validate a framework that combines the power of connected vehicles concept with the notion of autonomous systems and build a novel platform for cost-effective deployment of autonomous features and ultimately realisation of connected and fully autonomous cars. This can be made possible thanks to modern wireless technologies and the power of cloud computing that allows sharing expensive computing resources (hence, reducing costs per vehicle) and provides access to information that are only available on the cloud. To realise the ambition of the project, a number of key challenges in the areas of ultra-low-latency wireless technologies, cloud computing, distributed control systems, and human interaction issues will be addressed in this project. In addition, potential security threats will be identified and analysed to assess the potential risks for the public and reputational damage for car manufacturers should such technologies be commercialised. At the end of the project, the technical solutions will be integrated into a single framework and will be validated by example applications, characterising technical and service-level performance of the framework, and providing a basis for the future direction of enhanced automated services. While the objective here is to ultimately enable affordable driver-less cars, in the short term, this project aims to enable a number of demonstrable autonomous features in a test environment.

Domestic transport is the UK's highest emission sector, and congestion in cities is costly (e.g. London £5.1bn in 2021). Drastically reducing urban car dominance is imperative to reach the UK's 2050 net-zero target, but also an unparalleled opportunity to create more equitable, inclusive and accessible cities of the future across the country. Recent UK investments of approximately £15bn seek to radically transform urban mobility and modality: £2bn for half of urban journeys to be cycled/walked by 2030 (e.g., cycle lanes, mini-Holland schemes), £5.7bn City Region Sustainable Transport Settlements (e.g., Manchester bus and cycle schemes), and £7bn to level up local bus services. To realise full investment potential, and develop holistic adoption pathways towards net-zero, inclusive mobility, multimodal transport must be effectively planned, managed and operated, with people and their differences as a core consideration. This is challenging for a complex system-of-systems. On the supply side, modes compete for limited road space on shared infrastructure, creating conflicts. On the demand side, modes complement each other in intermodal journeys, jointly influencing uptake. For example, cycle lanes promote cycling, but may impact road speeds and exacerbate congestion and pollution, highlighting the need to evaluate person-level mobility and system-level emissions. A recent survey reported two-thirds of disabled respondents finding cycling easier than walking, highlighting the need to consider the broad disability spectrum and the potential for cycle lanes to improve access for all. Therefore, holistically optimising cycle lane schemes, as with all multimodal schemes, requires integrated methodologies: fully capturing multimodal transport systems' distributed and interconnected processes, the complexities of modal competition and complementarity, and the heterogeneity of traffic and population. My research will overcome these research challenges and develop the first multiscale digital twin for the transport-people-emission nexus using a truly integrated approach to model and simulate multimodal urban transport, advancing and coalescing my adventurous research in multimodality, using traffic flow theory, agent-based modelling, and machine learning. This will enable the development of holistic adoption pathways towards net-zero, inclusive mobility through scenario testing and optimisation, with guidance and recommendations to support implementation. Leading a strong consortium of 3 cities and 12 partners, covering the entire multimodal transport value chain, I will collaboratively exploit the digital twin to realise UK strategic agendas: net-zero; Equity, Diversity and Inclusivity (EDI); and levelling-up. By holistically enhancing mobility for everyone, my Fellowship also will propel the Green Revolution for economic growth, leveraging the net-zero mission to unlock new business opportunities, and establish the UK as a global leader in digital technologies to tackle climate change. I will deliver a strong positive impact on making net-zero a net win for people, industry, the UK, and the planet, thereby enabling both me and the UK to become world leaders in multimodal urban transport, at the forefront of research and innovation.

The emergence and re-emergence of infectious diseases is one of the greatest threats to human health. By their very nature, outbreaks of infectious disease can spread rapidly, causing enormous losses to health and livelihood. For example, an estimated 35-million people are HIV-infected, antibiotic resistant pathogens such as MRSA are a major global public health problem and pandemic influenza is rated as the greatest national risk on the UK government risk register (Cabinet Office 'National Risk Register for Civil Emergencies 2012 Edition'). Early diagnosis plays a vital role in the treatment, care and prevention of infectious diseases. However worldwide, many infections remain undiagnosed and untreated or are diagnosed at the late stage due to poor diagnostic tools, resulting in on-going transmission of serious infections or delay in the identification of emerging threats, leading to major human and economic consequences for millions of people. Our vision is to establish an EPSRC Interdisciplinary Research Centre to create a new generation of early-warning sensing systems to diagnose, monitor & prevent the spread of infectious diseases. This large scale collaboration will bring together scientists, engineers and computer scientists from University College London, Imperial College, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Newcastle together with NHS stakeholders, the Health Protection Agency and industry partners. Working across and beyond traditional research boundaries, the IRC will pioneer innovative nano-enabled mobile diagnostic tests which can be used in GP surgeries, community settings and developing countries, linked to smart digital-surveillance systems which search for information on the web to detect early indicators of diseases. The tremendous expansion in mobile phone technology with an estimated 6 billion users worldwide, provides new opportunities for point-of-care diagnostics with inbuilt capacity to securely transmit results to public healthcare systems. The challenge is to create robust multimarker sensor platforms that can diagnose early infections with high sensitivity and specificity. Our strategy will seamlessly integrate the scientific excellence underpinning recent breakthroughs by our team in diverse areas of biomarker discovery, capture coatings, nanoparticles, nanopatterning, sensor systems, wireless connectivity, data mining and health economic analysis of diagnostics. Moreover we will explore innovative new strategies to search for early indicators of infection (herein we coin the phrase "e-markers") by searching through millions of web-accessible information sources including Google, Facebook and Twitter to identify outbreaks even from people who do not attend clinics or from geographical regions that are invisible to traditional public health efforts. By providing doctors, community workers and public health organisations with real-time, geographically-linked information about emerging infections which will be visualised on a "dashboard" display, we will support more rapid, stratified, integrated evidence-based interventions, benefitting individuals and populations. Our disruptive early warning sensing capabilities will bring major human and economic benefits to the NHS and global healthcare systems. The ultimate beneficiaries will be patients since early diagnosis will empower them to gain faster access to better treatments, helping to reduce suffering and risk of death. Society will benefit by preventing the onwards spread of infection by people who are unaware of their infection and preserve the effectiveness of precious antimicrobial medicines for future generations. The NHS and healthcare systems will benefit by simplifying patient pathways allowing tests and results to be given in a single visit and so provide a more cost-effective solution of community based care. Our technologies will also provide new commercial opportunities for British industry.