Elite athletes walk a fine line between performance success and failure. Although regarded by the public as examples of ultimate fitness, in reality they often exhibit vital signs bordering on clinical pathology. Their physiological parameters challenge our notions of what we consider clinically normal, for, as individuals, athletes represent a unique model of human stress adaptation and often, sadly, mal-adaptation. Understanding this human variance may assist ultimately in understanding aspects of well being in the population at large, in the work place and during healthy exercise, as well as when undergoing lifestyle changes to overcome disease, age-related changes and chronic stress.To maximise the potential of GB athletes and support the quest for gold at future World Championships, Summer and Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, the UK's sports governing bodies and the UK sports governing bodies and research councils have identified the opportunity for engineering and physical science disciplines to support and interact with the sports community during training. Not only will this secure competitive advantage for UK athletes, it will also, of more general application, contribute understanding of the biology of athletic performance to gain insights which will improve the health and wellbeing of the population at large.The vision of ESPRIT is to position UK at the forefront of pervasive sensing in elite sports and promote its wider application in public life-long health, wellbeing and healthcare, whilst also addressing the EPSRC's key criteria for UK science and engineering research. The proposed programme represents a unique synergy of leading UK research in body sensor networks (BSN), biosensor design, sports performance monitoring and equipment design. The provision of ubiquitous and pervasive monitoring of physical, physiological, and biochemical parameters in any environment and without activity restriction and behaviour modification is the primary motivation of BSN research. This has become a reality with the recent advances in sensor design, MEMS integration, and ultra-low power micro-processor and wireless technologies. Since its inception, BSN has advanced very rapidly internationally. The proposing team has already contributed to a range of novel, low cost, miniaturised wireless devices and prototypes for sports and healthcare.

This proposal seeks funding to create a Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Connected Electronic and Photonic Systems (CEPS). Photonics has moved from a niche industry to being embedded in the majority of deployed systems, ranging from sensing, biophotonics and advanced manufacturing, through communications from the chip-to-chip to transcontinental scale, to display technologies, bringing higher resolution, lower power operation and enabling new ways of human-machine interaction. These advances have set the scene for a major change in commercialisation activity where electronics photonics and wireless converge in a wide range of information, sensing, communications, manufacturing and personal healthcare systems. Currently manufactured systems are realised by combining separately developed photonics, electronic and wireless components. This approach is labour intensive and requires many electrical interconnects as well as optical alignment on the micron scale. Devices are optimised separately and then brought together to meet systems specifications. Such an approach, although it has delivered remarkable results, not least the communications systems upon which the internet depends, limits the benefits that could come from systems-led design and the development of technologies for seamless integration of electronic photonics and wireless systems. To realise such connected systems requires researchers who have not only deep understanding of their specialist area, but also an excellent understanding across the fields of electronic photonics and wireless hardware and software. This proposal seeks to meet this important need, building upon the uniqueness and extent of the UCL and Cambridge research, where research activities are already focussing on higher levels of electronic, photonic and wireless integration; the convergence of wireless and optical communication systems; combined quantum and classical communication systems; the application of THz and optical low-latency connections in data centres; techniques for the low-cost roll-out of optical fibre to replace the copper network; the substitution of many conventional lighting products with photonic light sources and extensive application of photonics in medical diagnostics and personalised medicine. Many of these activities will increasingly rely on more advanced systems integration, and so the proposed CDT includes experts in electronic circuits, wireless systems and software. By drawing these complementary activities together, and building upon initial work towards this goal carried out within our previously funded CDT in Integrated Photonic and Electronic Systems, it is proposed to develop an advanced training programme to equip the next generation of very high calibre doctoral students with the required technical expertise, responsible innovation (RI), commercial and business skills to enable the £90 billion annual turnover UK electronics and photonics industry to create the closely integrated systems of the future. The CEPS CDT will provide a wide range of methods for learning for research students, well beyond that conventionally available, so that they can gain the required skills. In addition to conventional lectures and seminars, for example, there will be bespoke experimental coursework activities, reading clubs, roadmapping activities, responsible innovation (RI) studies, secondments to companies and other research laboratories and business planning courses. Connecting electronic and photonic systems is likely to expand the range of applications into which these technologies are deployed in other key sectors of the economy, such as industrial manufacturing, consumer electronics, data processing, defence, energy, engineering, security and medicine. As a result, a key feature of the CDT will be a developed awareness in its student cohorts of the breadth of opportunity available and the confidence that they can make strong impact thereon.

We live in the age of data. Technology is transforming our ability to collect and store data on unprecedented scales. From the use of Oyster card data to improve London's transport network, to the Square Kilometre Array astrophysics project that has the potential to transform our understanding of the universe, Big Data can inform and enrich many aspects of our lives. Due to the widespread use of sensor-based systems in everyday life, with even smartphones having sensors that can monitor location and activity level, much of the explosion of data is in the form of data streams: data from one or more related sources that arrive over time. It has even been estimates that there will be over 30 billion devices collecting data streams by 2020. The important role of Statistics within "Big Data" and data streams has been clear for some time. However the current tendency has been to focus purely on algorithmic scalability, such as how to develop versions of existing statistical algorithms that scale better with the amount of data. Such an approach, however, ignores the fact that fundamentally new issues often arise when dealing with data sets of this magnitude, and highly innovative solutions are required. Model error is one such issue. Many statistical approaches are based on the use of mathematical models for data. These models are only approximations of the real data-generating mechanisms. In traditional applications, this model error is usually small compared with the inherent sampling variability of the data, and can be overlooked. However, there is an increasing realisation that model error can dominate in Big Data applications. Understanding the impact of model error, and developing robust methods that have excellent statistical properties even in the presence of model error, are major challenges. A second issue is that many current statistical approaches are not computationally feasible for Big Data. In practice we will often need to use less efficient statistical methods that are computationally faster, or require less computer memory. This introduces a statistical-computational trade-off that is unique to Big Data, leading to many open theoretical questions, and important practical problems. The strategic vision for this programme grant is to investigate and develop an integrated approach to tackling these and other fundamental statistical challenges. In order to do this we will focus in particular on analysing data streams. An important issue with this type of data is detecting changes in the structure of the data over time. This will be an early area of focus for the programme, as it has been identified as one of seven key problem areas for Big Data. Moreover it is an area in which our research will lead to practically important breakthroughs. Our philosophy is to tackle methodological, theoretical and computational aspects of these statistical problems together, an approach that is only possible through the programme grant scheme. Such a broad perspective is essential to achieve the substantive fundamental advances in statistics envisaged, and to ensure our new methods are sufficiently robust and efficient to be widely adopted by academics, industry and society more generally.

The IoT represents a convergence of ubiquitous computing and communication technologies, with emerging uses that actuate in the real world. No longer do ubiquitous computing systems simply sense and respond digitally, now they physically interact with the world, ultimately becoming embodied and autonomous. At the same time, the game is changing from one of privacy, where it is often (contestably) cited that "users don't care", to one of user safety, where users (along with regulators, governments, and other stakeholders) certainly do care. Likewise, industry needs to become aware that this shift also changes the legal basis under which companies need to operate, from one of disparate and often weakly enforced privacy laws, to one of product liability. The current widely adopted approach in which cloud services underpin IoT devices has already raised major privacy issues. Importantly in an actuated future, untrammelled communications implicating a plethora of heterogeneous online services in their normal operation also brings with it resilience challenges. We must ensure the integrity of actuating systems, which will require greater local autonomy alongside increased situated accountability to users. This problem applies in many areas: industrial control, autonomous vehicles, and smart cities and buildings, including the intimate and shared context of the home. This research seeks to address the challenge in the context of the home, where the network infrastructure protection is minimal, providing little or no isolation between attached devices and the traffic they carry. Scant attention has been paid by the research community to home network security, and its acceptability and usability, from the viewpoint of ordinary citizens. This research is also deeply rooted in pragmatism and recognises the 'real world, real time' conditions that attach to the IoT: - that the cyber security solutions currently being defined for IoT systems will not deal with legacy issues and will never achieve 100% adoption; - that extant businesses limit the period of time for which they will provide software and security updates (if they even remain in business); - that cyber security is an arms race and threats will continue to emerge in future; - and that the public will never become network security experts.

Given the unprecedented demand for mobile capacity beyond that available from the RF spectrum, it is natural to consider the infrared and visible light spectrum for future terrestrial wireless systems. Wireless systems using these parts of the electromagnetic spectrum could be classified as nmWave wireless communications system in relation to mmWave radio systems and both are being standardised in current 5G systems. TOWS, therefore, will provide a technically logical pathway to ensure that wireless systems are future-proof and that they can deliver the capacities that future data intensive services such as high definition (HD) video streaming, augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality will demand. Light based wireless communication systems will not be in competition with RF communications, but instead these systems follow a trend that has been witnessed in cellular communications over the last 30 years. Light based wireless communications simply adds new capacity - the available spectrum is 2600 times the RF spectrum. 6G and beyond promise increased wireless capacity to accommodate this growth in traffic in an increasingly congested spectrum, however action is required now to ensure UK leadership of the fast moving 6G field. Optical wireless (OW) opens new spectral bands with a bandwidth exceeding 540 THz using simple sources and detectors and can be simpler than cellular and WiFi with a significantly larger spectrum. It is the best choice of spectrum beyond millimetre waves, where unlike the THz spectrum (the other possible choice), OW avoids complex sources and detectors and has good indoor channel conditions. Optical signals, when used indoors, are confined to the environment in which they originate, which offers added security at the physical layer and the ability to re-use wavelengths in adjacent rooms, thus radically increasing capacity. Our vision is to develop and experimentally demonstrate multiuser Terabit/s optical wireless systems that offer capacities at least two orders of magnitude higher than the current planned 5G optical and radio wireless systems, with a roadmap to wireless systems that can offer up to four orders of magnitude higher capacity. There are four features of the proposed system which make possible such unprecedented capacities to enable this disruptive advance. Firstly, unlike visible light communications (VLC), we will exploit the infrared spectrum, this providing a solution to the light dimming problem associated with VLC, eliminating uplink VLC glare and thus supporting bidirectional communications. Secondly, to make possible much greater transmission capacities and multi-user, multi-cell operation, we will introduce a new type of LED-like steerable laser diode array, which does not suffer from the speckle impairments of conventional laser diodes while ensuring ultrahigh speed performance. Thirdly, with the added capacity, we will develop native OW multi-user systems to share the resources, these being adaptively directional to allow full coverage with reduced user and inter-cell interference and finally incorporate RF systems to allow seamless transition and facilitate overall network control, in essence to introduce software defined radio to optical wireless. This means that OW multi-user systems can readily be designed to allow very high aggregate capacities as beams can be controlled in a compact manner. We will develop advanced inter-cell coding and handover for our optical multi-user systems, this also allowing seamless handover with radio systems when required such as for resilience. We believe that this work, though challenging, is feasible as it will leverage existing skills and research within the consortium, which includes excellence in OW link design, advanced coding and modulation, optimised algorithms for front-haul and back-haul networking, expertise in surface emitting laser design and single photon avalanche detectors for ultra-sensitive detection.