This project is a continuation of the ESRC-funded follow-on project Human Rights Atlas (ES/J000728/1) which has collated data on basic country statistics, legal comitments and human rights practices for all the countries and territories in the world for the period 1981 to 2011 [www.humanrightsatlas.org]. The continuation phase involves updating of the data in the main flat file and actively disseminating the Atlas to a primary user group in Latin America; assisting the user group in using the Atlas to map and analyse human rights issues in Latin America for the period 1990 to 2011; and working with two private organisations - The Mackman Group and the Thomson Reuters Foundation - to continue to raise awareness about the Atlas. The Latin American user group is being coordinated by the Faculty of Social Sciences in Mexico City (FLACSO), which is mapping human rights in the region and identifying gaps in knowledge about human rights using comparative statistical indicators of the kind already collated in the Human Rights Atlas. The work involves a workshop in Mexico City with FLACSO and its network of its researchers. The region itself had undergone remarkable and dramatic political transformations over the period envisaged for this study, including extraction from prolonged periods of authoritarianism, processes of transitional justice, re-establishment and consolidation of democracy, structural adjustment and macro-economic recovery, and rapid economic development among big regional actors such as Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. The Atlas provides a systematic resource that addresses the main data needs of this research network. The second main part of the project is to work with the Mackman Group (a private sector partner in the original Human Rights Atlas project) and the Thomson Reuters Foundation (the charitable fundation of the global media company Thomson Reuters) to disseminate the Atlas resource and raise awareness about cross-national human rights indicators for a wide range of users, including key organisations from the public and private sectors. This part of the project will take advantage of the Mackman Group's marketing technologies and Thomson Reuters' AlertNet resource, which is dedicated to the humanitarian sector around the world. In addition to the on-line promotional work, the project will also host a large London-based user engagement event hosted by Thomson Reuters in its Canary Wharf facility. This event will feature high profile global leaders from the humanitarian sector to discuss the needs of users for systematic data and data visualisation of the kind carried out by the original Atlas project.

The rapid spread of new forms of digital media production and reception around the globe is often seen as bringing about a 'contemporary flourishing of humanitarianism' (Barnett and Weiss 2013:9). Yet no one has ever studied the world's largest humanitarian news agencies, whose output is regarded as highly influential for relief workers, policy makers and donors working in humanitarian response. In particular, we know almost nothing about such news agencies' approaches to humanitarianism, news-making, and the relationship between the two. Nor do we yet understand much about the distinctive characteristics of the texts humanitarian news agencies produce. The main objective of this research is to remedy this situation by conducting a 12 month comparative analysis of two major global sources of humanitarian news, Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) and the Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF). This is made possible by the unprecedented level of access to these organisations we have been able to achieve. Indeed, we have already been conducting a small-scale pilot study with IRIN since January 2015 in which we have tested our methodology, refined our research questions and developed a suitable project management model. Our research will focus on three main areas. First, we are interested in what different people within these organisations think humanitarianism is. Does the concept of humanitarianism imply a certain threshold of suffering - either in terms of the number of people affected or the severity of the crisis? Is it more important to focus the immediate aftermath of a disaster or the slow-onset of chronic crises and efforts to prevent them? Secondly, we are concerned with the ways in which the routines and practices of news production affect journalists' ability to pursue the forms of humanitarian news that they value. How does physical location, online collaborative working and the use of different digital media shape humanitarian news content, for example? Thirdly, we aim to investigate what distinguishes the actual outputs of IRIN and TRF from each other and from that of other news organisations - especially the BBC World Service (BBCWS) and Reuters. Do humanitarian news organisations represent suffering in distinct ways? How do they attribute responsibility and frame the consequences of humanitarian crises? What, if anything, is unique about their sourcing practices, and use of multi-media material? In order to answer these three sets of research questions we will be conducting (1) extensive newsroom observations with IRIN, TRF, the BBCWS and Reuters, primarily in London, but also in Bangkok and Nairobi, (2) regular interviews with relevant journalists and editors and (3) a long-term content analysis and framing analysis of their outputs, over a 12 month period. Our model of project management involves fortnightly and quarterly team meetings, routine reporting to research partners and a reciprocal process of researcher skill-sharing, all overseen by a project mentor. The results of our study will be disseminated directly to IRIN and TRF and to academics in media studies, journalism studies and development studies as well as relevant news organisations, funders, regulators, public service broadcasters, the humanitarian sector and the general public. Results will be disseminated through social and mainstream media, academic articles, conference papers, an industry focussed final report and a 'fusion' dissemination event.

1) To create the next generation of Natural Language Processing experts, stimulating the growth of NLP in the public and private sectors domestically and internationally. A pool of NLP talent will provide incentives for (existing) companies to expand their operations in the UK and lead to start-ups and new products. 2) To deliver a programme which will have a transformative effect on the students that we train and on the field as a whole, developing future leaders and producing cutting-edge research in both methodology and applications. 3) To give students a firm grounding in the challenge of working with language in a computational setting and its relevance to critical engineering and scientific problems in our modern world. The Centre will also train them in the key programming, engineering, and machine learning skills necessary to solve NLP problems. 4) To attract students from a broad range of backgrounds, including computer science, AI, maths and statistics, linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology and provide an interdisciplinary cohort training approach. The latter involves taught courses, hands-on laboratory projects, research-skills training, and cohort-based activities such as specialist seminars, workshops, and meetups. 5) To train students with awareness of user design, ethics and responsible research in order to design systems that improve user statisfaction, treat users fairly, and increase the uptake of NLP technology across cultures, social groups and languages.

The financial services industry is at the forefront of the digital economy, and is crucial to the UK's, and especially London's, continuing social and economic prosperity. State-of-the-art Financial IT, Computational Finance and Financial Engineering (collectively Financial Computing) research is crucial to our international competitiveness in investment banking, investment funds or retail banking. Academically this DTC focuses on financial computing, as distinct from quantitative finance, already well resourced. Banks and funds view PhD students in science and engineering as an increasingly important and largely untapped talent pool; although one regrettably with little knowledge of finance. The Financial Services Skills Council notes that employers are placing increasing importance on high-level analytical skills, as well as their acute shortage, especially in the newly emerging areas that drive sector growth. This centre completely embraces the spirit of the Digital Economy programme. The proposed DTC is inherently multidisciplinary involving UCL Computer Science, one of the largest leading departments in its field in the UK, with LSE Finance and the London Business School; the two leading academic finance centres in the UK. Key to developing the financial services industry in the Digital Economy is the creation of a new cohort of researchers who have a strong research capability in IT and computation, but also understand finance and the needs of the wholesale financial services industry leading to early adoption of new financial information technology research.The research groups and centres that will participate in this DTC include worldclass groups at: UCL, such as the Software Systems Engineering Group and the Centre for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning, at LSE such as Financial Markets Group, and at the London Business School, including the Management Science and Operations and Finance Subject Areas. The total value of active grants currently held by the participating groups and centres exceeds 20 Million Pounds, and the number of currently registered PhD students exceeds 130. Collaborators in Statistics, Economics, Mathematics and Physics supplement the potential Supervisor pool.A great strength of this DTC proposal is our industry partners, which include: Abbey, Barclays, Barclays Capital, BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Lloyds TSB, Man Investments, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Nomura, RBS and Thomson Reuters. Regarding training and supervision, each DTC PhD student will follow a personally tailored programme of postgraduate courses drawn from the partners covering financial IT, networks & communications, HCI, computational finance, financial engineering and business, supplemented by lectures from our industry partners: * A tailored educational programme comprising graduate-level courses from UCL, LSE and LBS. * An academic supervisor (from UCL, LSE or LBS) and an industrial advisor (a partner bank, fund or Reuters), and a programme of research covered by an MOU. * A research project in financial IT, computational finance or financial engineering. * Training in industry software, such as Reuters 3000 Xtra, through UCL's virtual training floor.* A substantial period of industrial placement as agreed between the academic and industrial supervisors.* A short period at a leading foreign academic centre

CENTRE VISION Our vision for the new CDT in Financial Computing and Analytics is to as a national 'beacon' linking PhD & Masters' students, industry and academia in financial computing and analytics. We and our Industry partners are also central to the forthcoming investments in Big Data from EPSRC and ESRC (e.g. Business Datasafe). Its principal objective is to educate the next generation of elite PhDs with unparalleled, cross-disciplinary expertise in applied computing, analytics and financial mathematics, as well as in-depth sector understanding, to meet an increasing demand for their skills within the Financial Service Industry, Government, Retail and other Service sectors. Our existing DTC in Financial Computing is unique (there is no other research & training activity like it in the world) and by placing our PhD students in financial institutions and regulators it has had a major impact on the UK financial sector, as indicated by the Financial Times article (School for QUANTS) and our Letters of Support. The CDT is a new partnership between UCL, LSE and ICL, all providing MRes courses and PhD supervision. NATIONAL IMPORTANCE & GROWING NEED FOR CROSS-DISCIPLINARY SKILLS London is the world's leading international financial centre and the UK financial services industry is the key sector for the UK economy, contributed £124bn to the UK economy, generating a trade surplus of £36bn in 2010 and employing 1 million people. London is also the location for our financial regulators and world-class Retailers. Our Financial and other Service industries are therefore crucial to the UK's, and especially London's, continuing social and economic prosperity. Although we receive over 600 enquiries/applications per annum, and growing, recent reports by McKinsey and Accenture highlight the major and growing skills shortage of (postgrad) IT/data scientists in the USA 22,000 and the UK 4,000. EPSRC PRIORITIES AND RESEARCH The proposed CDT is aligned to EPSRC priorities across a number of Themes, in particular: Data to Knowledge (an ICT Theme priority), Industrially Focussed Mathematical Modelling (Mathematical Sciences) and New Digital Ventures (Digital Economy). The crucially important IT research challenges in just one area, namely the application of software engineering, AI and verification/correctness to algorithms for automated trading, illustrates the enormous research opportunities. IMPACT The current DTC in Financial Computing is acknowledged by the Department of Business Innovation & Skills as having had a major impact on our financial industry partners and on our academic partners. This will continue with the new CDT, impacting Regulators, government, Retailers and analytics companies. * STUDENTS - In 2011 the Centre funded more female PhD students than males, and in 2012 the Centre started 40 new PhD students if we count DTC funded students, students funded by other sources, such as retail and analytics companies, and industry-based part-time students. * ACADEMIA - UCL, LSE and Imperial College have all appointed new faculty in applied financial computing and business analytics; and UCL and ICL have started new Masters programmes. * INDUSTRY - many of the Banks now have established formal PhD programmes, in part due to the current DTC, and proved lecturers to the partners for industry-oriented programmes. * REGULATORS AND GOVERNMENT- we have placed PhD students in the BoE/FSA/PRA/FCA and the Cabinet Office, and as discussed in the Case for Support, we have held individual meetings and workshops with the Regulators (BoE, PRA, FCA) and with new (Retailer) partners (Tesco, BUPA, Unilever) to discuss how we can support them. * SOCIETAL - we encourage and support our PhD students in launching their own start-up, and we provide Masters and Undergraduate students to London-based start-ups, especially in the area called New Finance (e.g. P2P lending, crowdfunding).