Liquid crystal devices have come of age, having fulfilled their promise of several decades ago by increasingly dominating the market for displays. The industry has become global and the manufacturing is mostly in the Far East. This is not the end, but the beginning and UK scientists and engineers that have played a distinguished role in these developments must work with the global industry and develop strategies that enable us to remain engaged.We note that innovation continues rapidly and that the massive investment in this technology has produced a remarkable diversity of materials and electro-optic phenomena that are now starting to be applied in photonic devices in communications and the biosciences.The title Liquid Crystal Photonics is used to suggest that opto-electronics and displays should be embraced under one heading, reliant as they are on closely related optical functionality in similar materials. The strategic importance of phase-only real time holography by liquid crystal components is emerging into the marketplace in both optical communications and in displays. In displays the changes are probably going to be disruptive, producing highly miniature micro projectors with flexible control of all image attributes. Initially these are destined for 'micro projectors' for mobile phones etc., but will ultimately move to rear projection high definition TV. In optical communications the integration of several functions into software controlled modules matches closely the requirements of the now crucial metropolitan area network. Flexible, compact and low cost optical routers and add-drop-multiplexers for wavelength division (WDM) multiplexed systems may become a common sight in urban areas. The deep-sub-micron silicon CMOS technology that is used for liquid crystal over silicon (LCOS) backplanes is now mass producing complex low-cost integrated circuits with a minimum feature size below 100nm. We can therefore now electrically address liquid crystals using nano structure electrodes to open up applications requiring sub-wavelength photonic crystal structures (e.g. exhibiting electrically switchable surface alignment of liquid crystals, form birefringence and optical band gaps). As in the case of 'conventional' phase-only holography, the unique advantages resulting from the use of silicon CMOS backplanes are programmability and software control. It may be possible to enhance the already remarkable electro-optic properties of liquid crystals, enabling such properties as negative refractive index, programmable scattering and ultra-high-speed switching to be obtained.In general, liquid crystals respond dramatically to nano structures in the range from tens to hundreds of nanometres with or without electrical fields, e.g. liquid crystal director fields are aligned in contact with surface topography in this range. The interactions that occur between free particles embedded in nematic liquid crystals (due to both elastic interactions and Casimir interactions) are important issues in polymer based nano-composite materials and director deformations on this scale are important in structured dielectrics, semiconductors and conductors in the advance of polymer electronics. These are substantial areas of scientific and technological interest where the infra structure of liquid science and technology (that has been driven by the display industry) will be a major factor in future developments.

Each year, criminals steal an estimated £280 Billion of secret information. These crimes are hidden, with the perpetrators potentially thousands of miles away. Where does this crime happen? In the cyber world. Cyber criminals target valuable company assets, as they hack computers and bypass security systems to steal confidential business information, prototype designs, strategic bid information and customer lists. These assets are collectively known as trade secrets, as they derive their value from their secrecy. When this theft is done to benefit foreign countries, it is known as economic espionage. Concerned governments and companies are effecting important changes to combat this problem. Yet, despite the huge economic impact of these thefts, very little is known about them. This research seeks to address this lack of knowledge by investigating data on the theft of trade secrets to understand their economic impact. Using a unique source of data, this research examines what is actually happening in cybercrime. Analysis of information from court cases generates a systematic understanding of what is stolen, who the criminals are, and how this affects victims and the economy as a whole. By definition, the stolen trade secrets are secret, and therefore very difficult to investigate. This project uses the rare insights and information found in court cases to tease out a better understanding of this cybercrime. Over the course of this project, a team of researchers will collect and analyse court data. The researchers will use statistical and other analytical techniques to create a robust understanding of trade secret theft and its implications. These findings will be publicised using conferences, seminars, academic papers and social media, so that groups and individuals interested in these topics can engage with this project and the research team. This research will benefit businesses, policy makers, researchers and the general public. Businesses will have a better understanding of the value of their trade secrets and how best to protect them. Policy makers will be able to develop better policy as the project will generate evidence to ground economic insights and objective analysis into action. These improved policies, which create mechanisms to protect assets, will benefit the economy as a whole, as law and policy will be better tailored to the actual, as opposed to our current theoretical, situation. Researchers and innovators, from the fashion designer working on their next collection, to the aerospace engineer developing a new aeroplane, will be able to better protect their valuable prototypes, software programs and other trade secrets. Researchers who focus on cyber security and trade secrets themselves, will have improved insights leading to better cyber security systems designs, data to test social policy and estimates of the value of trade secrets. Legal scholars will have access to a rich source of information to combine empirical analysis with theoretical approaches. Finally, the general public will benefit from enhanced security and improved policy environment. Improved cyber security means better protection of personal data. The policies informed by this research will encourage innovation. Innovation improves lives, as we enjoy new fashions, advanced aeroplanes and new medicines. However, one group is not likely to benefit: the would-be thieves and corporate spies who target trade secrets.

Energy efficient processes are increasingly key priorities for ICT companies with attention being paid to both ecological and economic drivers. Although in some cases the use of ICT can be beneficial to the environment (for example by reducing journeys and introducing more efficient business processes), countries are becoming increasingly aware of the very large growth in energy consumption of telecommunications companies. For instance in 2007 BT consumed 0.7% of the UK's total electricity usage. In particular, the predicted future growth in the number of connected devices, and the internet bandwidth of an order of magnitude or two is not practical if it leads to a corresponding growth in energy consumption. Regulations may therefore come soon, particularly if Governments mandate moves towards carbon neutrality. Therefore the applicants believe that this proposal is of great importance in seeking to establish the current limits on ICT performance due to known environmental concerns and then develop new ICT techniques to provide enhanced performance. In particular they believe that substantial advances can be achieved through the innovative use of renewable sources and the development of new architectures, protocols, and algorithms operating on hardware which will itself allows significant reductions in energy consumption. This will represent a significant departure from accepted practices where ICT services are provided to meet the growing demand, without any regard for the energy consequences of relative location of supply and demand. In this project therefore, we propose innovatively to consider optimised dynamic placement of ICT services, taking account of varying energy costs at producer and consumer. Energy consumption in networks today is typically highly confined in switching and routing centres. Therefore in the project we will consider block transmission of data between centres chosen for optimum renewable energy supply as power transmission losses will often make the shipping of power to cities (data centres/switching nodes in cities) unattractive. Variable renewable sources such as solar and wind pose fresh challenges in ICT installations and network design, and hence this project will also look at innovative methods of flexible power consumption of block data routers to address this effect. We tackle the challenge along three axes: (i) We seek to design a new generation of ICT infrastructure architectures by addressing the optimisation problem of placing compute and communication resources between the producer and consumer, with the (time-varying) constraint of minimising energy costs. Here the architectures will leverage the new hardware becoming available to allow low energy operation. (ii) We seek to design new protocols and algorithms to enable communications systems to adapt their speed and power consumption according to both the user demand and energy availability. (iii) We build on recent advances in hardware which allow the block routing of data at greatly reduced energy levels over electronic techniques and determine hardware configurations (using on chip monitoring for the first time) to support these dynamic energy and communications needs. Here new network components will be developed, leveraging for example recent significant advances made on developing lower power routing hardware with routing power levels of approximately 1 mW/Gb/s for ns block switching times. In order to ensure success, different companies will engage their expertise: BT, Ericsson, Telecom New Zealand, Cisco and BBC will play a key role in supporting the development of the network architectures, provide experimental support and traffic traces, and aid standards development. Solarflare, Broadcom, Cisco and the BBC will support our protocol and intelligent traffic solutions. Avago, Broadcom and Oclaro will play a key role in the hardware development.