We are living through a revolution, as electronic communications become ever more ubiquitous in our daily lives. The use of mobile and smart phone technology is becoming increasingly universal, with applications beyond voice communications including access to social and business data, entertainment through live and more immersive video streaming and distributed processing and storage of information through high performance data centres and the cloud. All of this needs to be achieved with high levels of reliability, flexibility and at low cost, and solutions need to integrate developments in theoretical algorithms, optimization of software and ongoing advances in hardware performance. These trends will continue to shape our future. By 2020 it is predicted that the number of network-connected devices will reach 1000 times the world's population: there will be 7 trillion connected devices for 7 billion people. This will result in 1.3 zettabytes of global internet traffic by 2016 (with over 80% of this being due to video), requiring a 27% increase in energy consumption by telecommunications networks. The UK's excellence in communications has been a focal point for inward investment for many years - already this sector has a value of £82Bn a year to the UK economy (~5.7% GDP). However this strength is threatened by an age imbalance in the workforce and a shortage of highly skilled researchers. Our CDT will bridge this skills gap, by training the next generation of researchers, who can ensure that the UK remains at the heart of the worldwide communications industry, providing a much needed growth dividend for our economy. It will be guided by the commercial imperatives from our industry partners, and motivated by application drivers in future cities, transport, e-health, homeland security and entertainment. The expansion of the UK internet business is fuelled by innovative product development in optical transport mechanisms, wireless enabled technologies and efficient data representations. It is thus essential that communications practitioners of the future have an overall system perspective, bridging the gaps between hardware and software, wireless and wired communications, and application drivers and network constraints. While communications technology is the enabler, it is humans that are the producers, consumers and beneficiaries in terms of its broader applications. Our programme will thus focus on the challenges within and the interactions between the key domains of People, Power and Performance. Over three cohorts, the new CDT will build on Bristol's core expertise in Efficient Systems and Enabling Technologies to engineer novel solutions, offering enhanced performance, lower cost and reduced environmental impact. We will train our students in the mathematical fundamentals which underpin modern communication systems and deliver both human and technological solutions for the communication systems landscape of the future. In summary, Future Communications 2 will produce a new type of PhD graduate: one who is intellectually leading, creative, mathematically rigorous and who understands the commercial implications of his or her work - people who are the future technical leaders in the sector.

AIOLIA gives a robust 3-tier response to the complex challenges posed by the need to operationally interpret the EU AI Act and global AI regulation. (1) Recognizing the gap between ethical values and their practical application in engineering, AIOLIA pioneers a bottom-up approach to operationalize AI ethics with regard to human condition and behaviour. Following a selection of real-world use cases, AIOLIA translates high-level principles into actionable and contextual guidelines co-created by leading academic, policy, and ethics-aware industrial partners who represent diverse professional and geographic European and international contexts. (2) AIOLIA's commitment to context-sensitivity is deepened by crafting modular, inclusive training materials following the ADDIE methodology designed to cater to diverse learning needs. Hosted on the Embassy of Good Science, AIOLIA materials will range from lectures, videos, and mock reviews to such innovative formats as podcasts, Tiktoks, and a chatbot teaching AI ethics. (3) AIOLIA's outreach is amplified by encompassing 7 research ethics and integrity networks and 3 prominent computer science networks. This strategic alignment enables us to effectively recruit training participants and disseminate human-centric ethics guidelines to a wide spectrum of stakeholders, from ethics experts to early-stage researchers and policymakers worldwide. Resolutely European, AIOLIA's vision propagates beyond EU, embracing global cooperation with leading universities and think tanks in China, South Korea, Japan, and Canada. Utilizing UNESCO platform with its reach to Africa and South Asia, AIOLIA’s guidelines evolve into an analytic toolbox for key international AI dialogues and processes. This global perspective ensures that AIOLIA's impact is not only significant but also sustainable, contributing to fair scientific cooperation and providing concrete and culturally informed ethics instruments to shape the next generation of AI systems.

A major mission of condensed-matter physics is to understand material properties via the knowledge of the energy vs. momentum (q) dispersion and lifetime of fundamental excitations. Unfortunately, none of the available techniques can be applied to emerging nanomaterials: inelastic x-ray scattering & electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) in reflection lack the spatial resolution whereas EELS in transmission electron microscopy lacks the needed combined spatial, energy & q-resolution. In MORE-TEM, we develop a new spectrometer enabling to map excitations q-resolved with 0.01 Å-1 resolution and q-averaged down to atomic level, at unprecedented 1 meV energy resolution and at variable temperature between 700K & 4K. This breakthrough is possible by bringing together our synergy group with complementary skills in electron microscopy, electron optics, experimental & theoretical spectroscopy. This opens the so-far unexplored possibility to investigate dispersion and lifetime of phonons, plasmons & excitons in nanomaterials including (organic) molecules, 1D nanotubes, 2D materials, heterostructures & nanocrystals in minerals with a few nm of lateral resolution on samples as thin as an atomic monolayer. Mapping out the spatial and q-landscape of primary excitations will allow us to gain control on quantum phases, like charge-density waves and superconductivity, to engineer new materials for energy (e.g. batteries), (opto-)electronic devices in (organic) electronics, and to model the physical and chemical properties of natural geological systems. This will hugely impact a wide range of applications in physics, chemistry, engineering, as well as in environmental-, geo- & material science. MORE-TEM not only implements features of a large scale facility on a cheaper table-top instrument, but it also pushes q-resolved spectroscopy to the realm of the nanoscale, providing thus a fundamentally new & unique infrastructure for the characterization and optimisation of nanomaterials.