Debates about the state of the international order have leapt from academic journals to the front pages of newspapers and into the discourses of policymakers concerned about sustaining cooperation to address global challenges. International order-a complex of international norms, institutions, and practices that helps structure world politics-is understood to be challenged from without by the rise of new powers and weakened from within by a hollowing out of support from key states. This attention has driven scholarly attempts to better understand international order's foundation and evolution-and to criticize assumptions of that order's beneficence. Many of the norms, institutions, and practices that underpin today's order emerged in the nineteenth century; the great power bargains that shaped the order were intertwined with the expansion of empires and imposition of racial hierarchies. Scholarship in both global history and international relations increasingly understands the nineteenth century as a pivotal moment in the development international order. This project seeks to better understand the role of Latin America in this process-how did Latin American states shape and how were they shaped by their interactions with these foundational international projects? Given its status during this period-mostly independent but bereft of great powers and marginal to European international society-Latin America has been largely absent from discussions of international order or seen through the lens of their relations with the United States. This absence matters if we want to better understand how projects of international order relate to countries outside their cores. Our research will further de-center understandings of international order's creation and examine the constraints and possibilities for peripheral influence. The period was also pivotal for Latin American state consolidation and international insertion. Latin America was long presumed to be an illiberal backwater during the nineteenth century; however, recent scholarship of the history of political ideas has shown the vibrancy of liberalism and republican projects and practices. Legal history, in turn, has emphasized the relevance of legal traditions and the way in which they informed state formation and international relations. However, we still know little about how domestic and international practices were connected; as such we propose the examination of "Latin America republican internationalism" as a lens through which to examine how domestic politics were manifested in diplomatic practice. The research will benefit global historians, international relations scholars, and historians of republicanism and liberalism in Latin America's nineteenth century. The project will examine these developments from 1864-1919 through original archival research in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and the USA. We will focus on key moments, such as international and regional summits and the creation of international organizations, and re-engage the region's international intellectual currents. We seek a better understanding of how republicanism and liberalism shaped Latin American diplomatic practices, how Latin America's peripheral position affected its engagement with projects of order-building, and how its proposals may have influenced practices of multilateralism. The initial period starts with the First Geneva Conference and is marked by the growing domestic consolidation and international economic insertion of Latin America. At a global level, it was characterized by early creation of international public unions and larger projects of inter-imperial international order-building. From about 1889, we enter a second period in which disparate diplomatic initiatives begin to coalesce into forms that resemble today's international organizations. Many of these bodies exist today or have been reborn in the post-Second World War institutional architecture.

At the end of their lives stars settle into one of three possible final compact states known as white dwarfs, neutron stars or black-holes. All three of these are incredibly dense by our standards, so much so that to a neutron star, matter at Earth-like densities is barely different from a vacuum. Many examples of such objects are known, and they are often highly active as they can be so closely paired up with other stars that we can see the effects of gas transferring from one star to the compact object. In such a process the gas can be heated to many millions of degrees making these object efficient X-ray sources. Furthermore, both white dwarfs and neutron stars can show explosive effects as material accreting onto them sparks into uncontrollable fusion, generating vast amounts of energy within seconds or minutes. Such explosions can light up the furthest reaches of the Universe to reveal the history of the build up of structures in the Universe. Our work centres on trying to understand such processes and how the various objects that we see relate to one another. The purpose of this grant is to support the travel needed to observe these objects on ground-based telescopes where we carry out observations of the high-speed processes that occur as material crashes onto these remarkable objects. The grant will also support work on exoplanets, where high-precision measurements of brightness and velocity are essential to the measurements of the masses and radii of planets required to understand the nature of planets far beyond our Solar System.

Forensics is a well-established science that aims at applying various disciplines to the law, both civil and criminal, in order to solve questions related to crime. It is mainly concerned with proving and investigating infringements, identifying perpetrators and describing modus operandi. Biometrics, on the other hand, is a relatively new science that aims at measuring and analysing a person's unique characteristics, both behavioural and physical. It is mainly concerned with the development of technological solutions to extract and evaluate a person's biometric data mainly for verification and identification purposes. The potential of applying biometrics to forensics comes natural as several forensic questions rely on identifying, or verifying the identity, of people allegedly involved in crime. Although these two scientific communities have operated in relative isolation over the past couple of decades, forensic biometrics have been successfully applied through the development automatic fingerprint identification systems (AFIS), and most recently, through the development of face recognition systems. The potential of forensics biometrics, however, can be extended to other biometric traits, such as iris and gait analysis. This proposal also aims at consolidating the integration of multimedia forensics into the forensic science. Multimedia forensics is concerned with the development of scientific methods to extract, analyse and categorize digital evidence derived from multimedia sources, such as imaging devices. For example, developing technologies to identify, categorise and classify the source of images and video, as well as to authenticate and verify the integrity of their content. Since the enabling technologies in multimedia forensics are similar to those used for identification and verification purposes in biometric forensics, the integration of these areas is seamless.

This innovative project aims to investigate the phenomenon of the production of late-antique tokens as objects embodying the relations between different religious identities in Roman society. In particular, the study focuses on the so-called “Vota Publica coinage” (or “Festival of Isis coinage”) and “Asina tokens”, both minted in the Roman West during the fourth century and perhaps the fifth century AD. These issues are still partly unpublished and furnish valuable data. Since the creation of these “pagan” objects took place during the gradual repression of polytheistic cults by a Christian government, the project will shed light on the question of religious freedom and on the dynamics of religious “propaganda” during an era that saw the transformation of the pagan Roman Empire into a Christian one. Unlike traditional approaches, religious politics will be examined through the innovative perspective supplied by the numismatic evidence of tokens, which, as an expression of relationships, exchanges and culture, contain a remarkable informative potential for the understanding of broader aspects within ancient communities. Through this lens, the project will focus on specific social, religious, and cultural experiences in the context of the “conflict” between pagans and Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. The adoption of an interdisciplinary approach and the mobilization of intellectual tools forged by classical disciplines will help to formulate appropriate patterns and to develop an analytical inquiry on the psychological, social, religious and political changes and interactions revealed by tokens in the late Roman empire. This project will therefore make a historical contribution to current reflections on religious “tolerance” and “intolerance” that have a significant preponderance in societies past and present. Addressing a matter of continuing concern, the project will help inform contemporary debates in different fields of the scientific research

This 8 month project brings together internationally leading expertise in High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging from the University of Warwick with the innovation and in-depth market knowledge of the IBM Systems and Technology Group, Austin, USA. Together the partners will demonstrate the technical and commercial viability of an embedded HDR decoder-viewer which could be included in all future TVs and even retrofitted in existing TVs.HDR is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas of a scene than normal digital imaging techniques or photographic prints do. This wider dynamic range allows HDR images to more accurately represent the wide range of light intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight. Tone mapping techniques, which reduce overall contrast to facilitate display of HDR images on devices with lower dynamic range, can be applied to produce images with preserved or exaggerated local contrast for artistic effect. Although the process is complex, the end product seems very natural. This is because the eye and the visual cortex of the brain, unlike a camera, can deal with light variances of 10,000-fold within a single scene and adapt automatically without any conscious effort. Cameras capable of capturing dynamic HDR content are now appearing. The problem is: capturing the wide range of natural lighting results in a substantial increase in data. A highly efficient compression algorithm (of at least 100:1) for HDR video content has been developed at the University of Warwick as part of our research undertaken in EPSRC grant EP/D032148/2, for which a patent has been filed. Associated with this encoder is the need for a decoder and viewer which can deliver HDR content in real-time directly to HDR displays or tone mapped to existing Low Dynamic Range (LDR) displays, including computer monitors and televisions. A prototype down-loadable version of this decoder-viewer exists for PCs. A solution for televisions is not so straightforward. TV manufacturers need to embed the decoder-viewer into their display devices, so the decision to be HDR enabled would be made by the manufacturer, not the user. This embedded software may be adopted by TV manufacturers quite rapidly if it is well designed and easy to incorporate, as it adds another product distinguishing sales feature to their product. The television market is huge with about 170 million displays are sold annually in a market worth over $30 billion. Within this market, digital LCD to 1080 High Definition specification has become almost standard. The market has now stabilised, with further cost reduction being the major market driver, or they may move onto an even higher-specification standard. We believe that the latter is the more likely, and that HDR will be that standard. There is, however, one restraint on the rapid adoption of HDR television. Dolby tightly control all the IP related to HDR displays after their acquisition of BrightSide in February 2007 (for $29 million). It could thus take a few years while licensing agreements are resolved or other innovations for HDR displays start to appear. The embedded system we are developing in this project will enable existing television designs to be HDR enabled . The embedded decoder-viewer will allow HDR content to be tone mapped in real-time for display on these televisions. While a tone mapped image will never be as rich as a true HDR one, as we, and others have shown, modern tone mappers can give a significantly enhanced viewing experience on an LDR display which are perceptually close to the HDR experience. This proposal thus bridges the gap from the research results from a previous EPSRC grant to develop a robust demonstrator of an embedded HDR decoder-viewer and a commercial exploitation plan. On completion of the project, we will be in a strong position to secure commercial support from venture capital or seed funds.