We will train a cohort of 65 PhD students to tackle the challenge of Data Creativity for the 21st century digital economy. In partnership with over 40 industry and academic partners, our students will establish the technologies and methods to enable producers and consumers to co-create smarter products in smarter ways and so establish trust in the use of personal data. Data is widely recognised by industry as being the 'fuel' that powers the economy. However, the highly personal nature of much data has raised concerns about privacy and ownership that threaten to undermine consumers' trust. Unlocking the economic potential of personal data while tackling societal concerns demands a new approach that balances the ability to innovate new products with building trust and ensuring compliance with a complex regulatory framework. This requires PhD students with a deep appreciation of the capabilities of emerging technology, the ability to innovate new products, but also an understanding of how this can be done in a responsible way. Our approach to this challenge is one of Data Creativity - enabling people to take control of their data and exercise greater agency by becoming creative consumers who actively co-create more trusted products. Driven by the needs of industry, public sector and third sector partners who have so far committed £1.6M of direct and £2.8M of in kind funding, we will explore multiple sectors including Fast Moving Consumer Goods and Food; Creative Industries; Health and Wellbeing; Personal Finance; and Smart Mobility and how it can unlock synergies between these. Our partners also represent interests in enabling technologies and the cross cutting concerns of privacy and security. Each student will work with industry, public, third sector or international partners to ensure that their research is grounded in real user needs, maximising its impact while also enhancing their future employability. External partners will be involved in PhD co-design, supervision, training, providing resources, hosting placements, setting industry-led challenge projects and steering. Addressing the challenges of Data Creativity demands a multi-disciplinary approach that combines expertise in technology development and human-centred methods with domain expertise across key sectors of the economy. Our students will be situated within Horizon, a leading centre for Digital Economy research and a vibrant environment that draws together a national research Hub, CDT and a network of over 100 industry, academic and international partners. We currently provide access to a network of >80 potential supervisors, ranging from leading Professors to talented early career researchers. This extends to academic partners at other Universities who will be involved in co-hosting and supervising our students, including the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University. We run an integrated four-year training programme that features: a bespoke core covering key topics in Future Products, Enabling Technologies, Innovation and Responsibility; optional advanced specialist modules; internship and international exchanges; industry-led challenge projects; training in research methods and professional skills; modules dedicated to the PhD proposal, planning and write up; and many opportunities for cross-cohort collaboration including our annual industry conference, retreat and summer schools. Our Impact Fund supports students in deepening the impact of their research. Horizon has EDI considerations embedded throughout, from consideration of equal opportunities in recruitment to ensuring that we deliver an inclusive environment which supports diversity of needs and backgrounds in the student experience.

The Horizon institute is a multidisciplinary centre of excellence for Digital Economy (DE) research. The core mission of Horizon has been to balance the opportunities arising from the capture, analysis and use of personal data with an awareness and understanding of human and social values. The focus on personal data in a wide range of contexts has required the development of a broad set of multidisciplinary competencies allowing us to build links from foundational algorithms and system to issues of society and policy. We follow a user-centred approach, undertaking research in the wild based on principles of open innovation. Horizon now encompasses over 50 researchers, spanning Computing, Engineering, Law, Psychology, Social Sciences, Business and the Humanities. It has grown a diverse network of over 200 external partners who are involved in ongoing collaborative research and impact with Horizon, ranging from major international corporations to SMEs, from a wide variety of sectors, alongside government and civil society groups. We have also established a CDT in the third wave of funding that will eventually deliver 150 PhDs. Our critical mass of researchers, partners, students and funding has already led to over 800 peer-reviewed publications, composed of: 277 journal articles, 51 books and book chapters, and 424 conference papers, in a total of 15 different disciplines. Over the years Horizon's focus has evolved from an emphasis on the collection and understanding of personal data to consider the user-centred design and development of data-driven products. This proposal builds on our established interdisciplinary competencies to deliver research and impact to ensure that future data-driven products can be both co-created and trusted by consumers. Core to our current vision is the idea that future products will be hybrids of both the digital and the physical. Physical products are increasingly augmented with digital capabilities, from data footprints that capture their provenance to software that enables them to adapt their behaviour. Conversely, digital products are ultimately physically experienced by people in some real-world context and increasingly adapt to both. This real-world context is social; hence the data is social and often implicates groups, not just individuals. We foresee that this blending of physical and digital will drive the merging of traditional goods, services and experiences into new forms of product. We also foresee that - just as today's social media services are co-created by consumers who provide content and data - so will be these new data-driven products. At the same time, we are also witnessing a crisis of trust concerning the commercial use of personal data that threatens to undermine this vision of data-driven products. Hence, it is vitally important to build trust with consumers and operate within an increasingly complex regulatory environment from the earliest stages of innovating future products. Our user-centred approach involves external partners and the public in "research-in-the-wild", grounding our fundamental research in real world challenges. Our delivery programme combines a bottom-up approach in which researchers are given the opportunity (and provided with the skills) to follow new impact opportunities in collaboration with partners as they arise (our Agile programme), with a top-down approach that strategically coordinates how these activities are targeted at wider communities (our Campaigns programme, with successive focus on Consumables, Co-production and Welfare), and reflective processes that allow us to draw out broader conclusions for the widest possible impact (our Cross-Cutting programme). Throughout we aim to continue to develop the capacity in our researchers, the wider DE research community and more broadly within society, to engage in responsible innovation using personal data within the Digital Economy.

The proposal seeks funds to renew and refresh the Centre for Doctoral Training in Formulation Engineering based in Chemical Engineering at Birmingham. The Centre was first funded by EPSRC in 2001, and was renewed in 2008. In 2011, on its 10th anniversary, the Centre received one of the Diamond Jubilee Queen's Anniversary Prizes, for 'new technologies and leadership in formulation engineering in support of UK manufacturing'. The scheme is an Engineeering Doctoral Centre; students are embedded in their sponsoring company and carry out industry-focused research. Formulation Engineering is the study of the manufacture of products that are structured at the micro-scale, and whose properties depend on this structure. In this it differs from conventional chemical engineering. Examples include foods, home and personal care products, catalysts, ceramics and agrichemicals. In all of these material formulation and microstructure control the physical and chemical properties that are essential to its function. The structure determines how molecules are delivered or perceived - for example, in foods delivery is of flavour molecules to the mouth and nose, and of nutritional benefit to the GI tract, whilst in home and personal care delivery is to skin or to clothes to be cleaned, and in catalysis it is delivery of molecules to and from the active site. Different industry sectors are thus underpinned by the same engineering science. We have built partnerships with a series of companies each of whom is world-class in its own field, such as P&G, Kraft/Mondelez, Unilever, Johnson Matthey, Imerys, Pepsico and Rolls Royce, each of which has written letters of support that confirm the value of the programme and that they will continue to support the EngD. Research Engineers work within their sponsoring companies and return to the University for training courses that develop the concepts of formulation engineering as well as teaching personal and management skills; a three day conference is held every year at which staff from the different companies interact and hear presentations on all of the projects. Outputs from the Centre have been published in high-impact journals and conferences, IP agreements are in place with each sponsoring company to ensure both commercial confidentiality and that key aspects of the work are published. Currently there are 50 ongoing projects, and of the Centre's graduates, all are employed and more than 85% have found employment in formulation companies. EPSRC funds are requested to support 8 projects/year for 5 years, together with the salary of the Deputy Director who works to link the University, the sponsors and the researchers and is critical to ensure that the projects run efficiently and the cohorts interact well. Two projects/year will be funded by the University (which will also support a lecturer, total >£1 million over the life of the programme) and through other sources such as the 1851 Exhibition fund, which is currently funding 3 projects. EPSRC funding will leverage at least £3 million of direct industry contributions and £8 million of in-kind support, as noted in the supporting letters. EPSRC funding of £4,155,480 will enable a programme with total costs of more than £17 million to operate, an EPSRC contribution of 24% to the whole programme.

The speed of a wave moving through a material is set by the refractive index; something immutable we might look up in a table and perhaps promptly forget. But imagine having the power to change it at will. What could we do? It would allow a single object to have different functions: a chassis that becomes transparent at the flick of a switch, or a room that can be made instantly private, turning thin walls into sound absorbers. Yet these ideas are just the beginning of the story. If we can rapidly switch the wave speed, then completely new effects emerge. For example, changing the refractive index abruptly causes a wave to "reflect in time" - a paradoxical temporal analogue of the ordinary reflection we see and hear every day (e.g. the echo from a wall), but one that can cause the wave to gain energy. Other new effects arise if we can also change the refractive index differently at each point in space. With this control it becomes possible - for instance - to make a stationary object look like it is moving. Unlike true motion there is no restriction on this speed, and we can even mimic objects moving faster than light! Our research will develop new materials where the refractive index can be changed in time, exploring switchable functionality and the plethora of new wave effects that emerge when the material properties are varied rapidly. This is not always an easy thing to do and to avoid potential obstacles to our research we take a "wave agnostic" view, where we - in parallel - explore the effects of a time varying wave speed for airborne acoustic waves, mechanical vibrations, radio frequency waves, terahertz waves, and in optics. To illustrate the huge advantage of this approach, consider the time scales involved: "rapid" means the change must be imposed more quickly than the wave oscillates. For audible sound this is milliseconds, for visible light femtoseconds. We should use very different techniques in these two cases! In optics, special materials are subject to ultra-fast, high-intensity fields, while in acoustics we use electronically controlled transducers. Through considering different wave regimes we can implement a time varying wave speed by the most promising means, avoiding the limitations of any individual technique. Our program of research is split into four, first developing experiments to demonstrate rapid switching of acoustic, elastic, and electromagnetic wave speeds in time, and the theory required to design them. The second part pushes this work to the next stage, developing materials where the wave speed varies in both space and time, allowing us to e.g. mimic motion. Having developed these experimental and theoretical capabilities, the final two parts of the project explore new wave effects in these materials, specifically wave amplification and unusual materials where the wave can only propagate in one direction. While our research is a fundamental study into wave physics in time-varying materials, we predict multiple applications of this technology. Future communications (6G) is perhaps the simplest. This will need an enormous number of separately powered antennas to precisely direct beams of electromagnetic waves. But if we can rapidly change the reflective properties of a surface next to a single antenna, we can make it alone perform the function of these many different antennas, reducing energy requirements and complexity! Wave-based computing is a second example: like every physical process, the scattering of a wave from a material is equivalent to a computation. Although electromagnetic waves perform this computation very quickly - at the speed of light! - to use it as a "computer" we need to program it. The material properties are fixed, so the wave always scatters in the same way. If we can switch the material properties, we can program it and create a new class of high-speed computational devices based on wave-scattering.

We propose a new imaging platform that combines ultra-fast confocal imaging with the the nano-fluidic functionality delivered by an integrated Fluidic Force microscope (FluidFM-UFCLSM). The proposed capability opens a new phase of exploration of biological systems by enabling characterisation of localised biochemical and physiological processes. The proposed capability provides new avenues for specific applications such as new antimicrobial agents, functional genetics and the development of sustainable crops. The unique design of FluidFM-UFCLSM enables accommodating an array of complex biological samples to perform quantitative and predictive characterisation of biofilms, tissues, whole plants, small animals, insects, mucosal membranes, food systems and tissue scaffold hydrogels. The unique feature of FluidFM-UFCLSM is it will enable study of the smallest units of biological organisation such as proteins as well as larger objects such as cells, tissues and organs. The use of FluidFM-UFCLSM cuts across many disciplines and delivers benefits to a broad range of research topics in the areas of biofilm formation, plant science, tissue engineering, food science and cell physiology. Some examples of FluidFM-UFCLSM applications are: 1) Elucidate anti-microbial resistance and the localised mechanisms underpinning quorum sensing 1) Probe interaction between immune cells with lung epithelium as one of the key pathways of Covid-19 pathogenies 2) Uncover the secrets of plant development and mechanical signalling to develop new resistant crops 3) Probe the effect of nutrition on gut microbiome and associated health outcomes 4) Explore new plant-mimetic materials for designing new food-compatible films for environmentally sustainable food production The broader areas of impact will be achieved by supporting emerging areas research that targets the major problems and challenges of food security, improved nutrition, animal and human health, combatting antimicrobial resistance, microbiome research, industrial biotechnology, waste valorisation, sustainable agricultural and synthetic biology.