The proposal anticipates a new era of fabrication driven by Synthetic Biology and our ability to manipulate living organisms to make new materials and structures. We are also going beyond the usual application domains of Synthetic Biology by applying it to Civil Engineering, expanding design methods and opening up a new area of Engineering Design. To achieve this we will develop a living material which can respond to physical forces in its environment through the synthesis of strengthening materials. This concept is partly biomimetic inspired by for example the way in which our bones strengthen, becoming more dense under repeated load. However, we are also proposing to buid this system using living bacteria cells which have no such functional requirement in nature. Imagine a hydrogel (jelly) containing billions of engineered bacteria. A weight is placed on top of the jelly and, as it is loaded the bacteria in the material sense the mechanical changes in their environment and begin to induce mineral crystals to form. As they make this material the jelly stiffens and strengthens to resist the load. By the end of this project we will be able to demonstrate this principle creating an entirely novel living material. We are working with project partners from across industry and academia to develop this proof of concept and to investigate the broad applications of such a technology to, for example, create self constructing building foundations and make large scale structures where it is very difficult to build using traditional buildings and materials.

Many decisions in today's world are made through a complex, dynamic process of interaction and communication between people and teams with different interests and priorities - so called "distributed decision-making" (DDM). For example, many businesses work across multiple geographically dispersed offices and timezones, with teams specialising in quite diverse areas. Each team may have its own goals and reward models, which do not necessarily coincide, and may be spread across multiple organisational units (e.g. different businesses or governments). Communication may happen via several different modalities with very different timescales and properties (e.g. email, instant messenger, and face-to-face meetings). Unfortunately, although many organisations have started to document these processes and even make records available (particularly governmental organisations e.g. https://data.gov.uk/), we have no way to automatically analyse these records. If we did, we could produce tools to automatically summarise decisions, trace who made them, and why and how they were made (and why other decisions weren't made). From a societal standpoint this would help make these processes more accountable and transparent. We'd also be able to identify collaborative failures, biases and other problems, and thus help improve decision-making in future. This project will develop these urgently required methods, using a combination of natural language processing and social network analysis. We will collate, annotate and publicly release the first multimodal dataset of real-world distributed decision-making. We will devise techniques to take natural language and semi-structured data to recognise the dialogue and interaction structures in decision making, and analyse those structures to produce summaries and evaluate the efficacy of the decision making process. We will then use the outputs to inform strategic interventions that can streamline and improve decision making. Our methods will be suitably generic to span several domains. However, the project will focus on one particular global organisation as its main use case: the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This is an international forum responsible for producing Internet protocol standards - formal documents which specify the languages by which software and hardware "speak" across the Internet. To produce these documents, extensive international collaboration is performed - this spans several modalities including email discussions, collaborative document editing, face-to-face meetings and teleconferencing. Importantly, all of these modalities are documented via transparency reports ranging from public email archives to minutes from meetings. This project has partnered with the IETF to help model and streamline their decision making process. We will borrow from their experience, and employ our methods to extract decision making bottlenecks. We will devise tooling which will provide advice and proposed interventions to relevant parties within the IETF. Amongst many other things, we directly benefit the IETF, and the global Internet standards community, by helping them to uncover biases and help make important decision processes accountable.

The dominant driver of anthropogenic global warming is the increasing amount of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is increasing because it is being emitted by the burning of fossil fuel, deforestation and cement making, with only ~45% staying in the atmosphere. The rest is stored in other reservoirs at or near Earth's surface including the ocean, trees, soils, permafrost and methane ice, as well as sediments and rock. Carbon flows naturally between the atmosphere and these reservoirs by processes like photosynthesis, decay, weathering, burial and ocean circulation. Collectively, the exchange of carbon between these reservoirs is termed the carbon cycle. One of the biggest uncertainties about future climate change is how the carbon cycle will respond to (or 'feed back' on) our warming planet. It is possible, for example, that if global warming exceeds a threshold, permafrost and methane ice stored at the seafloor will melt rapidly, adding further greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and accelerating the warming. It is very difficult to predict whether 'tipping point' behaviour like this will occur in the global carbon cycle. C-FORCE will measure how the global carbon cycle responded from start to finish during a past period of global warming that was driven by emissions of carbon-based greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) is the largest natural climate change event of the last 65 million years, and the closest natural comparator to the modern rates of global warming and carbon greenhouse gas emissions. During the PETM, initial global warming of 4-5 degrees Celsius over a few thousand years was partially driven by carbon emissions from an unusually massive episode of volcanism, and the climate then gradually recovered to its pre-existing state over more than 100 thousand years. C-FORCE will use a novel model of the global carbon cycle to compare the carbon supplied by volcanism with the total PETM carbon budget; the difference between these two budgets can be attributed to carbon cycle feedbacks. We will make new high-resolution estimates of the rate at which volcanism supplied carbon to the atmosphere throughout the PETM by measuring the processes that generated the magma. We will calculate the total budget of carbon emissions to the atmosphere that caused the climate change by generating new high-resolution records of ocean acidification. Our carbon cycle modelling will allow the scientists who make these two sets of measurements to interface effectively to solve the net global carbon cycle feedback problem for the first time. Furthermore, because Earth's carbon reservoirs differ in isotopic composition, we can fingerprint which reservoirs most likely acted as carbon sources or sinks over the course of the PETM. Thus C-FORCE will determine how the global carbon cycle evolved throughout the PETM, and show whether or not tipping point behaviour occurred. Understanding how Earth's carbon reservoirs respond to global warming is crucial for predicting atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and climate change long into the future. Ultimately, an improved understanding of the carbon cycle affects future carbon budgets to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celcius and is therefore necessary for shaping mitigation targets and government policy. Beyond delivering a research product, C-FORCE challenges current understanding of the carbon cycle and we see our role as an empowering force in this space. The public discourse on climate change is a mixture of disaffection and anxiety, so C-FORCE will take a different direction to traditional public engagement, by partnering with community organisers and local government to train, mentor and co-develop our public engagement with young people.

The Wallacea region, lying between the Borneo to the west and Papau New Guinea to the east, is one of the world's biodiversity hotspots, hosting incredibly high levels of biodiversity, much of which is unique to the region. This exceptional level of biodiversity and endemism reflects evolutionary diversification and radiation over millions of years in one of the world's most geologically complex and active regions. The region's exceptional biodiversity, however, is threatened by climate change, direct exploitation and habitat destruction and fragmentation from land use change. Continued habitat loss and fragmentation is expected to precipitate population declines, increase extinction rates, and could also lead to 'reverse speciation' where disturbance pushes recently diverged species together, leading to increased hybridisation, genetic homogenisation, and species' collapse. Already, approximately 1,300 Indonesian species have been listed as at risk of extinction, but the vast majority of the region's biodiversity has not been assessed and we lack basic information on the distribution and diversification of many groups, let alone understanding of what processes drove their diversification, how they will respond to future environmental change, and how to minimize species' extinctions and losses of genetic diversity while balancing future sustainable development needs. In response to the need for conservation and management strategies to minimize the loss of Wallacea's unique biodiversity under future environmental change and future development scenarios, we will develop ForeWall, a genetically explicit individual-based model of the origin and future of the region's biodiversity. ForeWall will integrate state-of-the-art eco-evolutionary modelling with new and existing ecological and evolutionary data for terrestrial and aquatic taxa including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, freshwater fish, snails, damselflies and soil microbes, to deliver fresh understanding of the processes responsible for the generation, diversification, and persistence of Wallacea's endemic biodiversity. After testing and calibrating ForeWall against empirical data, we will forecast biodiversity dynamics across a suite of taxa under multiple environmental change and economic development scenarios. We will develop a set of alternative plausible biodiversity management/mitigation options to assess the effectiveness of these for preserving ecological and evolutionary patterns and processes across the region, allowing for policy-makers to minimise biodiversity losses during sustainable development. Our project will thus not only provide novel understanding of how geological and evolutionary processes have interacted to generate this biodiversity hotspot, but also provide policy- and decision-makers with tools and evidence to help preserve it.

VISION: To create, run and exploit the world's leading research programme in mobile autonomy addressing fundamental technical issues which impede large scale commercial and societal adoption of mobile robotics. AMBITION: We need to build better robots - we need them to be cheap, work synergistically with people in large, complex and time-changing environments and do so for long periods of time. Moreover, it is essential that they are safe and trusted. We are compelled as researchers to produce the foundational technologies that will see robots work in economically and socially important domains. These motivations drive the science in this proposal. STRATEGY: Robotics is fast advancing to a point where autonomous systems can add real value to the public domain. The potential reach of mobile robotics in particular is vast, covering sectors as diverse as transport, logistics, space, defence, agriculture and infrastructure management. In order to realise this potential we need our robots to be cheap, work synergistically with people in large, complex and time-changing environments and do so robustly for long periods of time. Our aim, therefore, is to create a lasting, catalysing impact on UKPLC by growing a sustainable centre of excellence in mobile autonomy. A central tenet to this research is that the capability gap between the state of the art and what is needed is addressed by designing algorithms that leverage experiences gained through real and continued world use. Our machines will operate in support of humans and seamlessly integrate into complex cyber-physical systems with a variety of physical and computational elements. We must, therefore, be able to guarantee, and even certify, that the software that controls the robots is safe and trustworthy by design. We will engage in this via a range of flagship technology demonstrators in different domains (transport, logistics, space, etc.), which will mesh the research together, giving at once context, grounding, validation and impact.