This proposal seeks funding to create a Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Connected Electronic and Photonic Systems (CEPS). Photonics has moved from a niche industry to being embedded in the majority of deployed systems, ranging from sensing, biophotonics and advanced manufacturing, through communications from the chip-to-chip to transcontinental scale, to display technologies, bringing higher resolution, lower power operation and enabling new ways of human-machine interaction. These advances have set the scene for a major change in commercialisation activity where electronics photonics and wireless converge in a wide range of information, sensing, communications, manufacturing and personal healthcare systems. Currently manufactured systems are realised by combining separately developed photonics, electronic and wireless components. This approach is labour intensive and requires many electrical interconnects as well as optical alignment on the micron scale. Devices are optimised separately and then brought together to meet systems specifications. Such an approach, although it has delivered remarkable results, not least the communications systems upon which the internet depends, limits the benefits that could come from systems-led design and the development of technologies for seamless integration of electronic photonics and wireless systems. To realise such connected systems requires researchers who have not only deep understanding of their specialist area, but also an excellent understanding across the fields of electronic photonics and wireless hardware and software. This proposal seeks to meet this important need, building upon the uniqueness and extent of the UCL and Cambridge research, where research activities are already focussing on higher levels of electronic, photonic and wireless integration; the convergence of wireless and optical communication systems; combined quantum and classical communication systems; the application of THz and optical low-latency connections in data centres; techniques for the low-cost roll-out of optical fibre to replace the copper network; the substitution of many conventional lighting products with photonic light sources and extensive application of photonics in medical diagnostics and personalised medicine. Many of these activities will increasingly rely on more advanced systems integration, and so the proposed CDT includes experts in electronic circuits, wireless systems and software. By drawing these complementary activities together, and building upon initial work towards this goal carried out within our previously funded CDT in Integrated Photonic and Electronic Systems, it is proposed to develop an advanced training programme to equip the next generation of very high calibre doctoral students with the required technical expertise, responsible innovation (RI), commercial and business skills to enable the £90 billion annual turnover UK electronics and photonics industry to create the closely integrated systems of the future. The CEPS CDT will provide a wide range of methods for learning for research students, well beyond that conventionally available, so that they can gain the required skills. In addition to conventional lectures and seminars, for example, there will be bespoke experimental coursework activities, reading clubs, roadmapping activities, responsible innovation (RI) studies, secondments to companies and other research laboratories and business planning courses. Connecting electronic and photonic systems is likely to expand the range of applications into which these technologies are deployed in other key sectors of the economy, such as industrial manufacturing, consumer electronics, data processing, defence, energy, engineering, security and medicine. As a result, a key feature of the CDT will be a developed awareness in its student cohorts of the breadth of opportunity available and the confidence that they can make strong impact thereon.

Synthetic Biology is the underpinning discipline for advances in the UK bioeconomy, a sector currently worth ~£200Bn GVA globally. It is a technology base that is revolutionising methods of working in the biotechnology sector and has been the subject of important Government Roadmaps and supported by significant UKRI investments through the Synthetic Biology for Growth programme. This is now leading to a vibrant translational landscape with many start-ups taking advantage of the rapidly evolving technology landscape and traditional industries seeking to embed new working practices. We have sought evidence from key industry leaders within the emerging technology space and received a clear and consistent response that there is a significant deficit of suitably trained PhDs that can bridge the gap between biological understanding and data science. Our vision is a CDT with an integrative training programme that covers experimentation, coding, data science and entrepreneurship applied to the design, realisation and optimisation of novel biological systems for diverse applications: BioDesign Engineers. It directly addresses the priority area 'Engineering for the Bioeconomy' and has the potential to underpin growth across many sectors of the bioeconomy including pharmaceutical, healthcare, chemical, energy, and food. This CDT will bring together three world-leading academic institutions, Imperial College London (Imperial), University of Manchester (UoM) and University College London (UCL) with a wide portfolio of industrial partners to create an integrated approach to training the next generation of visionary BioDesign Engineers. Our CDT will focus on providing an optimal training environment together with a rigorous interdisciplinary program of cohort-based training and research, so that students are equipped to address complex questions at the cutting edge of the field. It will provide the highly-skilled workforce required by this emerging industry and establish a network of future UK Bioindustry leaders. The joint location of the CDT in London and Manchester will provide a strong dynamic link between the SE England biotech cluster and the Northern Powerhouse. Our vision, which brings together a BioDesign perspective with Engineering expertise, can only be delivered by an outstanding and proven grouping of internationally renowned researchers. We have a supervisor pool of 66 world class researchers that span the associated disciplines and have a demonstrated commitment to interdisciplinary research and training. Furthermore, students will work directly with the London and Manchester DNA Foundries, embedding the next generation bioscience technologies and automation in their training and working practices. Cohort training will be delivered through a common first year MRes at Imperial College London, with students following a 3-month taught programme and a 9-month research project at one of the 3 participating institutions. Cohort and industry stakeholder engagement will be ensured through bespoke training and CDT activities that will take place every 6 months during the entire 4-year span of the programme and include multi-year group hackathons, training in responsible research and innovation, PhD research symposia, industry research days, and entrepreneurial skills training. Through this ambitious cohort-based training, we will deliver PhD-level BioDesign Engineers that can bridge the gap between rigorous engineering, efficient model-based design, in-depth cellular and biomolecular knowledge, high throughput automation and data science for the realisation and exploitation of engineered biological systems. This unique cohort-based training platform will create the next generation of visionaries and leaders needed to accelerate growth of the UK bioeconomy.

There is an urgent, unmet need for reliable, intelligent systems that can monitor patient condition in the home, and which can help patients manage long-term conditions. Delays in recognition of the changes in physiological state worsen outcomes and increase healthcare costs. The ASPIRE programme uses chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) as an exemplar, which affects over 210 million people globally. This condition costs the National Health Service over £800 million each year, over half of which is spent treating patients in hospital, rather than caring for them in their homes. Intelligent monitoring systems are required to address the needs of patients with long-term conditions in their homes. However, no wearable systems have penetrated into clinical practice at scale, due to: (i) poor tolerance of existing wearable devices for monitoring; (ii) a lack of robustness in the estimates of the vital signs that wearable sensors produce; (iii) very limited battery life that requires batteries to be re-charged at a rate that prevents their use on a large scale; and (iv) limited subsequent use of the data for helping the patient understand and manage their condition. We propose to develop an "intelligent" home-based system, with smart algorithms embedded within lightweight healthcare sensors, to overcome these limitations. Our novel work will incorporate next-generation machine learning algorithms to combine information from healthcare sensors with information from GP and hospital visits. This will enable the system to learn "normal" health condition for individual patients, with knowledge of other conditions from which they may be suffering, and which can then make recommendations to the patient concerning self-management of their condition. This work will include close working with world-leading clinicians to ensure that the recommendations provided by the system are correct for the individual patient.

Given the unprecedented demand for mobile capacity beyond that available from the RF spectrum, it is natural to consider the infrared and visible light spectrum for future terrestrial wireless systems. Wireless systems using these parts of the electromagnetic spectrum could be classified as nmWave wireless communications system in relation to mmWave radio systems and both are being standardised in current 5G systems. TOWS, therefore, will provide a technically logical pathway to ensure that wireless systems are future-proof and that they can deliver the capacities that future data intensive services such as high definition (HD) video streaming, augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality will demand. Light based wireless communication systems will not be in competition with RF communications, but instead these systems follow a trend that has been witnessed in cellular communications over the last 30 years. Light based wireless communications simply adds new capacity - the available spectrum is 2600 times the RF spectrum. 6G and beyond promise increased wireless capacity to accommodate this growth in traffic in an increasingly congested spectrum, however action is required now to ensure UK leadership of the fast moving 6G field. Optical wireless (OW) opens new spectral bands with a bandwidth exceeding 540 THz using simple sources and detectors and can be simpler than cellular and WiFi with a significantly larger spectrum. It is the best choice of spectrum beyond millimetre waves, where unlike the THz spectrum (the other possible choice), OW avoids complex sources and detectors and has good indoor channel conditions. Optical signals, when used indoors, are confined to the environment in which they originate, which offers added security at the physical layer and the ability to re-use wavelengths in adjacent rooms, thus radically increasing capacity. Our vision is to develop and experimentally demonstrate multiuser Terabit/s optical wireless systems that offer capacities at least two orders of magnitude higher than the current planned 5G optical and radio wireless systems, with a roadmap to wireless systems that can offer up to four orders of magnitude higher capacity. There are four features of the proposed system which make possible such unprecedented capacities to enable this disruptive advance. Firstly, unlike visible light communications (VLC), we will exploit the infrared spectrum, this providing a solution to the light dimming problem associated with VLC, eliminating uplink VLC glare and thus supporting bidirectional communications. Secondly, to make possible much greater transmission capacities and multi-user, multi-cell operation, we will introduce a new type of LED-like steerable laser diode array, which does not suffer from the speckle impairments of conventional laser diodes while ensuring ultrahigh speed performance. Thirdly, with the added capacity, we will develop native OW multi-user systems to share the resources, these being adaptively directional to allow full coverage with reduced user and inter-cell interference and finally incorporate RF systems to allow seamless transition and facilitate overall network control, in essence to introduce software defined radio to optical wireless. This means that OW multi-user systems can readily be designed to allow very high aggregate capacities as beams can be controlled in a compact manner. We will develop advanced inter-cell coding and handover for our optical multi-user systems, this also allowing seamless handover with radio systems when required such as for resilience. We believe that this work, though challenging, is feasible as it will leverage existing skills and research within the consortium, which includes excellence in OW link design, advanced coding and modulation, optimised algorithms for front-haul and back-haul networking, expertise in surface emitting laser design and single photon avalanche detectors for ultra-sensitive detection.

Public opinion on complex scientific topics can have dramatic effects on industrial sectors (e.g. GM crops, fracking, global warming). In order to realise the industrial and societal benefits of Autonomous Systems, they must be trustworthy by design and default, judged both through objective processes of systematic assurance and certification, and via the more subjective lens of users, industry, and the public. To address this and deliver it across the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) programme, the UK Research Hub for TAS (TAS-UK) assembles a team that is world renowned for research in understanding the socially embedded nature of technologies. TASK-UK will establish a collaborative platform for the UK to deliver world-leading best practices for the design, regulation and operation of 'socially beneficial' autonomous systems which are both trustworthy in principle, and trusted in practice by individuals, society and government. TAS-UK will work to bring together those within a broader landscape of TAS research, including the TAS nodes, to deliver the fundamental scientific principles that underpin TAS; it will provide a focal point for market and society-led research into TAS; and provide a visible and open door to engage a broad range of end-users, international collaborators and investors. TAS-UK will do this by delivering three key programmes to deliver the overall TAS programme, including the Research Programme, the Advocacy & Engagement Programme, and the Skills Programme. The core of the Research Programme is to amplify and shape TAS research and innovation in the UK, building on existing programmes and linking with the seven TAS nodes to deliver a coherent programme to ensure coverage of the fundamental research issues. The Advocacy & Engagement Programme will create a set of mechanisms for engagement and co-creation with the public, public sector actors, government, the third sector, and industry to help define best practices, assurance processes, and formulate policy. It will engage in cross-sector industry and partner connection and brokering across nodes. The Skills Programme will create a structured pipeline for future leaders in TAS research and innovation with new training programmes and openly available resources for broader upskilling and reskilling in TAS industry.