Flood-PREPARED will develop an international leading capability for real-time surface water flood risk and impacts analysis for cities. Our vision is to provide the tools and methods that allow cities to become proactive, rather than be reactive, to managing surface water flooding This will be achieved by developing new physical analytical methods that integrate advanced urban flood hazard models with statistical analytics of big data from multiple real-time data-feeds that describe the current state and condition of the city in terms of surface water flood risk and impacts. By coupling physically-based modelling and statistical analytics, decision makers will be provided with improved real-time predictions of surface water flooding to assist in flood mitigation at a range of governance scales; from the individual site through to national emergency and response. This vision will be delivered via five interrelated work packages: Work package 1 will develop the data management platforms required for capturing, managing and making available the wide variety of real-time data that will be utilised, including real-time weather radar, environmental weather station data feeds, sewer telemetry gauging, CCTV data and traffic congestion data. Data comes from Newcastle's £1.5m Urban Observatory that includes hundreds of pervasive environmental sensors that currently record ~1million observations per day. Work package 2 will employ this data within a new hydrodynamic surface water flood model that employs statistical data assimilation and modelling for improved real-time calibration and parameterisation for surface water flooding. The outputs of the hydrodynamic surface water flood model will be used in work package 3 to parameterise real-time impacts analysis. Using real-time data feeds such as CCTV, social media, traffic monitoring, new predictive models of how impacts evolve and cascade within cities will be developed for improved response and mitigation. Work package 4 will develop the integrated computational workflow and scheduling software required for the tools and methods of work package 2 and 3 to be employed in an operational manner. An operational 'live' demonstrator of the system will be implemented in work package 5. Working with key strategic project partners the demonstrator will be rigorously evaluated through a series of case studies at the individual site, city and national scale to evaluate how improved surface flood risk mitigation in real-time can be undertaken.

The Northern Health Futures (NortHFutures) hub aims to create a world-leading healthcare technology (health-tech) development ecosystem. This will address unmet health needs and inequalities by supporting: inclusive digital skills training and sharing; research, innovation and entrepreneurship, enabled by digital design. Based in the North East and North Cumbria (NENC), with national and global reach, NortHFutures will support underserved communities, as it is known that national disparity of investment in NENC negatively impacts population health and wellbeing, and that a 'levelling up' of investment is needed to stimulate socio-economic and cultural growth for all, to encourage living and ageing well. NortHFutures builds upon the joined-up NENC approach to people-powered digital health innovation, as our regional Integrated Care Board (ICB) uniquely involves local authorities, communities, and citizens. Academic team members have a research track record that is stakeholder-involved and civic- and community-engaged. They are world-leading on understanding (i) health inequalities from medical, social, and design perspectives, and (ii) the opportunities for enrichment and enablement related to ageing well, connecting rural and urban populations, and pioneering applications of data science. In the pilot phase, we draw on this specialist expertise to address evidenced unmet health needs in NENC, (which have national and global importance): children and young people's health and nutrition; mental health and wellbeing; development of digital surgical pathways (for monitoring patient journeys beyond the hospital); living well with multiple long-term conditions. We combine the strengths and resources of 6 universities (Newcastle, Cumbria, Durham, Northumbria, Sunderland and Teesside), bringing regional investment in NIHR services, facilities and Applied Research Collaborations, plus National Innovation Centres for Ageing (NICA), Data (NICD) and Rural Enterprise (NICRE), National Horizons Centre (NHC), EPSRC Digital Economy programmes in data and digital citizens, and Health Data Research UK, the UK's national institute for health data science. NortHFutures supports new planned Centres, including Northumbria's Centre for Health & Social Equity and Cumbria's new campus and medical school. These University offers combine with an extensive partner network, including: ICB-NENC, 7 NHS Trusts, NHS Business Services Authority, Department of Health and Social Care, Health Education England; VCSE organisations delivering community-based services; industry partners - from SMEs to global tech giants; civic bodies such as Local and Combined Authorities; existing health research networks (e.g. AHSN-NENC, Newcastle Health Innovation Partnership); and innovation accelerators (e.g. Innovation SuperNetwork). Through an integrated, regional approach uniting this consortium for the first time, NortHFutures ambitiously aims to establish global leadership in Digital Health. To deliver this we will develop a supportive community infrastructure. We will co-design a digital brokerage service to connect and amplify partners' work, to offer and consume expertise, services and facilities (supporting acceleration of health-tech companies at differing tech-readiness levels). We will pioneer a Live Digital Health Databank, to explore, and train for, advanced healthcare data analytics, combining live data flows with care records (e.g. Great North Care Record). This will support personalised health diagnostics and interventions, giving our hub a unique value proposition to companies wishing to explore advanced data technologies. We will invest in Extended Reality pilots, to open up possibilities for clinical practice and service delivery. Our approaches will embed Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), and Patient and Public Engagement (PPIE) throughout, to deliver health-tech that supports care beyond the hospital and is co-designed with end-users.

In order to address the aim of identifying the need for new software engineering techniques that are geared for use in globally distributed software development efforts the network partners will first establish how currently software development is performed on projects that are dispersed between the UK and India. Our Indian collaborators at IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay are uniquely positioned to establish contacts within the top Indian IT companies, most notably Infosys, Wipro and TCS. In the first of two fact-finding mission, we will visit the development labs of these organizations and assess their current software development processes, methods, tools and infrastructures. We expect to find that they use traditional textbook techniques that were devised for an age when software was developed by a centralized team within one organization. On a second fact-finding mission, we will visit industrial and academic research centres at Microsoft India, Google India, HP Labs India and various IITs to obtain their views on adjustments that are needed for software development on a global scale. We will then consolidate these views at an open workshop to be held in India.We will organize a similar workshop in the UK where on a first day we invite UK industry to present their experience with global software development efforts and the following two days are used to determine the need for novel investigation into software engineering techniques that are to be used in the context of global software development. The workshop will focus on various software engineering disciplines, most notably, software engineering economics, software development processes, software architecture, middleware infrastructures and software quality assurance.We will use the results of this workshop to formulate a follow-on proposal for an interdisciplinary research centre in the area of global software development. We hope that we can convince the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology in India, that we want to visit with our Indian Partners on one of our fact finding trips of the importance of this area of research for the global digital economy and enlist their willingness to receive a proposal for funding from our Indian Partners at IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay.