Citizen Science - the participation of amateurs, volunteers and enthusiasts in scientific projects - is not new, given activities such as the Christmas Bird Watch or the British Trust for Ornithology Survey, in which volunteers observe birds and report to a national repository. Such projects date back to the early 20th century, and many of the temperature records used in climate modelling today have been collected by amateur enthusiasts operating their own weather stations. Over the past decade, Web 2.0 technologies have led to the proliferation of Citizen Science activities, from SETI@Home, where people volunteer their unused computer processing power, to Galaxy Zoo, where amateur astronomers suggest interpretations of images from the Hubble telescope, to the Pepys Estate in Deptford, London, where residents carried out community noise monitoring for six weeks to challenge the activities of a local scrapyard operator. However, the current range of Citizen Science projects is limited in several respects. First, in most instances the participants are trusted only as passive participants (by donating CPU cycles), or as active participants, but limited to basic observation and data collection. They do not participate in problem definition or in the scientific analysis itself. Second, there is an implicit assumption that participants will have a relatively advanced level of education. Third, and largely because of the educational requirements, Citizen Science occurs mostly in affluent places, and therefore most of the places that are critical for encouraging biodiversity conservation, and where population growth is most rapid, are effectively excluded. This proposal challenges this current mode of Citizen Science by suggesting the establishment of an interdisciplinary research group that will focus on 'Extreme' Citizen Science (ExCiteS). ExCiteS is extreme in three ways: first, it aims to develop the theories and methodologies to allow any community to start a Citizen Science project that will deal with the issues that concern them - from biodiversity to food production; second, it will provide a set of tools that can be used by any user, regardless of their level of literacy, to collect, analyse and act on information by using established scientific methods; finally, it aims to use the methodologies of Citizen Science around the globe, by developing a technology, through collaborative activities, that can involve communities from housing estates in London to hunter-gatherers and forest villagers in the Congo Basin. The underlying technology is aimed to be universal and to provide the foundations for many other projects and activities. The technology that will be developed will rely on spatial and geographical representations of information. The reason for focusing on this mode of representation is that, as a form of human communication, geographical representations predate text, and are likely to be accessible by many people with limited reading and technology literacy.ExCiteS has the transformative potential to deal with some of the major sustainability challenges involved in using science and Information and Communication Technologies in a hot (due to climate change), flat (due to globalisation) and crowded (due to population increase) world, by creating tools that will help communities understand their environment as it changes, and manage it by using scientific modelling and management methods. The proposal focuses not only on the development of ExCiteS as a practice, but, significantly, on developing a fundamental understanding of Citizen Science by studying the motivation of participants and their incentives, identifying patterns of data collection, and dealing with the uncertainty and validity of data collected in this way.

In response to the growing demands for delivery of content-rich and delay-sensitive services, network architectures for 5th generation and beyond wireless communication systems are becoming more and more dense. This illustrated through the ever increasing deployment of small cell networks as well as machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. This trend, whilst improving network capacity, will still necessitate reuse of available resources such as frequency spectrum within smaller areas by larger number of nodes/cells, which in turn would adversely affect the quality of service. On the other hand, by allowing simultaneous transmission and reception in the same frequency band, In-band Full-Duplex Communication (IFDC) technology potentially enhances the spectral efficiency of a single point-to-point (P2P) channel by 100% over the conventional half-duplex communication. IFDC also enables the nodes, e.g. in P2P scenarios, to receive channel feedback or sense other channels whilst transmitting data, which shortens the latency compared to conventional half duplex communication with time-division-duplexing. Moreover, using full duplex relay nodes in multi-hop scenarios can potentially reduce the end-to-end latency by enabling simultaneous receiving and relaying. Practical implementation of this technology requires rigorous interference cancellation methods at each node to suppress the strong self-interference imposed on the receiver by the transmitter of the same node. The major bulk of research on IFDC has focused on self interference cancellation (SIC), and the respective state-of-the-art technology can achieve a high level of SIC at full duplex terminals; hence the IFDC technology has become closer to commercial deployment by industry. Deploying IFDC in realistic dense settings entails new range of technical challenges, and opportunities alike. IFDC can yield substantially greater network throughputs and delay reductions over half duplex networking by deploying the technology in denser networks. However, attaining such gains demands for efficient scalable resource allocation and multi-node interference control methods. This great potential of 'full-duplex dense networks' in 'scalable service provisioning' has not been addressed to date by the research community in sufficient depth. At physical-layer, new resource allocation challenges arise in IFDC networks; for instance, in the design of concurrent channel sensing and data transmission, and in adapting transmit power of the nodes to their variable self-interference. Also, using IFDC in dense scenarios will affect design of the protocols in the higher layers; for instance IFDC would entail greater chance of packet collisions and multi-node interference, which demands for new medium access control (MAC) protocols suited to the emerging dense full duplex networks. Furthermore, IFDC will enable full duplex relaying in multi-hop communication, hence requires new Forwarding-layer/Network-layer protocols to deal with the new full-duplex forwarding paradigms. For conventional half duplex scenarios it is known that network throughput and quality of services can be improved through cross-layer methods, particularly with co-design of physical and MAC layers or MAC and Network/Forwarding layers. In fact for optimal scalability of heterogeneous services in full duplex dense networks, cross-layer approaches are inevitable. This project aims to propose systematic design of resource allocation and interference suppression techniques and algorithms at physical, MAC and Forwarding layers in order to enable substantial throughput gain and delay reduction by deploying full-duplex communication in dense wireless networks. These new methods will pave the way for deploying scalable service provisioning in the emerging dense wireless networks.

Wireless communications has become a pervasive technology that we use throughout our lives. Across society, there is a move away from using the internet on desktop computers and towards smartphones, tablets and laptops. Consequently, the amount of wireless data transmission to support our online activities is rapidly increasing. There is also significant growth in automatic data sharing and collection from many types of sensors, meters and embedded computers, sometimes referred to as machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. This continuing growth in mobile data is a significant problem for network operators. In order to meet this enormous traffic growth challenge, operators are considering a number of potential solutions with three leading concepts: 1. increasing the availability of radio spectrum; 2. deploying heterogeneous and small cell networks; and 3. separating control and traffic data for enhanced network management. This project will address the expected capacity crunch by focusing on the RF bottleneck in future heterogeneous wireless networks through researching and developing miniature, integrated, reconfigurable and tuneable, multiband radios to enable 'spectrum agile' radio access and concurrent multiband operation. Research will address the radio system agility across the microwave spectrum bands from 450 to 6000 MHz. The project will embrace the co-design of antennas, amplifiers, filters and digitisers to achieve spectrum and energy efficient frequency agile radio systems. The project consists of five major research areas: 1. Tuneable Antennas and Filters - Research will focus on reconfigurable and tuneable antennas with integrated filters to achieve frequency selectivity and concurrent multiband operation. 2. Transmit Amplifiers - Research on transmit amplifiers for base stations and handsets will focus on methods to achieve re-tuneable, linear, wideband, power efficient and concurrent multiband operation. 3. Receiver Interference Mitigation - Simple and efficient solutions to reduce the effects of unwanted signal suppression caused by RF blockers in the multiband RF receiver chain will be sought. 4. Multiband A/D Conversion & PAPR Reduction - Research will focus on developing concurrent multiband ADC techniques at the receiver and the design of signal sets with significantly reduced peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR). 5. Testbed Demonstration: Themes 1-4 will lead to the evaluation and demonstration of solutions using a hardware-in-the-loop RF testbed. By researching a frequency agile, concurrent multiband radio technology FARAD will significantly contribute to the growth of future radio access networks and the use of new spectrum bands in an efficient way. The techniques and algorithms developed in this project will enable far reaching capabilities in wireless networks for the next 20 to 30 years helping to solve the anticipated capacity crunch while establishing a new paradigm in radio transceiver design.

We are living through a revolution, as electronic communications become ever more ubiquitous in our daily lives. The use of mobile and smart phone technology is becoming increasingly universal, with applications beyond voice communications including access to social and business data, entertainment through live and more immersive video streaming and distributed processing and storage of information through high performance data centres and the cloud. All of this needs to be achieved with high levels of reliability, flexibility and at low cost, and solutions need to integrate developments in theoretical algorithms, optimization of software and ongoing advances in hardware performance. These trends will continue to shape our future. By 2020 it is predicted that the number of network-connected devices will reach 1000 times the world's population: there will be 7 trillion connected devices for 7 billion people. This will result in 1.3 zettabytes of global internet traffic by 2016 (with over 80% of this being due to video), requiring a 27% increase in energy consumption by telecommunications networks. The UK's excellence in communications has been a focal point for inward investment for many years - already this sector has a value of £82Bn a year to the UK economy (~5.7% GDP). However this strength is threatened by an age imbalance in the workforce and a shortage of highly skilled researchers. Our CDT will bridge this skills gap, by training the next generation of researchers, who can ensure that the UK remains at the heart of the worldwide communications industry, providing a much needed growth dividend for our economy. It will be guided by the commercial imperatives from our industry partners, and motivated by application drivers in future cities, transport, e-health, homeland security and entertainment. The expansion of the UK internet business is fuelled by innovative product development in optical transport mechanisms, wireless enabled technologies and efficient data representations. It is thus essential that communications practitioners of the future have an overall system perspective, bridging the gaps between hardware and software, wireless and wired communications, and application drivers and network constraints. While communications technology is the enabler, it is humans that are the producers, consumers and beneficiaries in terms of its broader applications. Our programme will thus focus on the challenges within and the interactions between the key domains of People, Power and Performance. Over three cohorts, the new CDT will build on Bristol's core expertise in Efficient Systems and Enabling Technologies to engineer novel solutions, offering enhanced performance, lower cost and reduced environmental impact. We will train our students in the mathematical fundamentals which underpin modern communication systems and deliver both human and technological solutions for the communication systems landscape of the future. In summary, Future Communications 2 will produce a new type of PhD graduate: one who is intellectually leading, creative, mathematically rigorous and who understands the commercial implications of his or her work - people who are the future technical leaders in the sector.