Long-term energy consumption reduction can be achieved more readily through sensible cooperation between end users and technological advancements. Monitoring energy use within buildings requires clear and reliable methods with outputs that are meaningful and helpful. End users play a pivotal role in this as energy use revolves around their presence and comfort. Hence, with changing lifestyles and working patterns, energy consumption reduction can be aided by new approaches in digital innovation. Energy metering schemes are now popular and provide data on energy use and cost, but communicatively are a one-way street. Hence, this information is only beneficial if users continually make changes to utility use within their home. However, behavioural changes inducing energy reduction fade relatively quickly and users feel less empowered. Last year, residential sector emissions rose by 13.4% despite metering being a popular investment. Based on this information, interactive systems can help address this problem. Consumers appreciate that innovative technology can increase their quality of life. However, a lasting bond between the two can only occur when users have confidence in the technology around them. This is more likely to happen when users and technologists work collectively in the system design process. DANCER takes insights from users' behaviour analysis, metering schemes, wireless sensors and embedded software to produce a system that both interactively and automatically manages users' energy consumption within indoor environments. It will tailor users' energy consumption to their habits aiming to reduce energy consumption. To achieve this DANCER adopts a multidisciplinary approach where knowledge from psychology, social and economic research, wireless communication and computer science unite to provide a viable solution that is beneficial to all the stakeholders on the energy supply-consumer chain. To the above aim, users' energy consumption habits will be collected and studied to inform both the design of the energy control system as well as the user interface in the DANCER system. Baseline information will be collected from samples of end users. This will be combined with insights from the relevant emerging literature. Moreover, an iterative participatory design approach will be used to explore how users feel about the digital technologies to be employed in this project and how they imagine these technologies can assist them in reducing their energy consumption and carbon footprint. Increasingly mature versions of the DANCER system will then be pre-tested through a series of pilot studies with volunteers so that users' queries about the sensors, networks and control policies being used to monitor and interactively manage their energy use can be further examined. Finally, the mature DANCER system will be tested in a control trial experiment where samples of households will be either provided with DANCER or allocated to appropriate control conditions. The trial will enable the analysis of the effect of the system on users' energy related behaviours, energy and carbon emissions. The DANCER system will act as follows. Wireless sensor networks will employ novel sensing and communication mechanisms which will monitor users' movements and the energy use of a range of appliances. These data, together with the information either collected directly from end users via their smart phone application (e.g. indications to reduce energy use by 20%) or inferred indirectly from user habits, will be fed into a decision making agent that will decide when to switch on/off certain appliances and for how long. The above information collected by the agent, on a per-dwelling basis, will be sent to a centralised remote database. As a result, a global view of the energy consumption and user habits can be derived. In return, this information can be used to guide stakeholders to more effective and efficient way of supplying and consuming energy.

Smart environments are designed to react intelligently to the needs of those who visit, live and work in them. For example, the lights can come on when it gets dark in a living room or a video exhibit can play in the correct language when a museum visitor approaches it. However, we lack intuitive ways for users without technical backgrounds to understand and reconfigure the behaviours of such environments, and there is considerable public mistrust of automated environments. Whilst there are tools that let users view and change the rules defining smart environment behaviours without having programming knowledge, they have not seen wide uptake beyond technology enthusiasts. One drawback of existing tools is that they pull attention away from the environment in question, requiring users to translate from real world objects to abstract screen-based representations of them. New programming tools that allow users to harness their understandings of and references to objects in the real world could greatly increase trust and uptake of smart environments. This research will investigate how users understand and describe smart environment behaviours whilst in situ, and use the findings to develop more intuitive programming tools. For example, a tool could let someone simply say that they want a lamp to come on when it gets dark, and point at it to identify it. Speech interfaces are now widely used in intelligent personal assistants, but the functionality is largely limited to issuing immediate commands or setting simple reminders. In reality, there are many challenges with using speech interfaces for programming tasks, and idealised interactions such as the lamp example are not at all simple, in reality. In many cases, research used to design programming interfaces for everyday users is carried out in research labs rather than in the real home or workplace settings, and the people invited to take part in design and evaluation studies are often university students or staff, or people with an existing interest or background in technology. These interfaces often fall down once taken away from the small set of toy usage scenarios in which they have been designed and tested and given to everyday users. This research investigates the challenges with using speech for programming, and evaluates ways to mitigate these challenges, including conversational prompts, use of gesture and proximity data to avoid ambiguity, and providing default behaviours that can be customised. In this project, we focus primarily on smart home scenarios, and we will carry out our studies in real domestic settings. Speech interfaces are increasingly being used in these scenarios, but there is no support for querying, debugging and alternating the behaviours through speech. We will recruit participants with no programming background, including older and disabled users, who are often highlighted as people who could benefit from smart home technology, but rarely included in studies of this sort. We will carry out interviews in people's homes to understand how they naturally describe rules for smart environments, taking into account speech, gesture and location. We will look for any errors or unclear elements in the rules they describe, and investigate how far prompts from researchers can help them to be able to express the rules clearly. We will also explore how far participants can customise default behaviours presented to them. This data will be used to allow us to create a conversational interface that harnesses the approaches that worked with human prompts, and test it in real world settings. Some elements of the system will be controlled by a human researcher, but the system will simulate the experience of interacting with an intelligent conversational interface. This will allow us to identify fruitful areas to pursue in developing fully functional conversational programming tools, which may also be useful in museums, education, agriculture and robotics.

Renewable and low carbon energy sources need to be more competitive if the world is to meet the carbon emissions targets agreed in COP21. CAMREG brings together cutting edge materials researchers who will work across discipline boundaries to increase renewable energy technology durability, reliability, utility, performance and energy yield. The aim of the Centre is to combine activity, know-how and facilities from a wide range of existing fundamental and applied materials science capacity to address the known and emerging challenges in renewable energy generation, including on- and off-shore wind, wave, tidal, conventional and next-generation solar photovoltaics and energy storage. CAMREG will support and hasten the establishment or expansion of viable and sustainable renewable energy industries in the UK. The proposed centre offers a wide breadth and considerable depth of materials research capability and capacity in many areas of renewable energy and is aimed at reducing the overall levelised cost of energy to the consumer. The centre addresses 4 of the suggested areas in the Call in the following 3 themes: multifunctional materials for energy applications; materials for energy conversion & storage and smart materials for energy applications. Research areas include: efficient materials for PV and energy storage; materials for increased power density in electrical generators; improved design and testing of composite blades for wind and tidal turbines; smart materials and optical coatings that detect early damage in wind blades; smart coatings to minimise erosion and corrosion on blades and offshore support towers; lighter-weight design of structural steels; large-scale structural testing of components; better materials fatigue and failure management; lower-maintenance materials with improved resistance to wear and corrosion; superconducting materials to transfer power over long distances with less losses; high temperature ceramics and molten salt for energy storage; electrically responsive artificial muscles that can morph the shapes of wind turbine blades to ensure better energy yields, materials for increased conversion efficiency and better mooring for wave and tidal devices. CAMREG is a partnership of 3 research-intensive universities, Edinburgh, Cranfield and Strathclyde, which would gather and network the interests, capacity and networks of many of the RCUK investments in energy research and training, and accruing over 200 industry connections: through 3 SuperGen Hubs, Marine UKCMER, Wind and Power Networks; 4 EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training - Wind Energy Systems, Wind & Marine Energy Systems, Offshore Renewable Energy Marine Structures and Integrative Sensing and Measurement; the EPSRC Industrial Doctorate Centre in Offshore Renewable Energy and the DECC SLIC (Offshore Wind Structural Lifecycle) Joint Industry Project - the largest industry-funded offshore renewables related materials and structures research project worldwide, involving Certification Authorities (DNV-GL and LR) and 10 of Europe's largest energy utility companies. The Centre will also respond to the needs and experience of device developers, project planners, legislators and consenting bodies, and academic partners will continue to work closely with key UK policy stakeholders. CAMREG underpins the efforts at existing recognised centres of renewable energy and materials science research, and encourages networking with new research groups working in complementary areas and linking centres into a coordinated national network. Expected national impacts include: environmental benefits, through increasing the potential to displace fossil fuels; economic benefit through the expansion of employment and human capacity transfer from the existing offshore energy industries; increased diversity, security and resilience of electricity supply through reduction in dependence upon imported fuel and as indigenous coal oil and gas production declines.

A thriving, low carbon hydrogen sector is essential for the UK's plans to build back better with a cleaner, greener energy system. Hydrogen has the potential to reduce emissions in some of the highest-emitting and most difficult to decarbonise areas of the economy, which must be transformed rapidly to meet Net Zero targets. To achieve this, large amounts of low carbon hydrogen and alternative liquid fuels will be needed. These must be stored and transported to their point of use. There remain significant research challenges across the whole value chain and researchers, industry and policy makers must work collaboratively and across disciplines to drive forward large-scale implementation of hydrogen and alternative liquid fuels as energy vectors and feedstocks. The flagship UK-HyRES hub will identify, prioritise and deliver solutions to research challenges that must be overcome for widespread adoption of hydrogen and alternative liquid fuels. It will be a focus for the UK research community, both those who are already involved in hydrogen research and those who must be involved in future. The UK-HyRES hub will provide a network and collaboration platform for fundamental research, requiring the combined efforts of scientists, engineers, social scientists and others. The UK-HyRES team will coordinate a national, interdisciplinary programme of research to ensure a pipeline of projects that can deliver commercialisation of hydrogen and alternative liquid fuel technologies that are safe, acceptable, and environmentally, economically and socially sustainable, de-coupling fossil fuels from our energy system and delivering greener energy. We intend that, within its five-year funding window and beyond, UK-HyRES will be recognised internationally as a global centre of excellence and impact in hydrogen and alternative liquid fuel research.

Recent satellite measurements of the Earth's polar ice sheets highlight that changes in ice extent and thickness are occurring at rates far higher than expected. The challenge for researchers is to place these observations into a longer-term context and produce computer models ('ice sheet forecasts') that reliably predict the fate of ice sheets over this century and beyond. Although remote from habitation, the polar ice sheets influence global sea level. Retreat by increased melting and iceberg calving produces higher sea levels and concerns exist that sea level may rise by metres displacing many millions of people, and their livelihoods, from their coastal homes. At this point in time, it is not possible to study the full life cycle of the present Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets as they are still evolving and undergoing large-scale changes. Instead, we will use an ice sheet that has now fully retreated; the ice sheet that covered most of Britain, Ireland and the North Sea during the last ice age. The last British-Irish ice sheet covered up to 1,000,000 km2 at its maximum size, around 25,000 yrs ago, and was relatively small by global standards. However, its character, setting and behaviour have striking parallels with both the modern West Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets. Large parts of the British-Irish Ice Sheet were marine-influenced just like in west Antarctica today; and numerous fast-flowing ice streams carried much of its mass, just like in the Greenland Ice Sheet today. All three are or were highly dynamic, in climatically sensitive regions, with marine sectors, ocean-terminating margins and land-based glaciers. All these common factors make the British-Irish Ice Sheet a powerful analogue for understanding ice sheet dynamics on a range of timescales, operating now and in the future. Recent work by members of this consortium has revealed the pattern of ice sheet retreat that once covered the British Isles, as recorded by end moraines and other glacial landforms. Other work by members of this consortium has used sophisticated computer models to simulate the ice sheet's response to climate change at the end of the last Ice Age. However, these models can only be as good as the geological data on which they are based, and the pattern is poorly constrained in time. We need to know more about the style, rate and timing of ice sheet decay in response to past climate change. Such knowledge allows us to further refine computer modelling so that better predictions can be made. The main focus of the project therefore, is to collect sediments and rocks deposited by the last ice sheet that covered the British Isles, and use these, along with organic remains, to date (e.g. by radiocarbon analyses) the retreat of the ice sheet margins. The project will use over 200 carefully chosen sites, dating some 800 samples in order to achieve this. Offshore, samples will be extracted using coring devices lowered from a research ship to the seabed, and onshore by manual sampling and by use of small drilling rigs. Once the samples are dated and added to the pattern information provided by the landforms, maps of the shrinking ice sheet will be produced. These will provide crucial information on the timing and rates of change across the whole ice sheet. The British-Irish Ice Sheet will become the best constrained anywhere in the world and be the benchmark against which ice sheet models are improved and tested in the future. Knowledge on the character and age of the seafloor sediments surrounding the British Isles is also useful for many industrial, archaeological and heritage applications. Accordingly, the project is closely linked to partners interested for example in locating offshore windfarms, electricity cables between Britain and Ireland, and heritage bodies aiming to preserve offshore archaeological remains.