The co-existence of data transmission and lighting inside a common light emitting diode (LED) to complement the radio frequency based wireless communication in satisfying the global socio-economic activities is a low-cost/low-energy proposition termed visible light communications (VLC). It radically turns a passive light source into a dynamic service hub that provides opportunities to improve existing services and introduce new ones. For this nascent VLC idea to gain traction and realise its huge potential however, vital optimisation approach to mutually accommodate data and illumination on the same LED becomes a necessity. This includes studying, understanding and quantifying the inter-relationship between lighting requirements and data transmission as against the current approach that completely disregards this. To this end, this research will be investigating the impacts of VLC on the fundamental properties of energy efficiency, light quality and life expectancy of an LED that is primarily designed for lighting/display. The findings from this work will provide the required approach for optimising VLC and safeguard the LED's reliability, durability and emitted light quality

In the near future, light emitting diodes (LEDs) will replace all other sources of light - from the lamps that light homes and offices to the headlights of cars. As well as providing illumination, these LEDs can be used to transmit data, and so offer an opportunity to create a new wireless infrastructure for data transmission. The demand for wireless communications to smartphones, watches, tablets and other devices is growing at a rate of 50% per year, and new technologies are needed to augment the capacity of conventional WiFi. Using LEDs in visible light communications offers a huge potential capacity to support this growth and to provide new services that use localised wireless communications. While LEDs can transmit the information, an optical receiver is needed to collect the transmitted light, convert it to an electrical signal and extract the transmitted data. The maximum amount of light that can be transmitted is limited by the illumination brightness and concerns for the eye safety and comfort of users. The sensitivity of the receiver therefore ultimately determines the range over which optical data can be transmitted and/or the maximum possible data rate. The sensitivity of existing receivers for visible light communications is limited by a combination of the methods used to collect light and the devices used to convert this light to an electrical signal. In this project we aim to create new super receivers that are significantly more sensitive than existing optical receivers; that overcome conventional limits for combining speed, sensitivity and easy alignment; that are thin and flexible enough to be easily integrated onto any device. A dramatic change in performance will be achieved by combining two technologies- fluorescent concentrators and arrays of single-photon avalanche photodiodes- in a receiver for the first time. The first will use fluorescent materials to absorb the transmitted light signal and re-emit it at a different wavelength onto the detector. Using this method we will collect light over large areas using a thin, flexible layer which guides and concentrates the emitted light to its edges. The second technology is a light detector capable of detecting individual photons. We will develop methods to count photons from the transmitter in the presence of ambient light. We will explore how to optimise the fluorescent materials and light collecting layer to efficiently concentrate light onto one or more light detectors, and develop methods to maximise the amount of data transmitted by optimising how the data is represented. These super receivers will be tested in free-space visible light communications links to quantify their performance. Our estimates suggest that this approach could lead to a 100 times improvement in performance over current receivers, enabling faster data transmission, longer transmission ranges and the ability to operate in difficult environments, such as in the presence of bright ambient light.

Future information and communication networks will certainly consist of both classical and quantum devices, some of which are expected to be dishonest, with various degrees of functionality, ranging from simple routers to servers executing quantum algorithms. The realisation of such a complex network of classical and quantum communication must rely on a solid theoretical foundation that, nevertheless, is able to foresee and handle the intricacies of real-life implementations. The study of security, efficiency and verification of quantum communication and computation is inherently related to the fundamental notions of quantum mechanics, including entanglement and non-locality, as well as to central notions in classical complexity theory and cryptography. The central Research objective of our proposal is an end to end investigation of the verification and validation of quantum technologies, from full scale quantum computers and simulators to communication networks with devices of varying size and complexity down to realistic ``quantum gadgets". This goal represents a key challenge in the transition from theory to practice for quantum computing technologies. We will work closely with experimentalists and engineers to ensure that theoretical progress takes Development considerations into account, and will design prototypes for proof-of-principle demonstrations of our methods. The experimental aspects of our proposal are supported by the PI's associate directorial position at the Oxford led hub, joint projects with the York led hub as well as other ongoing collaborations with experimental labs in France and Austria. Meanwhile the required expertise in engineering design would be supported through a new collaboration of the PI as part of the Edinburgh Li-Fi research and development centre. The Deployment axis, complementing our core activity in research-development, will be built upon the unique Edinburgh entrepreneurial culture supported by Informatics Ventures as well as a dedicated senior business advisory board (which sponsored the PI's recent patent on quantum cloud). Advances to the problem of secure delegated computation would have an immediate significant consequence on how computational problems are solved in the real world. One can envision virtually unlimited computational power to end users on the go, using just a simple terminal to access the computing cloud which would turn any smartphone into a quantum-enhanced phone. This will generate new streams of growth for the UK cyber security sector as well as complementary business developments for the National quantum technology investment.

The rapidly developing technique of transfer printing on the micro and nanoscales allows the manufacture of high quality, high performance devices on a wide range of substrates in almost any location. This highly versatile capability features a high-precision mechanical pick-and-place assembly technique that utilises the adhesive properties of soft stamps, and the technology has only recently broken into the field of electronics and photonics. Placing this exciting and highly important development into context, in the 1990s Whitesides (Harvard University Chemistry Dept.), a pioneer in microfabrication and nanotechnology, established the ground-breaking concept of patterning self-assembled monolayers for lithographic, sensing, medical and pharmaceutical applications and termed this micro-contact printing. From this foundation, the technique has evolved into much higher levels of complexity in which micro-transfer printing has recently delivered micro- LED arrays that, for example, feature in flexible displays and provide inorganic analogues of flexible organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) - something that was previously thought to be extremely challenging if not impossible. In this programme, 'Hetero-print', we aim to rapidly push this exciting field further by establishing, for the first time and ahead of the international competition, new routes towards the manufacture of heterogeneous devices, consisting of integrated systems made from pure and/or hybrid inorganic/organic materials. The demand for these hybrid approaches is extremely high, because it opens up the prospect of multifunctional devices that organic materials can deliver in tandem with inorganic semiconductor technology. The ambition of Hetero-print is to deliver micro- and nano-transfer printing as the technology for the versatile and scalable manufacture of heterogeneous materials, structures and devices. In achieving this, we will introduce significant new capabilities for the manufacture of electronic, photonic, and other systems, which complement and are synergistic with those of established semiconductor mass-manufacturing methods including vacuum deposition and solution processing. In this respect, transfer printing is a highly scalable technique and perfectly suited to high volume manufacture, allowing >10,000 micro-sized integrated circuits to be processed in a single run. An issue with many photonic devices is cost, but micro-transfer printing can be economical with the number of print cycles from a single stamp running into the tens of thousands; the technique is also economical in terms of materials waste, providing a methodology to manufacture multiple-array devices in very high yield.

Understanding the behaviour of the Internet with its inherent complexity and scale is essential when designing new Internet systems and applications. Simulation, emulation, and test-bed experiments are important techniques for investigating large-scale complex Internet systems. It is now widely recognised that classical theoretical/simulation scalability studies for Internet research are unreliable without relevant and representative supporting experimental evidence. This is increasingly important with the emergence of 5G, cloud services and IoT, which lead to at least 2 orders increase in connection capacity requirements and 3 orders of additional devices that require Internet connectivity. Great progress has been made in the UK over the years on the development of communications laboratories infrastructure in ICT domains such as optical & wireless, signal processing, networks and distributed systems, where the UK is internationally leading. However, UK telecommunications research remains largely segregated in independent optical, wireless or computer network research labs, so researchers very rarely have the opportunity to experiment across the boundaries between these disciplines. Due to the limitations of performing research in discipline-specific facilities, the current UK ICT research output does not address realistic end-to-end Internet systems INITIATE will create a new, specialist distributed test-bed to facilitate the increasingly large and complex experimentation required for future Internet research. This will be achieved by interconnecting operational, state-of-the-art operational laboratories at the Universities of Bristol, Lancaster (UoLan), Edinburgh (UoEd) and Kings College London (KCL). These laboratories will contribute many key capabilities for Internet research including optical networks, wireless/RF communications, the Internet of Things (IoT), Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) and cloud computing. Therefore INITIATE will offer the combined capability to the UK Internet research and innovation communities as a single distributed test-bed able to support the increasingly complex experimentation required for future Internet research. For example, INITIATE will enable for the first time experimentally driven research addressing the integration of multi-domain and multi-technology 5G and IoT access platforms with high-speed optical transport and investigate full system optimization strategies. Uniquely, INITIATE will also be able to integrate end-users as part of the experimental process and support user driven scenarios such as mobile edge computing, data visualization and autonomous mobility. The applicants have an outstanding worldwide reputation for creating, maintaining and operating research test-beds. They have repeatedly enabled remote access to their laboratories for experimenters and they have worked in multiple initiatives involving interconnection of research test-beds either locally, across the consortium partners or at a regional, national and international scale. Examples are: Bristol Is Open (UoB), TOUCAN (EPSRC involving UoB, UoEd, UoLan), NDFIS (UoB, UCL, SOTON, Cambridge), wireless mesh networks for rural communities (UoLan) and the Ofcom whitespace trial environment (KCL), among others. Internationally, the partners have been involved in numerous Future Internet infrastructure projects such as OFELIA & Fed4FIRE (EU FIRE), FIBRE & FUTEBOL (EU-Brazil), STRAUSS (EU-Japan) and GEANT, where they have delivered test-bed infrastructure, developed experimental control and federation tools and supported user experiments. INITIATE will create an environment for delivering excellence in Internet research, educational and industrial innovation and cross-discipline interaction through experimentally driven national collaboration. The project will also support academia as well as industry and SMEs and will deliver a sustainable engagement model.