The nuclear industry has some of the most extreme environments in the world, with radiation levels and other hazards frequently restricting human access to facilities. Even when human entry is possible, the risks can be significant and very low levels of productivity. To date, robotic systems have had limited impact on the nuclear industry, but it is clear that they offer considerable opportunities for improved productivity and significantly reduced human risk. The nuclear industry has a vast array of highly complex and diverse challenges that span the entire industry: decommissioning and waste management, Plant Life Extension (PLEX), Nuclear New Build (NNB), small modular reactors (SMRs) and fusion. Whilst the challenges across the nuclear industry are varied, they share many similarities that relate to the extreme conditions that are present. Vitally these similarities also translate across into other environments, such as space, oil and gas and mining, all of which, for example, have challenges associated with radiation (high energy cosmic rays in space and the presence of naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM) in mining and oil and gas). Major hazards associated with the nuclear industry include radiation; storage media (for example water, air, vacuum); lack of utilities (such as lighting, power or communications); restricted access; unstructured environments. These hazards mean that some challenges are currently intractable in the absence of solutions that will rely on future capabilities in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (RAI). Reliable robotic systems are not just essential for future operations in the nuclear industry, but they also offer the potential to transform the industry globally. In decommissioning, robots will be required to characterise facilities (e.g. map dose rates, generate topographical maps and identify materials), inspect vessels and infrastructure, move, manipulate, cut, sort and segregate waste and assist operations staff. To support the life extension of existing nuclear power plants, robotic systems will be required to inspect and assess the integrity and condition of equipment and facilities and might even be used to implement urgent repairs in hard to reach areas of the plant. Similar systems will be required in NNB, fusion reactors and SMRs. Furthermore, it is essential that past mistakes in the design of nuclear facilities, which makes the deployment of robotic systems highly challenging, do not perpetuate into future builds. Even newly constructed facilities such as CERN, which now has many areas that are inaccessible to humans because of high radioactive dose rates, has been designed for human, rather than robotic intervention. Another major challenge that RAIN will grapple with is the use of digital technologies within the nuclear sector. Virtual and Augmented Reality, AI and machine learning have arrived but the nuclear sector is poorly positioned to understand and use these rapidly emerging technologies. RAIN will deliver the necessary step changes in fundamental robotics science and establish the pathways to impact that will enable the creation of a research and innovation ecosystem with the capability to lead the world in nuclear robotics. While our centre of gravity is around nuclear we have a keen focus on applications and exploitation in a much wider range of challenging environments.

The Circular Economy (CE) is a revolutionary alternative to a traditional linear, make-use-dispose economy. It is based on the central principle of maintaining continuous flows of resources at their highest value for the longest period and then recovering, cascading and regenerating products and materials at the end of each life cycle. Metals are ideal flows for a circular economy. With careful stewardship and good technology, metals mined from the Earth can be reused indefinitely. Technology metals (techmetals) are an essential, distinct, subset of specialist metals. Although they are used in much smaller quantities than industrial metals such as iron and aluminium, each techmetal has its own specific and special properties that give it essential functions in devices ranging from smart phones, batteries, wind turbines and solar cells to electric vehicles. Techmetals are thus essential enablers of a future circular, low carbon economy and demand for many is increasing rapidly. E.g., to meet the UK's 2050 ambition for offshore wind turbines will require 10 years' worth of global neodymium production. To replace all UK-based vehicles with electric vehicles would require 200% of cobalt and 75% of lithium currently produced globally each year. The UK is 100% reliant on imports of techmetals including from countries that represent geopolitical risks. Some techmetals are therefore called Critical Raw Materials (high economic importance and high risk of supply disruption). Only four of the 27 raw materials considered critical by the EU have an end-of-life recycling input rate higher than 10%. Our UKRI TechMet CE Centre brings together for the first time world-leading researchers to maximise opportunities around the provision of techmetals from primary and secondary sources, and lead materials stewardship, creating a National Techmetals Circular Economy Roadmap to accelerate us towards a circular economy. This will help the UK meet its Industrial Strategy Clean Growth agenda and its ambitious UK 2050 climate change targets with secure and environmentally-acceptable supplies of techmetals. There are many challenges to a future techmetal circular economy. With growing demand, new mining is needed and we must keep the environmental footprint of this primary production as low as possible. Materials stewardship of techmetals is difficult because their fate is often difficult to track. Most arrive in the UK 'hidden' in complex products from which they are difficult to recover. Collection is inefficient, consumers may not feel incentivised to recycle, and policy and legislative initiatives such as Extended Producer Responsibility focus on large volume metals rather than small quantity techmetals. There is a lack of end-to-end visibility and connection between different parts of techmetal value chains. The TechMet consortium brings together the Universities of Exeter, Birmingham, Leicester, Manchester and the British Geological Survey who are already working on how to improve the raw materials cycle, manufacture goods to be re-used and recycled, recycle complex goods such as batteries and use and re-use equipment for as long as possible before it needs recycling. One of our first tasks is to track the current flows of techmetals through the UK economy, which although fundamental, is poorly known. The Centre will conduct new interdisciplinary research on interventions to improve each stage in the cycle and join up the value chain - raw materials can be newly mined and recycled, and manufacturing technology can be linked directly to re-use and recycling. The environmental footprint of our techmetals will be evaluated. Business, regulatory and social experts will recommend how the UK can best put all these stages together to make a new techmetals circular economy and produce a strategy for its implementation.

We will work with researchers and mining companies in the Philippines to discover new ways to manage metal mine wastes, to clean up pollution, and to make soils to support plant growth and allow the land to be reused. More and more metals are needed for the low carbon technologies to minimise the effects of climate change. The Philippines is the fifth most mineral-rich country in the world and will benefit from this increased demand, but sustainable mining technologies are needed to prevent negative impacts on the environment and surrounding communities. Traditional mining and mineral processing technologies consume large quantities of fresh water, produce CO2, can contaminate water, and compete with local communities for resources. They also produce large amounts of mine waste - uneconomic rock, and wet slurries of finely-ground minerals left over from mineral processing, known as tailings. These are deposited behind constructed dams as tailings storage facilities. It is estimated that in the Philippines about 33 million tonnes of tailings are produced annually - about six times the weight of the Great Pyramid. Tailings storage facilities at both operational and closed mines pose environmental hazards; failure could cause contaminated materials to be released affecting people and ecosystems. The risk of failure is increased in the Philippines, due to the rugged topography, high rainfall, and frequent earthquakes. Our research project will investigate new sustainable technologies to minimise the environmental hazards of mine tailings. We will apply our research to both nickel and copper-gold mines which make up 99% of the value of metallic minerals mined in the Philippines. Our project brings together three science areas that are vital for innovation: (1) we will show how tailings storage facilities can be monitored in real time to allow reactive management to environmental changes; to achieve this we will use emerging technology in geophysical tomography and remote sensing to monitor and understand tailings behaviour in 4D (2) we will investigate novel environmentally-benign solvents as a new method to dissolve metals from modern and abandoned tailings and test their application at mine sites; this will allow more metals to be recovered with economic value and also benefit tailings management by decontaminating hazardous components (3) we will study how plants and microbes colonise mine wastes, how this is affected by the use of solvents, and identify the best ways to promote biological growth. This will not only rehabilitate the land and allow it to be reused for agriculture or wildlife, it also minimises environmental hazards by improving the stability of the tailings and decreasing their toxicity. Whilst these approaches have been applied separately in other settings, this will be the first time that they have been used in combination to address the pressing issue of tailings remediation. By integrating these novel approaches we will find synergies that will deliver a step-change in innovation and enable us to achieve our ambition of sustainable tailings management. The outcomes, impacts and benefits of this research will be to decrease impacts from tailings to local communities and the environment, improved social license to operate for mining companies, reduced long term liabilities and risks from abandoned sites, and potential sources of revenue by recovery of additional metals and land re-use.

The CDT in Media and Arts Technology will train PhD students to become skilled researchers and practitioners at the intersection of science, technology, digital media and the arts. The proposed CDT builds on the outstanding success of Queen Mary's current Media and Arts Technology (MAT) programme, introducing new training elements in Design, Innovation and Materials and expanded industrial and international partnerships. It addresses all 3 of EPSRCS's Digital Economy themes, particularly Digitally Connected Citizens and many ICT themes, especially Next Generation Interaction Technologies, Data to Knowledge and ICT for Manufacturing; Digital Healthcare. MAT is firmly grounded in Britain's Digital Economy (DE), which contributes the biggest share of GDP in any g20 nation and is projected to increase by a third by 2016. The Creative Digital sector in East London, on Queen Mary's doorstep and known as Tech City, is the fastest growing DE cluster in the UK, outstripping Greater London and the UK for jobs growth since 2001. It now accounts for 48,500 jobs in over 3200 companies, ranging from micro-business and SMEs to global players like Ustwo and Last.fm, and is attracting inward investment from international players such as IBM, Facebook, and Google. The Creative Digital sector demands workers with a high degree of technical skill coupled with creative skills, able to work in multi-disciplinary teams: exactly the type of graduate MAT will produce. The MAT CDT has an established network of over 40 external partners including: large companies (BBC, IBM, Orange, Sony and Procter & Gamble) health organisations (Royal Hospital of Neurodisability) and Tech City SMEs (Cinimod, Lean Mean Fighting Machine, Ustwo, Playgen, United Visual Artists, Hide&Seek, Troika), cultural institutions (Barbican, Science Museum and V&A), and governmental bodies (UKTI, TCIO, DSTL and London & Partners). Many partners host students' Advanced Placement Project, provide data sets and technical resources, supervision and mentoring, and exposure to a wide range of markets and audiences. The CDT acts as a focus bringing together otherwise disparate external bodies who discover shared interests and values. Because DE is a key strategic area for QML, the university invests heavily in the area. The existing MAT CDT catalysed the formation of qMedia, a cross-Faculty Research Centre based in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, and continues to be at its core. qMedia includes the world leading Centre for Digital Music, the newly formed Cognitive Science Group, the Multimedia and Vision Group, and members of the Networks, Vision and Antennas Groups. In EECS alone, qMedia has >40 academics, 41 RAs, 102 PhD students and a portfolio of grants with a current value of over £21 million. The CDT led to a major expansion in Digital Media research and teaching at Queen Mary. It inspired the creation of both a MSc in Media and Arts Technology and a BSc(Eng) in Multimedia and Arts Technology. The University invested around £3M in 200m2 of facilities for the MAT CDT, including Media and Arts Technology Studios, CDT hub (work/meeting space), 'maker' workshops, and a multimedia IT suite for audio/video editing. In conclusion, the existing CDT and its proposed renewal brings value nationally, locally and to the university. It is also a major international beacon of excellence that has led to several international partnerships, particularly in USA and China.

For the first time in 50 years the UK has 'sovereignty' over its trade policy. It must now decide, for example, how to configure its free trade agreements, its regulations for imported food and digital trade and its trade and climate policies. Simultaneously, income distribution has become highly sensitive in the UK, policy-making power is devolved over several UK entities and the world trading system is beset by a range of tensions such as digitisation and Chinese growth. How UK policies respond to this, and who is involved in making and scrutinising them, will shape economic outcomes for generations and affect all parts of society and all regions of the UK. The Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy (CITP) will undertake INNOVATIVE, INTERDISCIPLINARY research at the frontier of knowledge, to help understand these challenges and opportunities and contribute to providing the UK with a modern trade policy. As well as being INTERNATIONAL in its approach, the CITP is designed to deliver IMPACT through targeted communications and sustained engagement with a wide range of non-academic stakeholders. Above all, our research responds to the view that trade policy should be INCLUSIVE in OUTCOMES for the people and regions of the UK, and in the FORMULATION OF POLICY by considering the views of all those affected. These five "I's" are core to the work of the CITP. Trade involves exchange and agreement between sovereign states and is thus at the interface of economics and international law; these disciplines form the core of the CITP, together with political science, international relations and business. CITP research is organised into three interrelated themes: 1. People, Firms and Places: focusses on the differential impact of trade (policy) across locations, firms and individuals (as consumers and workers) in the four nations of the UK. In this theme we will address how changes in trade barriers have differential impacts on productivity, the structure of supply chains, local labour markets and regions, and how knowledge of this can make trade policy more efficient and inclusive. 2. Digitisation and Technical Change: addresses the drivers and consequences of digitisation on geographical boundaries transforming what is produced and traded, how, where and by whom. Key here is how this impacts on trade practices and the rules governing them and the interaction between technical change, regulatory autonomy and international cooperation. 3. Negotiating a Turbulent World: considers the way that challenges to the trading system are testing the cooperation and trust that underpins open trade. CITP addresses these issues as well as regulatory coherence in trade agreements and how this may impact on domestic regulation. It will also focus closely on the stresses that trade policymaking is inducing between national and devolved administrations in the UK. Through the themes run genuine interdisciplinarity, the development of innovative methods (including in the economic modelling of trade, especially intra-UK trade), the creation of new data (e.g. on jobs in trade), major stakeholder and public engagement (citizens' juries) to identify what the UK as a whole seeks from trade policy, an Innovation Fund to encourage earlier career researchers to propose new trade research, and a commitment to communication and engagement to achieve impact and ultimately generate change. The CITP builds on the proven research and impact successes of its component Universities - Sussex, Nottingham, Strathclyde, Queens (Belfast), Cardiff, Cambridge, the European University Institute, Berkeley, Tel Aviv and Georgetown (USA). Each partner brings a distinct and complementary element to the CITP, extending its research expertise and its geographical reach and creating new synergies to establish an international centre of excellence for trade policy research.