Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

This proposal is for a grant to researchers in astrophysics at the University of Bristol. Much recent cosmology has been based on investigations of galaxy clusters. The first project will make reliable measurements of cluster masses and other parameters. This involves statistically rigorous investigations of cluster samples drawn from X-ray sky surveys - the hot gas in the clusters shines in X-rays. The clusters span a wide mass range and are seen over half the age of the Universe, so we take into account their evolution over time. Massive galaxies within current-day clusters have very old stellar populations. They finished forming their stars in the first few billion years after the big bang, unlike most galaxies outside clusters. Understanding details of their formation is crucial to understanding their nature. Our second project will identify and study galaxies in proto-clusters (progenitors of today's clusters) as they form their stars, building a picture of the inter-related evolution of clusters and their galaxies. A third project explores the physics of matter falling into black holes. It will determine how X-ray observations can reliably measure the black hole mass, spin rate, and geometry of the environment close to the black hole. Galaxies and their central black holes grow together, so reliable measurements of black hole mass and spin rates can test models of galaxy evolution. Observing the close environment of super-massive black holes is both intrinsically interesting, and is a key goal for the next generation of X-ray satellites such as the ESA's Athena observatory. A fourth project looks at how tiny regions in the centres of individual galaxies, near central black holes, affect gas on the large scale - by stopping cooling of the atmospheres of galaxy clusters, and by making the atmospheres more magnetic over time. A feedback process, in which cluster gas is reheated by the ejection of very hot, fast, gas from the regions near black holes is involved, at least in one heating mode. Having identified the sources responsible for this heating, we now want to understand how the process works. The fifth project involves maintenance and improvement of the TOPCAT software, a catalogue and data manipulation tool used world-wide and of great importance to many astronomers in their interactions with data sets of increasing size and complexity and which is now finding creative uses well beyond astronomy. The project will also contribute to the critical international Virtual Observatory framework that enables remote data access for TOPCAT and other software and interoperability between them. A sixth project will use in-hand HST and guaranteed JWST observations of a transiting giant exoplanet to characterise the chemical makeup, dynamics, and evolution through measurements of its atmospheric transmission and emission in unprecedented detail. We will use these observations to develop new data analysis pipelines for JWST to produce the most complete dataset for a single exoplanet atmosphere. Two further projects explore exoplanets from a theoretical perspective. Project seven investigates the nature of the gas/dust disks around young stars in which planets form. As young pieces of planets collide and assemble into larger planets they can destroy one another. Some disks around young stars may show evidence of this destructive side of planet formation. We will carry out computer calculations to interpret extreme examples of dusty disks to see if they evolve through giant impacts between young planets.The final project is a theoretical study into polar vortices in the atmospheres of planets around other stars and how they may affect their habitability. When combined with JWST observations, it will result in a detailed model of the atmosphere of TRAPPIST-1e, an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting in its star's habitable zone.

An age of globalization makes it more than ever urgent to ask: what processes of transmission mediate literary and cultural exchanges between China and the West? China's complex interactions with its others are key to understanding its relation to modernity. Humanities scholarship on the translations and transformations involved in such interactions have diverged. Some have posed, from a Western point of view, the alterity of China. Others have focused on the negotiations of difference and equivalence involved in any cultural encounter, and on forms of transmission enabled or transformed by these negotiations. \n\nThe Network will focus on the oppositions and relations through which Chinese modernity has been shaped and imagined. The historical origins of 'the modern' have been variously located in western formations: Reformation, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, or the emergence of an Avant-Garde. Defining the modern, however, is not only a question of periodization, but also of geography. As Lydia Liu observes, 'The problem of translation has become increasingly central to critical reflections on modernity... The fact that one can speak about a varied range of modernities suggests an extraordinary faith in the translatability of modernity and its universal ethos.' \n\nAt the heart of this problem are specific acts, sites, and theories of translation; relationships between universal and particular; and the limits or possibilities of cultural commensurability. Whether at the level of language and culture, or concepts, technologies and techniques, translation defines the field of Chinese modernism and modernity. The processes of transmission include literary and visual translation, as well as contextualization and reception, but also raise issues of translatability in the broadest sense. The study of modernity in relation to cultural transmission has proved increasingly attractive not only to scholars of literary and cultural studies in China and the West, but to translation theorists, critical theorists, and theorists of the visual. \n\nThe activities of the Network will be organized into three strands: \n\nTranslating Modernism: Scholars working on the relationship between Western and Chinese modernisms increasingly seek to go beyond the question of what in Chinese modernism corresponds to or derives from European modernism.\n\nTranslating Theory: The take-up of western post-modern cultural and critical theory in China since the 1990s has been dramatic, yet poses questions about its translation into new contexts.\n\nTranslating Culture: Contemporary Chinese artistic and cultural production has never been more accessible to global audiences, but issues of commensurability arise in both elite and popular culture.\n\nThe rationale of the Network is to increase UK research capacity into modern and contemporary Chinese culture. While work on cultural transmission to and from China has been vibrant in the US academy over the past fifteen years, the field remains comparatively weak in the UK. The aim of the three-way Network between CRASSH, the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Tsinghua University, and Yale's Council on East Asian Studies is to create and sustain relationships with academics in both China and the US, where the field is further advanced. The Network will play a key role in developing research capacity through a programme of workshops, seminars, visiting fellowships, and two major international conferences in Cambridge and Beijing. \n\nIts participants have expertise in literary theory, cultural studies, translation theory, modernism, and contemporary Chinese culture, including visual culture. The activities of the Network will be of interest to academics and practitioners in the fields of comparative literature, cultural studies, critical and cultural theory, translation studies, and Chinese studies.

The proposed research covers a very wide range of topics in processing of digital geometry, images and video sequences, being funded to a total of 24,000,000 Chinese Yuan (about 1,600,000) by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.The topics to be investigated will includeShape, image and video understanding, using neural networks and other ideas based on the structure of the human visual system, with an emphasis on high-performance systemsThe development of mathematical tools which are necessary for processing geometry and image and video understanding, allowing computers to learn about things they see, and to then classify new examples shown to them later. The key issue here is the huge amount of information present in the large numbers of pixels present in images, and even more so in video.How analogies to the human visual system can be used to help develop systems which can understand images and video. This includes such ideas as how to separate the big picture from the small details, using understanding at different geometric scales, and how to make methods which can automatically cluster related information. Further key issues are how geometric and visual information should be acquired and represented so that it can be processed effectively and efficiently to answer queries about content.How key features of geometric shapes, images and video can be represented, stored, compressed and encrypted. Particularly important are issues of digital rights management, including embedding invisible watermarks into visual data to enable proof of ownership, and the ability to provide content-aware security for geometric models, images and video.Other goals include new approaches to capturing and editing geometric models, images and video, including for example video blending.