Flooding causes substantial social and economic losses and poses a significant threat to the current and future sustainability of communities and livelihoods. Currently, one in six UK residential and commercial properties (c. £5.2 million properties) are estimated to be at risk of flooding from river, coastal and/or surface water (Environment Agency, 2020). These risks are forecast to increase because of climate and socio-demographic changes and improving societal resilience to flood risk is critical to reducing impacts. It is well recognised that social, economic and environmentally sustainable flood risk management requires the adoption of a portfolio of measures including large-scale hard structural barriers as well as non-structural behavioural and local options to best manage the impacts of flooding. Aligned to this is the greater need to encourage individual property owners to take action to reduce risk which is the focus of this research. Through working in collaboration with Flood Re and the internationally renowned Flood Hazard Research Centre at Middlesex University, this studentship provides an exciting opportunity to address the critical issue of managing flood risk and its societal impacts. Flood Re is a not-for profit organisation financed and run by UK insurers whose aim is to maintain the availability and affordability of flood insurance. Part of this involves encouraging property owners to understand and reduce their flood risk recognising that insurance has the potential to encourage action through the uptake of Property-level Flood Resilience (PFR). PFR includes measures which homeowners can adopt at the property level to reduce risk and the impacts of flooding, but critically they can also empower them to make individual decisions. Flood Re, in collaboration with, government and other organisations has undertaken a range of actions to promote the uptake of resilience measures. This included in 2022 Flood Re launching BuildBackBetter which facilitates resilient reinstatement of properties following flooding. The scheme offers eligible policyholders up to an additional £10,000 to implement PFR as part of their insurance claim. However, whilst the potential for PFR to positively reduce flood risk nationally is high, uptake remains low. Many barriers to implementing risk reduction measures at the household level exist but include homeowners' lack of knowledge of the risk and which measures to implement and how any measures will reduce the impacts of flooding. Coupled with this is the absence of a mechanism which allows any PFR measures implemented to be identified by insurers and/or mortgage lenders and therefore allow the risk reduction (and any associated premium reduction) to be recognised. Indeed, in The Property Flood Resilience Action Plan delivered to government Bonfield (2016; 5) recognised the gap and highlighted the need to understand how "householders and insurers can be supported and incentivised...to manage the risk of flooding and reduce the cost of [insurance] claims through resilience." To fill this gap Flood Re (in collaboration with FHRC) are in the process of developing a Flood Performance Certificate, akin to an Energy Performance Certificate, which provides household level detail about the risk of flooding and any PFR actions a homeowner has, or can take, to reduce potential impacts. The connection between this proposed certificate on household-level behaviour is the key focus of the research project. Importantly, this research will inform the development and implementation of the certificate and contribute to Flood Re's efforts to improving societal flood resilience. This research complements other work already being undertaken in parallel research strands which are examining related policy and implementation questions (e.g. Who produces and owns a Flood Performance Certificate? How do Flood Performance Certificate link to current building standards? How frequently should the

The Government's End-to-End Rape Review found police investigations were poor and low numbers of rape cases ended in a conviction. Operation Soteria Bluestone (OSB) was launched in response. OSB aimed to transform the way police investigate rape and serious sexual offences (RASSO) by creating a National Operating Model which is currently being implemented in all 43 forces in England and Wales. The applicants were involved in OSB, and created comprehensive and novel datasets, including: over 80 interviews with police officers and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) staff in five UK police forces/CPS areas; a quantitative dataset of all sex offence reports over a three-year period in three UK police forces and associated criminal histories of all named suspects (totalling information about 163,000 offences and 28,000 named suspects), and 177 case reviews from five forces including detailed information and analysis of rape investigations in different contexts. In addition, a large network was developed for consultation, feedback, and dissemination with different stakeholders, including the 43 forces in England and Wales, other law enforcement agencies such as the CPS and the National Crime Agency, and third-party support services such as Rape Crisis England and Wales and Victim Support. The applicants have a unique opportunity to further explore these datasets to develop our understanding of sexual violence and law enforcement response to this type of offending, using the existing networks to promote and disseminate the work to practitioners, policy makers, and academics alike. Sexual violence is often viewed through the lens of the victim and their responsibility for 'protecting themselves' against sexual violence, a premise founded on the notion of what constitutes 'real' rape and the myths and stereotyping surrounding sexual violence which serve to render many victims unworthy of their status as a victim, or access to justice. Using a social justice framework to examine the social and structural factors that influence our understanding of sexual violence, our aim is to challenge the single-story narrative of sexual violence that places responsibility with the victim and explore how institutional policies, practices, beliefs, and stereotypes influence the victim experience, hamper the investigative process, and affect the perception of suspect recidivism risk. Using a mixed methods approach, this work will focus on three key strands of sexual violence: Victims and victim experiences, including how different victim experiences intersect with investigations; 2. Investigative and institutional challenges associated with RASSO cases, and; 3. Assessing and predicting suspect risk. By emphasising the multiple factors that influence RASSO investigations, this project will draw attention to unhelpful societal misunderstandings and practices that surround RASSO, and provide recommendations to support evidence-based policing, and law enforcement's understanding of suspects, victims, and RASSO investigations. In addition, it will contribute to the academic evidence base, supporting our understanding of sex offending, the parties involved, and the criminal justice process, all of which will, in turn, further support the principle of evidence-based policing. Through knowledge exchange and utilising our existing networks, all results will be made available to practitioners, including police, charities, and the criminal justice system more widely in a way that makes the links to practice clear, as well as being presented to academics at conferences. This work, therefore, can continue the legacy of OSB by translating research into real changes in policing, helping to deliver better justice for victims of sexual violence.

The overall objective of the INCASI2 project is to establish a global cross-sectoral network of experts working on a joint research programme aimed at building a new analytical model of socioeconomic inequalities in order to: a) To produce effective advances in the understanding of the complex phenomena of socioeconomic inequalities creating a fresh analytical framework at a comparative and interdisciplinary level in a context of societies in "permanent crisis". b) To construct an innovative multidimensional measure (DYSIC: Dynamics of Socioeconomic Inequality in Comparison) adapted to the new realities shaped in this context that is global, more comprehensive and realistic in the comparative analysis of inequalities between Europe and Latin America & the Caribbean, and to monitor the situation and evolution of inequalities. We consider 3 DYSIC variants: 1) including 3 main dimensions as a base (education, occupation and income), 2) adding gender dimension and 3) adding dynamic trends. c) To create the INCASI Living Lab to elaborate diagnoses, contribute to informed decision-making and the design of public policies. It is designed to enhance the innovation process by embracing three core principles: fostering a collaborative open innovation strategy, utilizing a methodology centred on promoting the quality of life for individuals, and creating an environment for interdisciplinary thinking and action that enables the participation of diverse socioeconomic, political, and scientific agents. These objectives will be achieved with a collaborative work of an interdisciplinary, intersectoral and international network for Comparative Analysis of Socioeconomic Inequalities (INCASI) with 29 organizations: 14 EU universities from 6 countries, 11 universities and 4 non-academic organizations from 7 LAC countries and the USA, in order to face one of the most relevant problem in our societies: socioeconomic inequalities, and promote European values of social justice.

We aim to produce "2000 + 1: A Maths Space Odyssey" which will be a publicly accessible digital game that challenges players to perform astronautical manoeuvres through completing relevant Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3 (ages 8-14) mathematics questions. Players will see the real-life application of the mathematics they are doing played out in simulated orbital mechanics using engaging 2-dimensional graphics. For example, at Key Stage 2 the challenges could include adding the appropriate delta-v to get a rocket to the correct speed. At Key Stage 3 this could be substituting given quantities into the appropriate physical law (using Kepler or Tsiolkovsky equations) to get the correct speed for the desired orbital period. Challenges will be based around STFC-supported missions such as orbital adjustments for future LaunchUK missions. We will use this as an opportunity to showcase STFC science and technology (contributing to the STFC public engagement strategy point 1). A "sandbox mode" will be available for curious players who wish to explore orbital mechanics in a less structured way. The completed game will be an accessible digital teaching aid for use in the classroom and will be publicly available for informal science learning. The development of this game and parallel public engagement resources will be done through a co-design and co-creation process with the target audience. Consequently, there will be design events where we engage the public with building the game, and delivery events where we engage the public with the final product. We see the engagement at these distinct events to be of equal importance in the project. In the first year of the project, we will work with local (Barnet) schools, youth groups and Middlesex University undergraduate students (both STEM and the arts) to co-design the game (narrative elements, challenges, digital resources, coding, and STFC integration) in outreach events. If the application is successful, the project will become a compulsory part of the undergraduate maths students' curriculum and assessment as an authentic and novel mathematics outreach project. In the second year of the project the finished product, now a high quality, co-created public engagement activity, will then be delivered to target audiences as part of further outreach events delivered with our undergraduate students (contributing to the STFC public engagement strategy point 5). The proposal builds on the mathematical pedagogy research by the applicants on the use of technology, their expertise on co-design for community outreach (for example with SmashFestUK), and the team's proven track-record in delivering public engagement at all scales. The project will have a primary focus on working with communities under-served and under-represented in STEM through targeted primary and secondary schools, and the wider Barnet community through the Middlesex University STEM festival. Other communities will be engaged through our involvement in further public engagement events such as the Big Bang at schools. Middlesex University undergraduates, who are typically from disadvantaged backgrounds (60.3% of Middlesex students are from the lower two IMD quintiles), are a critical part of this project as they are uniquely placed to engage with children from similar backgrounds with low science capital. The co-design process will involve collaboration between children and undergraduate scientists with the aim of widening the children's perceptions of who scientists are and the accessibility of science for them.

The overall goal of the CHIST-ERA JuDDGES project is to harness state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing & Human-In-The-Loop technologies to provide legal researchers with new Open software and tools that enable extensive, flexible and on-going meta-annotation capability (both automated and employing domain experts in-the-loop). This capability is applied to legal records/judgments from criminal courts across jurisdictions with varied legal constitutions (Poland, England & Wales). We hence seek to dissolve barriers of resources, language, data & format inhomogeneity that currently impede research on judicial decision making. In making this new software, tools and data resource open on a public repository, researchers will be empowered to develop and empirically test theories of judicial decision making and address judicial policy and practice-relevant questions. Researchers from public (legal) institutions can also reuse the data for their purposes. The application of Open Science hence also rectifies a substantial gap in the empirical legal research domain that has been slow in adopting Open Science principles. The resulting annotated pan-national dataset & toolset will constitute the largest and most comprehensive open and reusable legal research repository in Europe for research on judicial decision-making. This project will develop an AI-based solution (tool) that can be used by researchers to examine unstructured textual data in court records and/or written legal judgments. In doing so, we will create the largest extant pan-national legal dataset in Europe. The tool would allow researchers to access and progressively enrich large, detailed, and representative legal samples of data (starting from what we have made available) in a resource- and cost-effective as well as time-efficient way. The datasets so produced and adjusted to Open Science principles and openly available from a trusted data repository, will also be accessible to others for re-use both within and across legal jurisdictions, including the unexpected researcher/user (e.g., from legal institutions). Indeed, the open software & Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) tools that the project will provide will enable non-AI-specialist ECR researchers to interrogate judicial decision data and identify novel lines of research interrogation. The tool and resultant data will thus expand methodological horizons. In the long-term, our project will contribute to a scientific, evidence-based approach to judicial policy and practice in the courts. The project embodies and exemplifies the principles enshrined within Horizon Europe initiatives on open research data, applying Open Science principles and the utilisation of Open Infrastructures.