Some of us dwell on the past. Others live in the present. Others still look towards the future. The degree to which our thoughts are directed to the past, present or future is called our *temporal focus*. Psychologists have studied people's temporal focus, and have found that future-focused individuals are more likely to engage in pro-social behaviours and perform well in their studies and in their careers. This project is about politicians' temporal focus. Politicians are often accused of having a particular temporal focus-of focusing too much on the present, or of being "short-termist". This focus (runs the argument) prevents politicians from tackling long-term challenges such as climate change or caring for different generations. Tackling these challenges can involve making sacrifices now in order to gain advantages later. Politicians (and the voters who elect them) may discount these future benefits. The problem is that we don't know whether politicians are short-termist in this way. Indirect evidence is just that-indirect. Politicians who neglect climate change might do so because of short-termism, but might also do so because they don't believe in climate change, or believe that costs of tackling climate change outweigh the benefits. Direct evidence is better, but harder to collect. It is difficult to convince MPs to answer survey questions about their attitudes, and impossible to do so for historical politicians. This project solves this problem by developing an unobtrusive measure of politicians' temporal focus by looking at the language they use. Computational linguists have shown how to extract different features-parts of speech, dates, and abstract references to the future or past-from large bodies of text in an automated fashion. Psychologists have shown how these features of a person's language use can be used to predict their temporal focus. These studies have been carried out on short texts (typically social media posts) by young adults or students. We extend these techniques to cover politicians' speech, and produce measures of politicians' temporal focus for politicians in 3 national parliaments (the UK Parliament, the Australian Senate, and the Finnish Eduskunta). We test whether these measures make sense by comparing them to questionnaire responses from a small group of politicians in the UK Parliament, surveyed in collaboration with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Future Generations. We then go on to show how politicians' temporal focus varies according to age and different political and life events, and compare temporal focus in politicians to temporal focus in the general population. Knowing about politicians' temporal focus is valuable for its own sake, but it is also valuable because it allows us to answer questions about how we design our political institutions. Our project looks at three different institutional choices: the choice to elect or appoint politicians, the choice to have longer or shorter parliamentary terms, and the choice to have specialised institutions which focus on the future. By careful within-country comparisons, we test whether particular institutional choices change politicians' temporal focus beyond what we would expect as a result of ageing and chance events. Our project has concrete benefits for countries considering institutional reforms. In the UK, numerous groups have called for "more long term thinking in UK policy". In New Zealand, party leaders have expressed willingness to lengthen parliamentary terms to avoid short-termism. If we want to avoid short-termism, and promote a different temporal focus in our politicians, we need to be able to measure temporal focus, and relate temporal focus to different institutional choices. This research will do just that.

Biased technology disadvantages certain groups of society, e.g. based on their race or gender. Recently, biased machine learning has received increased attention. Here, we address a different type of bias which is not learnt from data, but encoded during the design process. We illustrate this problem on the example of Conversational Assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, or Google's Assistant, which are predominately modelled as young, submissive women. According to UNESCO, this bears the risk of reinforcing gender stereotypes. In this proposal, we will explore this claim via psychological studies on how conversational gendering (expressed through voice, content and style) influences human behaviour in both online and offline interactions. Based on the insights gained, we will establish a principled framework for designing and developing alternative conversational personas which are less likely to perpetuate bias. A persona can be viewed as a composite of elements of identity (background facts or user profile), language behaviour, and interaction style. This framework will include state-of-the-art data-efficient NLP deep learning tools for generating dialogue responses which are consistent with a given persona. The persona parameters can be specified by non-expert users in order to to facilitate more inclusive design, as well as to enable a wider critical discussion.

The UK has suffered from problems of under-investment and low productivity growth for a long time. This lack of investment and growth constraints how much money people are paid, how much money can be raised in taxes to pay for public services and the overall wealth of the UK population. The UK has experienced a large increase in the number of small firms in the economy over the last fifty years. As a result, around 60% of the working population rely on the small business sector for their jobs, incomes and well-being. A big concern, that has been around since the 1930s is that small firms may struggle to access loans from banks and investment from investors. For many reasons, there is a significant gap in our current knowledge about the contribution of smaller firms to the overall performance of the UK economy and specifically how their ability to access finance influences how they contribute to productivity. To fully understand how the 6 million small firms in the UK contribute to economic growth, this project helps researchers to understand more about small firms that are owned and managed by entrepreneurs. It explores how these entrepreneurs have personal preferences and talents that shape how their firms operate and explore potential opportunities for new investment that might lead to productivity-enhancing growth. When small firms have opportunities to invest, it then faces choices about how to fund these new investments. Many small firms have a strong dislike for external finance and choose to limit their investments to ones they can fund from their own resources. Others seek external debt, often bank loans, but are refused. Others get bank loans, but only get a fraction of the amount they requested. All of these scenarios potentially lead to an under-investment in productivity enhancing growth. This research project traces out the whole process from the small, entrepreneurial firm, to their investment opportunities and funding choices, and then examine how, when and where this process can lead to productivity growth. The project explore the chain of events in great detail and cover the full range of investment opportunities and potential sources of finance. This includes looking at bank debt, government guaranteed loans, "Peer-2-Peer" lending, Alternative Lenders, FinTech, right through to more sophisticated equity finance. This broad overview allows the project to establish, at each step in the causal chain of events, what types of firm face the greatest barriers to progression onto the next stage which ultimately end up with new investment and productivity growth. Specific points of focus within this chain of events will be on the identification of differences by (a) regions and place, (b) firms of different sizes, (c) firm of different ages, (d) differences by industry, and (e) patterns of innovation. The project builds a nuanced picture of the problems that small firms face accessing investment capital and increasing their productivity that will give policy-makers and businesses themselves the evidence to support a mutually beneficial and co-ordinated response to address these problems that may ultimately benefit the 6 million UK small business owners and their 16.8 million employees and their families.

The UK has suffered from problems of under-investment and low productivity growth for a long time. This lack of investment and growth constraints how much money people are paid, how much money can be raised in taxes to pay for public services and the overall wealth of the UK population. The UK has experienced a large increase in the number of small firms in the economy over the last fifty years. As a result, around 60% of the working population rely on the small business sector for their jobs, incomes and well-being. A big concern, that has been around since the 1930s is that small firms may struggle to access loans from banks and investment from investors. For many reasons, there is a significant gap in our current knowledge about the contribution of smaller firms to the overall performance of the UK economy and specifically how their ability to access finance influences how they contribute to productivity. To fully understand how the 6 million small firms in the UK contribute to economic growth, this project helps researchers to understand more about small firms that are owned and managed by entrepreneurs. It explores how these entrepreneurs have personal preferences and talents that shape how their firms operate and explore potential opportunities for new investment that might lead to productivity-enhancing growth. When small firms have opportunities to invest, it then faces choices about how to fund these new investments. Many small firms have a strong dislike for external finance and choose to limit their investments to ones they can fund from their own resources. Others seek external debt, often bank loans, but are refused. Others get bank loans, but only get a fraction of the amount they requested. All of these scenarios potentially lead to an under-investment in productivity enhancing growth. This research project traces out the whole process from the small, entrepreneurial firm, to their investment opportunities and funding choices, and then examine how, when and where this process can lead to productivity growth. The project explore the chain of events in great detail and cover the full range of investment opportunities and potential sources of finance. This includes looking at bank debt, government guaranteed loans, "Peer-2-Peer" lending, Alternative Lenders, FinTech, right through to more sophisticated equity finance. This broad overview allows the project to establish, at each step in the causal chain of events, what types of firm face the greatest barriers to progression onto the next stage which ultimately end up with new investment and productivity growth. Specific points of focus within this chain of events will be on the identification of differences by (a) regions and place, (b) firms of different sizes, (c) firm of different ages, (d) differences by industry, and (e) patterns of innovation. The project builds a nuanced picture of the problems that small firms face accessing investment capital and increasing their productivity that will give policy-makers and businesses themselves the evidence to support a mutually beneficial and co-ordinated response to address these problems that may ultimately benefit the 6 million UK small business owners and their 16.8 million employees and their families.

Governments across the world have become increasingly aware of the social and economic problems caused by inequality. It's not just income inequality that is cause for concern but how different aspects of inequality-in health, education, employment and crime-combine to impoverish particular groups, and deepen divisions in society. For certain types of inequality, Scotland fares worse than comparable countries, particularly with respect to suicide, homicide, overcrowding and children living in poverty. As a result, the Scottish Government has launched a national strategy to create a 'Fairer Scotland'. For this initiative to be successful, however, it needs to have solid evidence which is based on a well-informed understanding of how the different dimensions of inequality interact and change over time. Our goal in this project is to achieve a step change in the quality and usefulness of the evidence base in Scotland by developing world-leading advances in how the multi-dimensional nature of inequality is understood. Working closely with policy makers at local and national level, we aim to support, guide and inform government policies with a view to achieving a genuine reduction in social inequalities. Our project is called AMMISS: Analysing Multi-Dimensional and Multi-Scale Inequalities in Scottish Society. It represents an ambitious and innovative research programme that will explore the causes and consequences of social inequalities in Scottish society in a much deeper and more joined-up way than has been achieved before. It is 'multi-dimensional' because we will explore multiple forms of inequality (e.g. poor health, low educational achievement, exposure to crime, failure to access the labour market, poor social mobility). Developing cutting-edge analysis we shall help policy makers understand how these different dimensions interact to affect life chances. It is 'multi-scale' because looking at inequality for a single level of geography or social unit can lead to a distorted understanding of inequality. So it is particularly important that we understand how inequalities impact at different levels both spatially (e.g. communities and cities) and socially (e.g. individuals and families). Our novel approach will allow us to analyse the causes and effects of multi-dimensional and multi-scale inequalities in a truly joined-up way, taking full advantage of Scotland's world-class administrative and survey data. AMMISS has two main themes. First, we will explore the way in which the neighbourhoods impact on how people experience inequalities and how changing patterns of poverty in Scottish cities impact on those experiences; for example, by affecting access to the labour market and exposure to crime. We will also examine how changing ethnic mix affects educational achievement and experiences of victimisation. Second, we will investigate how inequality impacts individuals over the course of their lives; for example, how experiences in early childhood affect social inequalities experienced later in life. We will also explore why some 'high risk' people and neighbourhoods remain 'resilient' to social inequalities, achieving positive outcomes against the odds. To make sense of such a broad range of issues we have brought together an impressive group of internationally recognised experts from various different areas of research. This will allow us to develop the innovative and insightful research needed to tackle inequality. Working closely with a range of organisations across Scotland, including central and local government and charities, will provide many opportunities for innovation and ensure that our work is relevant and useful for achieving a fairer society. Our ambition is to help those in positions of influence achieve real change. By making Scotland an exemplar for inequalities research, our work has the potential to influence and inspire policies to reduce social inequality around the world.