Autonomous Systems (AS) are cyberphysical complex systems that combine artificial intelligence with multi-layer operations. Security for dynamic and networked ASs has to develop new methods to address an uncertain and shifting operational environment and usage space. As such, we have developed an ambitious program to develop fundamental secure AS research covering both the technical and social aspects of security. Our research program is coupled with internationally leading test facilities for AS and security, providing a research platform for not only this TAS node, but the whole TAS ecosystem. To enhance impact, we have built a partnership with leading AS operators in the UK and across the world, ranging from industrial designers to frontline end-users. Our long-term goal is to translate the internationally leading research into real-world AS impact via a number of impact pathways. The research will accelerate UK's position as a leader in secure AS research and promote a safer society.

This Hub accelerates progress towards a new "quantum era" by engineering small, high precision quantum systems, and linking them into a network to create the world's first truly scalable quantum computing engine. This new computing platform will harness quantum effects to achieve tasks that are currently impossible. The Hub is an Oxford-led alliance of nine universities with complementary expertise in quantum technologies including Bath, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Leeds, Strathclyde, Southampton, Sussex and Warwick. We have assembled a network of more than 25 companies (Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon BBN, Google, AMEX), government labs (NPL, DSTL, NIST) and SMEs (PureLiFi, Rohde & Schwarz, Aspen) who are investing resources and manpower. Our ambitious flagship goal is the Q20:20 engine - a network of twenty optically-linked ion-trap processors each containing twenty quantum bits (qubits). This 400 qubit machine will be vastly more powerful than anything that has been achieved to date, but recent progress on three fronts makes it a feasible goal. First, Oxford researchers recently discovered a way to build a quantum computer from precisely-controlled qubits linked with low precision by photons (particles of light). Second, Oxford's ion-trap researchers recently achieved a new world record for precision qubit control with 99.9999% accuracy. Third, we recently showed how to control photonic interference inside small silica chips. We now have an exciting opportunity to combine these advances to create a light-matter hybrid network computer that gets the 'best of both worlds' and overcomes long-standing impracticalities like the ever increasing complexity of matter-only systems, or the immense resource requirements of purely photonic approaches. Engineers and scientists with the hub will work with other hubs and partners from across the globe to achieve this. At present proof-of-principle experiments exist in the lab, and the 'grand challenge' is to develop compact manufacturable devices and components to build the Q20:20 engine (and to make it easy to build more). We have already identified more than 20 spin-offs from this work, ranging from hacker-proof communication systems and ultra-sensitive medical and military sensors to higher resolution imaging systems. Quantum ICT will bring great economic benefits and offer technical solutions to as yet unsolveable problems. Just as today's computers allow jet designers to test the aerodynamics of planes before they are built, a quantum computer will model the properties of materials before they've been made, or design a vital drug without the trial and error process. This is called digital quantum simulation. In fact many problems that are difficult using conventional computing can be enhanced with a 'quantum co-processor'. This is a hugely desirable capability, important across multiple areas of science and technology, so much so that even the prospect of limited quantum capabilities (e.g. D-Wave's device) has raised great excitement. The Q20:20 will be an early form of a verifiable quantum computer, the uncompromised universal machine that can ultimately perform any algorithm and scale to any size; the markets and impacts will be correspondingly far greater. In addition to computing there will be uses in secure communications, so that a 'trusted' internet becomes feasible, in sensing - so that we can measure to new levels of precision, and in new components - for instance new detectors that allow us to collect single photons. The hub will ultimately become a focus for an emerging quantum ICT industry, with trained scientists and engineers available to address the problems in industry and the wider world where quantum techniques will be bringing benefits. It will help form new companies, new markets, and grow the UK's knowledge economy.

The Scottish Manufacturing Institute aims to research technology for manufacture, addressing the requirements of European, UK and regional industries. It taps into the broad expanse of research at Heriot-Watt University to deliver innovative manufacturing technology solutions. The SMI delivers high quality research and education in innovative manufacturing technology for high value, lower volume, highly customised, and high IP content products that enable European and UK Manufacturers to compete in an environment of increased global competition, environmental concern, sustainability and regulation, where access to knowledge, skills and IP determine where manufacturing is located. Our mission is to deliver high impact research in innovative manufacturing technologies based on the multidisciplinary technology resource across Heriot-Watt University, the Edinburgh Research Partnership, the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance and beyond. The Institute is organised into three themes:- Digital Tools;- Photonics; and - MicrosystemsThe vision of the Digital Tools Theme is to provide tomorrow's engineers with tools that will help them to easily capture, locate, exploit and manipulate 3D information for mechanical products of all kinds using distributed, networked resources. Photonics has strong resonance with the needs of developed economies to compete in the 21st Century global market for manufacturing, providing: routes to low cost automated manufacture; and the key processes underpinning high added value products. We have a shared conviction that photonics technologies are an essential component of any credible strategy for knowledge-based industrial production. The Photonics Theme vision is for the SMI to be internationally recognised as the leading UK focus for industrially-relevant photonics R&D, delivering a mix of academic and commercial outputs in hardware, process technology and production applications.The principal strategy of the Microsystems Theme is to research into new integration and packaging solutions of MEMS that are low cost, mass manufacturable and easily adoptable by the industry. The vision is to become a European Centre of Excellence in MEMS integration and packaging over the next 5 years. We thus aspire to service UK manufacturing industry with innovative technology for high value, lower volume, highly customised, and high IP content products; and to help UK industry expand globally in an internationally competitive market.