SUMMARY Working with and across the four selected Demonstrators, Digital Catapult (DC) proposes a project to undertake a programme of activity over 2.5 years which will support the Demonstrator projects by: facilitating co-working and shared learning, providing and/or convening technical support where required, opening up engagement with and opportunities for the startup and scale up ecosystem and helping them make the most of the Demonstrator programme, and supporting a programme of showcasing and dissemination in order to increase impact. The project will be a collaboration between DC and UKRI, which will help to meet the objectives set out in the Industrial Strategy, aiming to consolidate the country's position as a global creative powerhouse. The total cost of the project for core activities will be: £898,282. It is proposed that contractual management and oversight of this project will be overseen by a Project Board, chaired by UKRI and including the relevant senior and operational staff from DC and UKRI. This Project Board meetings will sit alongside the formal oversight mechanism with a nominated Monitoring Officer, and will provide for senior level 'steer' of the project. It is assumed that a similar mechanism will be put in place between UKRI and each of the Demonstrators to oversee contractual delivery of those contracts. DC will not be represented at those meetings.

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.

Towards an Equitable Social VR Social Virtual Reality (SVR) constructs a digital parallel to the physical world, enabling remote social engagement mediated by modern immersive Virtual Reality (VR) technology. This social engagement is not strictly limited to conventional social interaction, but has also recently expanded to include activities such as remote participation in training, work, and service delivery. This digital parallel world offers significant opportunities for greater inclusion of individuals who are currently marginalised by the physical world, thereby widening access to the Digital Economy. SVR is a rapidly emerging technology and its pace of adoption has accelerated in the global pandemic. However, to date, there has been limited research examining the accessibility and inclusion requirements of SVR for users who currently face digital access barriers due to a disability or age-related capability loss. As a society, we sit at a critical juncture where concepts of inclusion and accessibility can be embedded into SVR while the technology is still in its formative stage. Towards an Equitable Social VR addresses the need to ensure that SVR platforms are accessible and inclusive for people with disabilities and older people, thus allowing for the potential of the platforms in contributing to the quality of life of these population groups to be realised in full. The project will undertake a programme of R&D with the aim of delivering the SVR Inclusion Framework: a collection of formalised guidance and tools serving to facilitate equal participation in SVR for disabled and older users. The project will take into account the whole spectrum of capability loss manifestations, including vision, hearing, mobility, dexterity, and neurodiversity aspects of cognition (learning difficulties) and mental health, as well as the co-occurrence of capability loss.

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), machine type communications (MTC), cloud computing and many other applications, the wireless network will become far more complex, while at the same time far more essential than ever before. Given the above exponential growth in both connectivity and complexity of the wireless systems and the unprecedented demands on latency, capacity, ultra-reliability and security, the network is becoming analytically intractable. Naturally, human-driven physical layer (PHY) design approaches rooted on mathematical models of communications systems and networks which drive today's network architectures are being surmounted by the sheer complexity of the emerging network paradigms. Hardware imperfections, that are inevitable with the employment of low-cost MTC sensors and transmitters, will drastically increase the volatility of the network, and theoretically driven solutions typically relying on generic and highly inaccurate models cannot address this as they are highly sub-optimal in practice. The above challenges necessitate new data-driven approaches to the design of communications systems, as opposed to traditional system-model driven designs that are becoming obsolete. Towards the diverse communication paradigms of MTC of the future, there is an urgent need to address reliable and adaptive links detached from mathematical models, and instead based on data-driven approaches. This visionary project will address these fundamental challenges by developing new Neural Netowrk architectures tailored for wireless communications, and new transceiver architectures based on data-driven training. Our research will address the development of a) a communications specific DL framework, b) DL-inspired PHY solutions and, c) proof-of-concept verification of the proposed solutions. LeanCom will be performed with Huawei, NEC Europe, Duke University, The Digital Catapult and CommNet and aspires to kick-start an innovative ecosystem for high-impact players among the infrastructure and service providers of ICT to develop and commercialize a new generation of learning-based networks. The implementation, experimentation and testing (within WP3) of the proposed solutions serves as a platform towards commercialisation of the results of LeanCom, aiming towards an impact of a foundational nature for the UK's digital economy.

An unprecedented amount of data exists about our lives, environments and the people we share them with. The devices (e.g. phones, smart thermostats and even cars) and organisations (e.g. councils, supermarkets) we interact with on a daily basis, record and store ever more information about things we do and care about. By empowering large numbers of people to access and interpret this data, we can transform the way we understand and make decisions about key aspects of our lives (e.g. health and energy use) and have a greater say in how we are treated by the government and other groups. We can access an increasing amount of this data by downloading it from our devices or other places like our local council's website. However, being able to get data does not necessarily mean we are able to understand it. Interpreting raw data files requires special software and techniques that most of us are not trained to use. Websites and apps that let us access and browse data in more accessible forms like graphs and infographics can help many people, but still are not right for everyone. Some people do not have the educational background needed to understand these forms of presentation, and others struggle to interpret what the facts and trends they show mean in the context of their lives. Equally importantly, many of us will not find seeking out and browsing data displayed in these ways an enjoyable and enriching way to spend our time - and might miss out on benefits of understanding our data as a result. This project will pioneer a new way for presenting data to the public that a large and diverse section of the population will be able to, and equally crucially, want to use. We propose that this can be achieved by creating personalised video stories that tell us how our data relates to our lives and the people around us. We call this new form Perspective Media. Imagine a documentary about climate change that uses a personalised narrative structure and graphics based on data from your smart meter to show specific and achievable ways to improve your carbon footprint. Building on the skilled craft of video storytelling (e.g. from TV) to present a personalised perspective on data will allow us to provide an easier route for many people to understand how large and complex data sources relate to their lives. Basing our approach on a highly popular media format like video, with a diverse range of genres, will mean that large numbers of people from different backgrounds will enjoy using it to engage with their data. Current ways of making video content assume that stories are fixed and linear, with the same information shown to everyone in the same order. Perspective Media, on the other hand, will show each viewer a personalised story about their data. For this reason, new ways of telling video stories that respond to data will need to be developed. These new approaches will, in turn, require new tools and technologies for creating content and delivering it to viewers. The aim of this research is to lay the foundations for these developments by: 1) investigating a range of techniques for presenting data in personalised video story form; 2) analysing the processes and tools that are currently used to make video stories to see how they need to be changed and extended; and 3) exploring how users experience video stories that are personalised to their data, and whether they truly offer a more inclusive and enjoyable way for people to engage with data. We will achieve this aim by bringing together people with expertise in media production and data analytics with technology designers, to create prototypes of personalised video stories based on data. By analysing these prototypes, and how they are made and received by audiences, we will inform future research into production tools and technologies for Perspective Media and encourage the growth of a community of people in the media industry who create it.