The environMENTAL project will investigate how some of the greatest global environmental challenges, climate change, urbanisation and psychosocial stress caused by the COVID-19-pandemic affect mental health over the lifespan. It will identify their underlying molecular mechanisms and develop preventions and early interventions. Leveraging cohort data of over 1.5 million European citizens and patients enriched with deep phenotyping data from large scale behavioural neuroimaging cohorts, we will identify brain mechanisms related to environmental adversity underlying symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress and substance abuse.
By linking population and patient data via geo-location to spatiotemporal environmental data derived from remote sensing satellites, climate models, regional-socioeconomic data and digital health applications, our interdisciplinary team will develop a neurocognitive model of multimodal environmental signatures related to transdiagnostic symptom groups that are characterised by EnvironMENTAL – Reducing the impact of major environmental challenges on mental health shared brain mechanisms.
We will uncover the molecular basis underlying these mechanisms using multi-modal -omics analyses, brain organoids and virtual brain simulations, thus providing an integrated perspective for each individual across the lifespan and spectrum of functioning. The insight gained will be applied to developing risk biomarkers and stratification markers. We will then screen for pharmacological compounds targeting the molecular mechanisms discovered. We will also reduce symptom development and progression using virtual reality interventions based on the adverse environmental features developed in close collaboration withstakeholders.
Overall, this project will lead to objective biomarkers and evidence-based pharmacologic and VR-based interventions that will significantly prevent and improve outcomes of environmentally- related mental illnesses, and empower EU citizens to manage better their mental health and well-being.
What goes into turning a literary classic into popular TV drama? That’s the question at the heart of a DMU research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in partnership with the British Library.
‘Transforming Middlemarch’ traces the journey from book to screen of George Eliot’s groundbreaking novel, drawing on the scripts, notes and correspondence of celebrated screenwriter Andrew Davies, who adapted Middlemarch for the BBC in a 6-part series starring Juliet Aubrey, Douglas Hodge, and Rufus Sewell first aired in 1994.
2022 marks the 150th anniversary of the first, serialised, publication of Middlemarch, set in a fictionalised Coventry at time of the great Reform Bill. So it is a timely choice from the extensive back catalogue of the prolific Davies, who donated his personal archive to DMU’s Special Collections in 2015. Middlemarch (1994) also marked a watershed for the BBC. In partnership with WGBH (Boston), Michael Wearing (Head of Drama) gambled what was then a risky £6m on a lavish production shot on film and set on location (in Rome and the Lincolnshire town of Stamford) that was big on period detail. In turn, it spawned a raft of BBC Education resources, a (then unusual) ‘making of…’ documentary, and lively arts show critics’ debates; and it boosted Stamford’s tourist trade with location tours and a repertoire of visitor souvenirs. Following its success, Davies’ next BBC heritage adaptation was Pride and Prejudice (best remembered for that scene of Mr Darcy’s dip in the lake which doesn’t appear in Jane Austen). The rest, as they say, is history.
These base texts will be augmented with Davies’ own hand-written annotations, notes
and correspondence, and a range of additional assets the project is gathering from interviews with Davies himself and members of the cast and crew, educational materials, production ephemera and clips. The resulting ‘genetic edition’ will be a new digital scholarly edition not of Middlemarch the novel, but of Middlemarch the Andrew Davies adaptation of Eliot’s novel, tracing the cross-media transformation. It promises to reveal much about what goes into (and comes out of) the process of literary adaptation.
The design of the genetic edition is being developed in consultation with Dr. Beverley Rilett, digital humanities specialist at the University of Auburn, Alabama and director of the George Eliot online archive. John Burton, chairman of the George Eliot Fellowship, is also part of an expert panel informing the project’s progress. The impact potential of the project’s methodology will be explored in a study day to be held at the British Library in December 2022, which will invite archivists, educational publishers and visitors’ centre curators to consider further genetic modifications to the digital adaptation of literary adaptations for a range of audiences .
Plastic pollution has become one of the most pressing environmental issues, for example, around one million plastic water bottles are bought every minute yet only 9% are recycled, with the rest leaking into landfill or the ocean.
Furthermore, as of August 23, 2021, the total excess plastic waste generated during the pandemic is calculated as 4.4 to 15.1 million tons due to COVID 19 pandemic. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 650 million people worldwide are disabled. Which equates to approximately 10% of the world’s population. Of those people, 80% currently live in LMICs that are often at various stages of economic development depending on active conflict or post conflict state. Diabetes and traffic accidents are two of the biggest causes of lower-limb amputation – both of which are continuously on the rise.
In LMICs, fewer than 3% of persons with disabilities have access to required rehabilitation services. Without access to the rehabilitation they require, those with disability may become entrenched in a cycle of poverty. Upcycling of recycled plastics and offering affordable prosthesis are two major global issues that we need to tackle. The De Montfort University’s research team led by Dr Kandan developed ARM (Accessible Recycled Material) developed a prosthetic limb that was cost effective yet comfortable and durable for amputee patients. The new design spins recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the building blocks of plastic bottles, into yarns 10 times stronger than bulk plastic.
These yarns were “knitted” into a three-dimensional net-shape preform which exactly matches the patient’s stump. By applying pressure and heat, those preforms were precisely converted into a patient- specific solid yet porous socket which keeps the patient cooler, particularly crucial in the case of diabetic amputees, who often sweat a lot and also for the amputees living in tropical climate. The ARM prosthetic limbs enable a more exact fit around the patient’s stump and reduces the risk of infection because of its breathable design. This is a feature that neither carbon or glass fibre sockets – currently the best designs available – can boast.
ARM prosthetic innovation tackling two problems: turning excess plastic bottle waste into prosthesis for patients in underserved areas. The ARM prosthetic socket technologies provide physical solutions for fabricating fit-for purpose prosthetic socket which are: accessible, comfortable, reduce fabrication time (days to hours), able to accommodate aging (crucial for limb-deficient child), while also being able 10 to manufacture using local materials and resources.
The research team led by Dr Kandan have won the RAE’s Frontiers Follow-On Funding for a project to further develop Upcycled Plastic Prosthetic limbs for amputees residing in lower and middle-income countries (LMICs).
The principal aim for the project team is to engage in developmental collaborative research between the UK and LMICs to scale-up and translate the success of Accessible Recycled Materials (ARM) Prosthetic Socket (PS) technologies with Majicast – a device to obtain accurate contours of a patient’s residual limbs for achieving tailor made fit that increases comfort and dramatically reduces socket fabrication time.
The ambitious two-year project will engage in networking and collaborative developmental research to consolidate ARM PS technologies with Majicast to engage in patient specific large-scale trials of ARM PSs with Indian amputees to gather the evidence-base for user-acceptance. At present, large-scale trials have been conducted with Indian amputees.
The project team actively engaged with wider audiences such as academics, NGOs and general public and presented the outcome of the project at the following key events: The project team organised a special symposium entitled ‘Prosthetics for Low-and-Middle- Income Countries (LMICs): Challenges and Opportunities’ at the International Society for Prosthetics and Orthotics (ISPO) 18th World Congress, 1-4 November 2021.
The project team successfully showcased Upcycled Plastic Prosthetics at Dubai Expo 2020 on the 27th of January 2022. This event was organised by the UK’s Department for International Trade at the UK pavilion at Dubai Expo 2020.
The pandemic not only changed the way we work, but the way work is managed and the way human resources are managed. And as more data becomes available to human resource departments there is more potential for using leading edge technologies to analyse it and develop evidence-based decision making.
Commercial applications have become available to control entry to lifts, monitor office occupancy in real time and measure physical characteristic such as carbon dioxide and temperature. Systems can monitor remote and home working. Combined with personnel dataset these provide a rich source for analysis.
Enter People Analytics (PA) which uses artificial intelligence to analyse huge datasets. Using PA sentiment analysis can be conducted, team motivation charted, job applicants selected and resignations predicted. With PA the HR department ceases to be just a business support function and becomes a partner in developing corporate strategy.
But what are the consequences of letting a machine recruit employees, of disbanding a team based on sentiment analysis or excluding an employee from promotion because their departure is predicted by PA?
As AI becomes more and more a part of everyday life, it will determine careers and prospects through the application of PA to every spoke of the talent management cycle.
Work by Neil McBride and Mayen Cunden in the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility and Vincent Bryce at the University, featured in People Management and the Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society has begun to investigate the ethical issues associated with People Analytics and to chart the new responsibilities human resource departments shoulder due to the accelerated impact of artificial intelligence. Through understanding the ethical parameters of people analytics a framework for the responsible research and innovation of PA within HR departments will be defined.
Feedback from a talk given for the Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes branch of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Directors suggested that for HR professionals the key issues lie in understanding how AI works, and effectively using people analytics without overshadowing the tacit skills and wisdom of HR professionals. Also, HR departments need to develop the skills to evaluate the plethora of PA systems emerging post pandemic.
There are always new technologies around in my discipline: computer science, and usually they are introduced with a really useful application in mind. Sometimes we discover a little later that the downsides of such technology outweigh the advantages. Facial recognition is getting close to that point, and the online advertising industry is trying hard to convince us that browser cookies are in that category too.
What is much rarer is a technology that is shown to be harmful before anyone has demonstrated that it could be useful. In my view blockchain technology (if you want to be technical and precise: public non-permissioned blockchains – including those of bitcoin and Ethereum) has now reached that point.
In my keynote at the 2018 Computing conference, “No, let’s NOT put it on the blockchain” (see video), I carved out a number of application areas where blockchain would definitely not be suitable: personal data of any sort for legal reasons; long term valuable data because encryption might not protect forever; successful applications (with lots of users and activity), as the chain already can’t keep up. While this gave a strong hint that blockchain might be mostly useless or redundant, and since then I haven’t seen any convincing successes of blockchain, while many companies have pulled out of blockchain projects, by now I’m convinced it is worse than that: it’s actually harmful.
There are two main reasons for that. One is cryptocurrency. People don’t participate in blockchain projects if there’s no reward for it, and giving them cryptocurrency is the normal way to do that. But to cover the real-world costs (e.g. computer time, see next point) somebody needs to insert some real money into the system by buying cryptocurrency. That gains them nothing except the hope that the value will go up over time – which can only happen if more people buy into this. For an academic explanation of the difference between proper money and a pyramid scheme fraud, please ask an economist. The second reason is ecology, which is also outside my expertise. The bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains use the “proof of work” method to reward participants in reaching agreement on the state of the world.
Currently this takes as much energy as a medium-sized country to process a few transactions per second worldwide. My discipline is full of people who believe more responsible alternatives exist, but while that may be true, the scale of the ecological disaster is now such that we can’t afford to wait for them before we switch this one off.
Now just to work out how to be effective in getting this technology abolished …