Adopting a systems approach, this UK-Jordan capacity-building project aims to develop a scalable environmental technology solution for sustainable management of olive mill waste in Jordan. This is a collaboration between DMU and three Jordanian universities – Al Balqa Applied University, University of Jordan and Jordan University of Science & Technology. The project has three parallel strands –
Strand1: Environmental technology integration and scaling-up
Strand2: Technology optimization and resource/Energy recovery
Strand3: Techno-economic feasibility and knowledge transfer.
Funder: Royal Academy of Engineering, International Science Partnerships Fund (2023-24)
This was a multi-stakeholder project collaboration, motivated by adoption of a “circular economy-driven systems approach” to delivering a sustainable solution to olive mill waste/wastewater (OMW) management with lower environmental burdens and energy demand, suiting arid regions in Jordan. It involved academics from the School of Engineering and Sustainable Development and School of Pharmacy, DMU and Engineering Department at Al-Balqa Applied University, and industrial researchers, business investors and institutional training providers. The project also saw the inauguration of a 15kW renewable off-grid capacity by the UK deputy ambassador to Jordan, Ms Helen Fazey to fully operate a wastewater treatment plant in Fuheis City near Amman. These activities were supported by the UK Royal Academy of Engineering under the Transforming Systems through Partnership (TSP1306) project.
In 2021, Dr Giuliana Tiripelli was commissioned by the Committee on Culture, Science, Education (CCSE) and Media of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), to write a report on “The role of the media in times of crisis”. The report was debated at the plenary of PACE held in May 2021, and the corresponding resolution was adopted in January 2022 (CCSE rapporteur, Ms Annicka Engblom, Sweden, EPP/CD). PACE, which means “peace” in Italian, is made up of parliamentarians from the 47 member states of the Council of Europe (CoE).
The CoE has an important balancing international role, which spans beyond EU countries, “to promote human rights, democracy and the rule of law” (https://www.gov.uk/world/organisations/uk-delegation-to-the-council-of-europe) across the wider pan-European region.
PACE “monitors the way member states honour their commitments and … obligations as members of the Council of Europe”, and itsnine committees “prepare the reports and follow the state of human rights, democracy and rule of law in the member states in their area of focus” (https://www.coe.int/en/web/no-hate-campaign/parliamentary-assembly1, https://www.coe.int/en/web/yerevan/the-coe/structure-of-coe#:~:text=The%20Council%20of%20Europe%20operates,and%20the%20Conference%20of%20INGOs).
The expert report by Dr Tiripelli for the PACE Committee on Culture, Science, Education and Media used previous re-search, case studies, and exchanges with experts. The report, soon to be made public, was an essential source for elaborating the final policy document Resolution 2419 approved on the 25th of January 2022. Tiripelli’s report is an essential source for PACE Resolution 2419 (2022). Its main points and recommendations are reflected in the resolution, and in particular the invitation to members States to:
support journalism that expands the knowledge of the public on both the technical and the social aspects of emergencies, and their resolution;
put in place policies to disperse the concentration of opinion power by social media and take countervailing measures to prevent that powerful digital businesses become centres of political power;
support community media engagement and seek to involve citizens more deeply in public debates, for exam-ple by involving students in educational communication with the community before and during a crisis;
support focused training for journalism that covers the social sciences, as well as the hard sciences, to en-hance journalists’ ability to report on scientific work and impact on the public;
support trainings and research centres focused on the sociological study of journalism and on constructive journalism approaches;
support journalistic coverage of both local and global contextualisation and narratives, and discouraging nationalistic frames in the media;
support documentary production and podcasting of knowledge that can make science, emergency services, and institutional work visible in the form of approachable media cultural outputs.
Universities are expected to undertake research at the cutting edge, whether it is to do with scholarly endeavour, scientific or technical development, artistic practice or anything else. Universities are also expected to play a significant role in terms of making their work relevant to their communities and to society at large.
The Interfaces project (www.interfacesnetwork.eu www.interfaces.dmu.ac.uk) that took place from May 2016 until August 2020 benefitted from cutting edge research developments regarding music that is made using any sounds which often involves cutting-edge technology and attempted to make this form of sonic creativity relevant and accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds. The project’s motto was: ‘Bringing new music to new audiences’. For the Music, Technology and Innovation – Institute for Sonic Creativity (MTI2) at DMU, it also meant, ‘Bringing new forms of sound-based music making to … everyone’.
Interfaces received €3 million funding as part of the Creative Europe programme. This programme is focused on cultural production, mobility and exchange, not pure research. Receiving our part of the grant provided an ideal opportunity for the MTI2 to reach out and make its work relevant to our region but also to society at large.
Coordinated by the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, it brought together two of the most prestigious institutions in Europe involved with contemporary music, IRCAM, the music department of the Pompidou Centre in Paris and ZKM, Europe’s premier new media art museum, research institute and art centre in Karlsruhe, Germany. Other partners included two of Europe’s finest new music ensembles, Ictus (Brussels) and Klangforum Wien (Vienna), a sound art venue, Q0-2 (Brussels) and another higher education institution, the European University of Cyprus (Nicosia).
For the MTI2 the project involved artistic commissions for a series of concerts and mini-festivals in venues around Leicester over the project period including the oldest church in the city, the Magazine, which formed part of the city walls, a number of buildings around the city including within Leicester’s cultural quarter including the Phoenix Arts Centre, which is Leicester’s digital arts venue and Curve, its main theatre and across several venues internationally simultaneously. Therefore, works amongst which many were made for specific sites, were visited by people who normally would not attend contemporary music events alongside its existent audience. The works presented included sound installations, building projections and audio-visual works. But there was more!
In a world going through a very strange and challenging pandemic, the notion of making music collaboratively virtually seems to make sense. One of our Interfaces actions, led by Dr. John Richards, was called Telematic Hacking which involved the creation of an instrument that could be built for just a few pounds that picks up information from the network and uses this information to jam with other musicians online anywhere in the world. Two international online multi-site live concerts can be found on YouTube.
Moving to things one might expect from a university, workshops for schools and community venues were created and are downloadable for free on DMU’s project site. These workshops were presented internationally in two areas of sonic creativity with children in schools and people of all ages in a variety of venues: making music with any sounds and socalled DIY electronics. (You can think of this as musical sampling and do-it-yourself instrument building involving any sounds.) The content of these workshops was based on the research of two staff members and over ten PhD students. All workshops culminated in the participants Bringing New Music to New Audiences – the Interfaces Project making their own pieces. At the end of many of the workshops, participants were asked whether they would like to hear this type of music again and whether they would like to make this type of music again. For music that is unknown to the majority of people today, it may come as a surprise that at least 70% reacted positively to both questions across four European countries during the entire project thus proving that we could succeed in terms of our wish to bring new music to a broad variety of new listeners and musicians.
Perhaps the most ambitious MTI2 activities within Interfaces were to do with the important developments of an eLearning site with its bespoke creative software. EARS 2 (the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site pedagogical project) and Compose with Sounds (CwS, ears2.dmu.ac.uk and ears2.dmu.ac.uk/cws) were developed from their earlier prototypes to sophisticated platforms introducing sonic creativity from the points of view of listening, learning and making. EARS 2 and CwS are available in ten European languages thanks to the project and have already been placed on Cyprus’s national curriculum for music.
As EARS 2 includes teachers’ packs for general and specialist teachers with little to no experience with this form of music making, both have been tested and received enthusiastic reactions from teachers and users alike. They are expected to be used in particular for the UK’s Key Stage 3 (11-14-year olds) but have been used with children from year 4 to adults of all ages. Compose with Sounds is designed to be used intuitively without a steep learning curve with regard to the discovery of making music with sounds. There are even translations in Chinese and Japanese in development. EARS 2 was specifically requested by UNESCO based on its predecessor EARS(www.ears.dmu.ac.uk), is a resource for students and professionals. The impact of EARS 2/CwS may be the ultimate in terms of what a mid-sized university institute can achieve with respect to increasing interest and participation in our field. EARS 2 is available to all online and Compose with Sounds is freely available for download on Mac and Windows operating systems.
A new version of Compose with Sounds called CwS Live has also been developed and is in an advanced testing phase at the time of writing this short article. It can be used on laptops, tablets and smart phones and involves the opportunity for multiple users to use sounds they have individually or collectively recorded and manipulate them producing real-time sonic performance. CwS Live is also available from the CwS web page and soon will also be available from the relevant App stores on the various platforms. Take a look at EARS 2 and Compose with Sounds and you can discover, explore and enjoy the world of making music with sounds. No previous experience is necessary.
Energy is crucial for the developing World and must be provided when needed to avoid serious impact on society.
Among all energy forms, electricity has an increasingly central role.
Electricity security is the power system’s capability to withstand disturbances or contingencies with an acceptable service disruption and represents a crucial concern forpolicy decision-making at all levels.
Usually, service disruption is due to cables insulation damage, often caused by, or accompanied by, a partial discharge (PD) event that is a localized electrical discharge that partially bridges the insulation between conductors. Since PD is one of the best early warning indicators of insulation damage, the on-line PD location is the most suitable method of monitoring network integrity and a desirable network protection method to guarantee electricity security.
The project’s main objective is to develop a new method for online PD location based on the innovative electromagnetic time reversal (EMTR) theoy.
Effects of Partial Discharge
✓ Cable premature failure within 3 years of operation ✓ Localised heating/moisture into the cable ✓ Interruption of power supply ✓ Reduction of power quality and customer satisfaction ✓ Reduction of Electricity Security of Power Networks.
On-Line Partial Discharge Location in Power Networks
On-line PD location is a desired feature in modern protection schemes’ power networks to guarantee:
a fault preventive action, improving reliability
a continuous monitoring condition for grid integrity
an increase of equipment lifetime and network resilience
a reduction of overall operating costs increasing plant productivity
a reduction of outage duration of supply, improving power quality, customer satisfaction and life quality.
Design of EMTR Method to Locat Partial Discharge on Power Networks
EMTR methods, in source-location identification, take advantage of the time reversibility of Maxwell’s equations and the spatial correlation property of the time-reversal theory to refocus the time reversed back-propagated electromagnetic waves into the original disturbance location: when the electromagnetic wave is time reversed and back injected into the original system, it refocuses back to the location of its source.
The new method to on-line locate PD source based on EMTR theory and using the Transmission Line Matrix (TLM) method to model PD signal propagation, under development at DMU.
The Cinema and Television History Institute (CATHI) is a centre of excellence in archival screen heritage. It specialises in evidence-based methods and oral history approaches to inform ground-breaking interdisciplinary research and RCUK-funded international collaborations.
The Institute boasts not only world-leading researchers, but a host of unique and valuable film and media-related archives that provide a veritable treasure trove of fascinating research materials to support innovative undergraduate teaching, engaging and educational public outreach events, and distinctive interdisciplinary postgraduate training.
Working alongside DMU’s Special Collections and the Centre for Adaptations, CATHI is home to unique collections overseen by Director of Archives Steve Chibnall, including the Hammer Script Archive, the Cinema Museum’s Indian Cinemas Archive, the Sir Norman Wisdom Collection, the Andrew Davies Archive, the Anita Anand Archive, the Palace Pictures & Scala Productions Archive, the Leicester Film Society and Phoenix Arts Centre Archives, and the Peter Whitehead Archive.
CATHI’s aim has always been to bring its research to new audiences (within and beyond the academic community), and impactful public engagement remains high on our agenda. Pre-COVID-19, the last twelve months’ calendar has included: Laraine Porter’s BFI British Silent Film Festival (September 2019); Claire Monk’s post-show interview with Hanif Kureishi at the stage version of My Beautiful Laundrette, The Curve, Leicester (1st October): Kieran Foster’s Vampirella live script reading, at the Regent Street Cinema, London (17th October); Steve Chibnall and Alissa Clarke’s Peter Whitehead Network film screenings at the ICA, London (7th and 9th November); Monia Acciari’s Kinaara Film Festival, Hyderabad, India (8th-10th November); Ulrike Kubatta’s DocHub@DMU screening and Q&A of The Hard Stop, Phoenix Cinema, Leicester (11th November); Claire Monk’s Introduction to a screening of Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, Phoenix Cinema (13th November); Laraine Porter at the Phoenix Cinema’s 10th anniversary (19th November) and chairing a panel discussion following a screening of Half the Picture, Phoenix Cinema (26th November); DMU’s Cultural Exchanges Festival (24th-28th February 2020) – Leicester Film Society (Sue Porter), Joseph Bennett (Ulrike Kubatta), Vampirella (Kieran Foster); Stuart Hanson, Silver Screens and the Town: Critical Exchanges, Phoenix Cinema (11th March).
Despite COVID-19, 2020 has seen some exciting new developments and further expansion of CATHI’s holdings this year. During lockdown, Matt Jones, Ulrike Kubatta and Ellen Wright ran COVIDEODROME – a weekly Zoom discussion group bringing together undergraduates, post-grads and academics to debate a key film. Meanwhile, Justin Smith and Deborah Cartmell (Director of the Centre for Adaptations) hosted an online ‘In Conversation’ with Honorary Professor and celebrated screenwriter Andrew Davies. As the new academic year approaches, our second Archives Open Day (a half-day MSTeams interactive forum) – in partnership with the University of Leicester and supported by Midlands 4 Cities as an AHRC Dialogue Day – takes place on 11th November, and is open to anyone with an interest in archive-based screen media research.
Participants will discover more about the new projects and additions to our collections in this CATHI’s 10th anniversary year. The custodian of the Cinema Museum’s Indian Cinemas Archive, Monia Acciari, will be discussing scrapbooking Seeing into the Near Future of Screen Pasts – The CATHI Archives Open Space as a research tool and revealing more about CATHI’s new ‘Voices of Indian Cinema’ project, based on a new collection of landmark interviews loaned to DMU by film producer Mahmood Jamal. Kieran Foster builds on his post- doc project on Hammer’s unmade Vampirella, with fresh plans for a study of Palace Pictures’ unmade films, drawing on their back catalogue. The Palace/Scala Archive will also provide a vital source for a new documentary about the company co-directed by Stephen Woolley and the late Nik Powell to be directed by Ben Wheatley. From DMU’s Centre for Adaptations, Anna Blackwell and Lucy Hobbs will be joining CATHI Director Justin Smith to explore the challenges of creating a digital genetic edition of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, using materials from screen adaptor Andrew Davies’ archive. And Smith will also be in conversation with former BBC Asian Network journalist and Assistant Head of Leicester Media School Gurvinder Aujla-Siddhu about an AHRC Midlands 4 Cities Collaborative Doctoral Award to revisit the role of factual and news programming made by Anita Anand (then Zee- TV, now at the BBC) in the run-up to the 1997 General Election with South Asian communities in Leicester and Birmingham, in partnership with Asian Arts and Heritage hub Sampad. Building on the considerable success of last year’s oversubscribed Open Day, this year’s online archival training event will also open up a space for postgraduates and Early Career Researchers to explore the challenges (heightened by COVID-19) of researching online collections in an age of digital plenitude, and will offer workshops on publication avenues and grant applications. CATHI’s track record of funded research offers specialist expertise and informed guidance in this area, as this list attests: Monia Acciari (Multilingual Euro-Bollywood: an ‘Imaginative language’ workshop); Vicky Ball (Women’s Work and Working Women: A Longitudinal Study of Women Working in the British Film and Television Industries (1933- 1989) and Play for Today at 50); Pier Ercole (European Cinema Audiences: Entangled Histories and Shared Memories and Mapping European Cinema: A comparative project on cinema going experiences in the 1950s); Stuart Hanson (The silver screen and the town: Memories of cinema-going, community and the revival of the local cinema); Matthew Jones (Cinema, memory and the community); Laraine Porter (British Silent Cinema and the Transition to Sound); and James Russell (Hollywood and the baby boom: a social history). It’s not hard to see why CATHI is the go-to place for supporting the next generation of screen history researchers.
Our approach focused upon ensuring Film and Media Studies learners are equipped with a workable, transferable skillset, ready for the job market, is embedded throughout our undergraduate provision, facilitating clear pathways via MA and MRes to our world-leading postgraduate archival research, through distinctive and innovative undergraduate modules on topics such as Global Film History, Film and Material Culture and the new undergraduate module currently under development, Film in the Archives, all of which build on CATHI’s unique experience and expertise.
CATHI’s research facilities and training enable hands-on access to our rich array of archival treasures, aided by state-of-the-art scanning and tape digitisation technologies. And progress on our large-scale cataloguing system, powered by sector experts Metadatis, promises open-access search-and-find in our future vision of the screen past.
Most models in the current data analysis require perfect data without missing or incomplete data. However, the real-world data are in most cases are not perfect at all. Incomplete data are common in most situations. As a model dedicated to incomplete data, grey data analysis appears as a prospective model to deal with such data. This research originated from China during the 1970’s when China recovered from the cultural revolution. At that time, China faced a huge gap in available data in nearly all areas due to the significant interruption of the cultural revolution. The theory of grey systems developed quickly in China and made a significant contribution to China’s economic boom from a seriously frozen economy. However, it is still relatively unknown outside China although it has achieved significant success in China.
To further promote grey data analysis in the world, we successfully applied and secured an advanced Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship in FP7 for Prof. Sifeng Liu to join us at DMU for 2 years during 2015-2016. In this project, the international incoming research fellow, Prof. Sifeng Liu, has spent two years at De Montfort University conducting the proposed research together with Prof. Yingjie Yang. They have published over 30 research papers in academic journals and conferences.
The research is going to have a significant impact in the development of grey systems and data mining both in China and Europe. As a developing subject, there are still gaps in grey systems both in theoretical and applied research, and they have restricted its further development in Europe. The progress made in this project has showcased the feasibility of grey systems in data mining and its great potential with limited and poor data. Given the big data-oriented research in Europe, this project fills the gap for data mining with limited and poor data and will contribute greatly to those areas with limited and poor data, such as social economic analysis, healthcare, new product development, etc. It is valuable, especially for business and corporate decision-makers, public policy makers and public system managers to obtain useful information from limited and poor information.
Prof. Liu and Prof. Yang have made a number of outreach activities to deliver visits, seminars, and training courses. For example, they have visited and delivered seminars at Napier University, South Bank University, Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Fuzhou University, Xiamen University, Lanzhou University, Shihezi University, Hebei University of Engineering, etc. They have also delivered several training courses at De Montfort University and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Furthermore, they organized the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Grey Systems and Intelligent Services at De Montfort University. They have also initiated the establishment of the International Association of Grey Systems and Uncertainty Analysis in 2016. The results of this project will certainly help to establish a new subject in Europe and complement the existing big data initiatives.
Prof Liu has delivered a series of training events in grey systems at De Montfort University in 2015 and 2016, each training consisting of three days of intensive lectures, seminars and discussion sessions. The scientist in charge, Prof. Yingjie Yang, has also delivered equivalent training at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2015 and 2016 on uncertainty modeling. In addition to these training events, Prof. Liu has also been involved in PhD supervision at De Montfort University (Archie Singh), Prof. Liu has contributed to research meetings at DMU and attended training sessions organized by DMU. As an active member, Prof. Liu has enjoyed close integration at DMU and participated in our research life actively. Prof. Yang and Prof. Liu had jointly supervision several PhD students at Grey Data Analysis
DMU and the University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Archie Khuman, Lifeng Wu, and Xiaojun Guo). Prof. Liu has also brought several visiting scholars from China to De Montfort University (Lifeng Wu, Chong Li and Mingli Hu). Prof. Yang and Prof. Liu have also initialized several research proposal applications involving both European partners and Chinese partners.
The project has turned out to be a huge success. In the 2017 MSCA competition, The fellow, Prof. Sifeng Liu, has been ranked as one of the top 10 in Europe for his work in this project.
Prof. Liu has also been cited as one of the few Chinese scholars who had a significant impact on the world in Merkel’s speech in China in 2019.
The great success of the project has also attracted attention from industry in the world. For example, Surbana Jurong Consultants Pte Ltd from Singapore invited Prof. Yang to carry out a consultant project with DMU in 2018 where grey systems are applied to their data mining and decision-making practice.
The lnstitute of Creative Technologies is part of a unique team of creative industry specialists who are working together to discover the next stage of immersive performance experiences for audiences around the world. DMU is one of 15 specialist organisations taking part in the Innovate UK project, which is being led by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and also includes Epic Games, i2 Media Research Limited, Intel, Magic Leap, Manchester International Festival, Marshmallow Laser Feast, Nesta, Phi Centre, Philharmonia Orchestra, Punchdrunk, University of Portsmouth and The Space.
The £16 million investment is a key element of the Audience of the Future programme, part of the government Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, which is delivered by UK Research and Innovation and was announced by the government in March 2018 in the Creative Industries Sector Deal. The consortium will use their knowledge and expertise in theatre and performance, the music industry, video production, gaming and the research sector to shape how audiences will experience live performance in the future.
A transdisciplinary team of researchers from the Institute of Creative Technologies are working across digital performance, game development, computer visualisation and creative AI, to explore how technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) can be used in both the production and reception of live performances. This research is defining new audience experiences, implementing new technologies, exploring new commercial revenues and supporting the UK’s growth in creative content, products and services. This significant collaboration will uncover the potential of real-time immersive performance connected across multiple platforms, creating opportunities for the UK
cultural sector to change the way audiences experience live performance. Audiences will no longer be bound by traditional performance locations, but by using devices such as mobile phones, Extended Reality (XR) headsets and streaming into the home, audiences will experience live performance like never before. This has become especially relevant in supporting organisation
