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 …
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.
